ED RIFs update: # 3

What more happened in sped world with the US Department of Education reductions in force?

Editor’s note: I have been aggregating news about the US federal government’s reductions in force that occurred in the special education offices of the Department of Education since about 10 October 2025. This is the third in a series of updates that I’ll be posting here on Special Education Today. At the foot of this message there is a catalog of earlier posts on SET about this topic.

Please note: If you know of an announcement, activity, or news story about the reduction in force related to the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services in the US Government, please advise me. See the thread in the SET chat.—JohnL

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Here is what we are learning about the reduction in force at the US Department of Education? Here’s our latest (updated as of xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.

Updates

• On 13 October 2025 (no timestamp) Jackie Dilworth published a press release for The Arc entitled “Federal Special Education Offices Hollowed Out, Putting Students’ Right at Risk.” The announcement included a call for readers to “Tell your lawmakers to protect the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services.” Here’s the lede for the announcement:

Disability advocates are warning that sweeping staff reductions inside the U.S. Department of Education have effectively dismantled the federal offices responsible for protecting the rights of students with disabilities. The Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services (OSERS) has lost most of its personnel, leaving only a small team to oversee the nation’s special education and rehabilitation systems.

“Behind every one of these jobs was a lifeline for children and families,” said Katy Neas, CEO of The Arc of the United States. “These offices exist because, not so long ago, millions of children with disabilities were shut out of school. They represent our nation’s promise that every child deserves an education and a future. With these offices gutted, families will have nowhere to turn when schools fail to meet their obligations under federal law.”

• For the New York Times on 14 October 2025 at 7:12 PM, Sarah Dervish, Michael C. Bender, and Dana Goldstein published, “White House Guts Education Department With More Layoffs: About a fifth of the agency’s remaining staff was affected, including employees working on special education, funding for low-income students and civil rights enforcement”

A pair of decades-old promises from Congress — ensuring disabled students receive a free and appropriate education and protecting all pupils from discrimination in schools — have been thrown into doubt after a round of sweeping layoffs at the Education Department.

The department’s Office of Special Education Programs was decimated by the cuts, which the Trump administration issued on Friday in its latest reduction of the federal work force. The special education office has been the principal government arm overseeing billions of dollars that support about 10 percent of the nation’s school-aged children, but will have fewer than a half-dozen employees, a reduction of about 95 percent since the start of the year.

• Chad Rummel, executive director for the Council for Exceptional Children, was interviewed for CNN’s news feed14 October 2025 at 11:xx AM. I was unable to locate CNN’s tape of the interview. However, CEC posted a copy to Vimeo and published it (along with a link for contacting legislators) on CEC’s site. “CEC’s Executive Director Chad Rummel on CNN - Mass Firings Impact Special Education Services.”

CEC’s Executive Director was interviewed on CNN on October 14, 2025, to discuss the impacts of the Department of Education’s layoffs on special education programs. The Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP) and Rehabilitative Services Administration (RSA) have been nearly eliminated in that “reduction in force” effort. It destroys the expertise, support, and resources critical to ensuring IDEA implementation in states, eroding rights for children with disabilities, and destroying the safety net for their parents. Without OSEP, IDEA is in grave jeopardy.

• For The Guardian on 15 October 2025 at 13:03 (BST) Michael Sainato wrote “Panic as US federal workers scramble to find out if they’ve been fired: ‘I don’t have email access’: Education department staff say they can’t access work emails amid the shutdown to check for layoff notices.”

Federal workers are scrambling to figure out if they still have a job after the Trump administration launched a fresh wave of layoffs amid a federal government shutdown, prompting widespread confusion and panic.

A hearing is scheduled to take place on Wednesday after labor unions sued to block the latest firings, setting the stage for another legal battle over Donald Trump’s efforts to drastically cut back the federal workforce.

Please let me know if you have addition content that ought to be represented here. See the thread in the SET chat. I know of some other sources that are not represented in the foregoing paragraphs, but I would appreciate help from the community in locating more news.¹

Previous coverage

Here are links to posts published earlier on SET that cover aspects of this story.

• On 14 October 2025 at 7:30 PM SET published:

• On 13 October 2025 at 2:00 PM SET published:

• On 12 October 2025 at 5:00 AM SET. published:

Footnote

1. The National Association of State Directors of Special Education published a link apparently aimed at the K-12 Dive story listed earlier in this message; the link was malformed, so it “went 400.” The Council for Administrators of Special Education published a document sometime (the public data are note dated). The document is on Google’s documents server, so I won’t visit it or publicize it here in recognition of the data-harvesting policies and practices of that company. Readers who are willing to sacrifice their privacy may visit the link to CASE and locate the document.