Education Department paid laid-off OCR staff $38M while dismissing most complaints

A report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office found the agency cannot prove the employee cuts improved services.

Published Feb. 3, 2026

First published on

Dive Brief:

• The U.S. Department of Education spent nearly $1 million per week on salaries for civil rights enforcement staff it had put on administrative leave beginning in March 2025, paying up to $38 million in total through Dec. 2025, according to a government watchdog report released Monday. 
• Between March and September, while the majority of OCR staff were on leave due to the agency’s reductions in force, the office received more than 9,000 complaints and resolved a total of 7,072 complaints. It did so by dismissing 90% of them, according to the Government Accountability Office report.
• The GAO report concluded that the department “lacks reasonable assurance that its actions achieved the stated goal of reforming the federal workforce to maximize efficiency and productivity, including whether such actions saved taxpayer dollars” and that it “cannot ensure that OCR improved service to the American people.” 

Dive Insight:

The department’s Office for Civil Rights employees were paid to sit idle after the Trump administration’s efforts to downsize the department and eliminate “waste, fraud and abuse” across the federal government. Those efforts were heavily litigated in multiple lawsuits, at least one of which put OCR’s layoffs on pause.

While Education Department officials said the agency analyzed the costs and savings associated with the OCR RIFs, it did not document those analyses despite being required by the administration to do so and could not provide it to the GAO. 

The report says that the department provided this information “orally” to the Office for Management and Budget, which oversees federal agencies’ performance. Agencies were directed to evaluate RIF-related costs and savings by March 2025. 

OCR was among the offices hit hardest by the Education Department’s March reduction in force, with more than half of its staff put on administrative leave and seven of of its 12 regional offices shuttered. Other offices heavily impacted by the agency’s RIFs include the English Language Acquisition office — which was entirely shuttered — as well as the Federal Student Aid office and the Institute of Education Sciences.

The RIFs sparked a flurry of lawsuits and impacted thousands of civil rights investigations across the nation as laid-off staff sat idle. Eventually, some staff were brought back as part of a court order and assigned to work through a backlog of civil rights complaints. 

A U.S. Department of Education database showing OCR complaints settled through resolution agreements shows there were only 177 such agreements in 2025, compared to 518 in 2024. While administration changes usually coincide with a dip in OCR resolution agreements, the office still entered into 265 resolution agreements in the first year of the Biden administration in 2021.

“Instead of following court orders and federal law, the Trump Administration chose to keep these civil rights professionals on paid administrative leave rather than letting them do their jobs, while students, families, and schools paid the price,” said Rachel Gittleman, president of American Federation of Government Employees Local 252, in a Monday statement. AFGE Local 252 is a union representing over 2,700 Education Department employees, including many of those affected by the layoffs.