The U.S. Education Department has directed dozens of Office for Civil Rights employees who were targeted for layoffs to return to work amid a mounting backlog of discrimination complaints. The temporary recall affects staff who had been placed on paid administrative leave after a March reduction-in-force was halted in court and is intended to strengthen enforcement for students and families while legal battles over the cuts continue, according to NPR.
Employees at the U.S. Education Department, including many attorneys in the Office for Civil Rights (OCR), received an unexpected email on Friday instructing them to report back to their regional offices on Monday, Dec. 15, according to reporting by NPR.
These federal workers investigate family complaints of discrimination in the nation's schools, including cases involving race, sex, disability and other protections. They were marked for termination by the Trump administration in a March reduction-in-force, but federal courts intervened, temporarily blocking the department from completing the layoffs. Rather than allow them to keep working while the legal fight continued, the department placed them on paid administrative leave.
Court records cited by NPR show that left 299 OCR employees — roughly half the office’s staff — in legal and professional limbo. Since then, 52 have chosen to leave the department, leaving 247 workers still on the payroll but off the job.
On Friday, an unspecified number of those remaining staffers received an email from the department saying that, while the Trump administration will continue its legal effort to downsize the agency, "utilizing all OCR employees, including those currently on administrative leave, will bolster and refocus efforts on enforcement activities in a way that serves and benefits parents, students, and families." The email was shared with NPR by two people who received it.
In a statement to NPR, Julie Hartman, the department's press secretary for legal affairs, confirmed that the department "will temporarily bring back OCR staff." She added that "the Department will continue to appeal the persistent and unceasing litigation disputes concerning the Reductions in Force, but in the meantime, it will utilize all employees currently being compensated by American taxpayers."
The department did not say how many staffers were being recalled or why it was making the move now, after keeping them on paid administrative leave for much of the year.
Rachel Gittleman, president of AFGE Local 252, a union that represents many Education Department employees, criticized the department’s handling of the layoffs and subsequent recall. "By blocking OCR staff from doing their jobs, Department leadership allowed a massive backlog of civil rights complaints to grow, and now expects these same employees to clean up a crisis entirely of the Department's own making," Gittleman said in a statement to NPR. "Students, families, and schools have paid the price for this chaos."
The Education Department did not provide an official figure for the scale of the backlog. However, one department source who spoke to NPR on condition of anonymity, citing fear of retaliation, said OCR now has about 25,000 pending complaints, including roughly 7,000 open investigations.
Separate NPR reporting earlier this year found that at least 240 OCR employees — most of them attorneys — were laid off in March as part of broader cuts that aimed to reduce the Education Department's workforce by roughly half. Those layoffs, combined with the decision to sideline hundreds of additional workers whose terminations were later blocked in court, have raised concerns among civil rights advocates that families could face long delays in getting discrimination complaints resolved.
The Education Department is headquartered in the Lyndon Baines Johnson Building in Washington, D.C., where many of the recalled staff ultimately report.
