Keri Rodrigues, president of the National Parents Union, speaks at a rally on Friday, March 14, 2025, in Washington, D.C, protesting the U.S. Education Department’s mass layoffs and President Donald Trump’s plans to dismantle the agency. (Photo by Shauneen Miranda/States Newsroom)

WASHINGTON — Dozens gathered Friday outside the U.S. Department of Education to protest the ousting of more than 1,300 employees and President Donald Trump’s plans to dismantle the agency.

As the fate of the 45-year-old department hangs in the balance following the cuts this week, demonstrators held signs at a rally outside of the Education Department headquarters with slogans including “Educate Don’t Eliminate” and “WWE: We Want Education,” a reference to Education Secretary Linda McMahon’s World Wrestling Entertainment background.

“These cuts — this isn’t just about a department and a building — this is about federal streams of money that help students live (up to) their full potential,” said Kim Anderson, executive director of the National Education Association, the country’s largest labor union.

“This agenda is about cutting funding and shipping it to private schools, it is about vouchers, make no mistake about it,” Anderson said. “It is about dismantling public education so that children cannot get what they deserve.”

Trump has repeatedly pledged to shutter the agency, and McMahon confirmed this week that the sweeping cuts marked the first step in that process.

The president alone does not have the authority to close the department, and such an effort would need congressional approval.

‘Fight back’

Following a “honk-a-thon” on Independence Avenue, Sen. Mazie Hirono told the crowd that Trump and billionaire White House adviser Elon Musk “think that they can take a chain saw to government agencies, and they’ve been slashing and burning and firing thousands of people for no cause, and just recently, of course, they got to the Department of Education.”

Trump and Musk have taken significant steps to reduce federal government spending and go after what they see as waste, with the Education Department marking a major target of those efforts.

“But we are all here to fight back because this is no time to be sitting back thinking that other people are going to fight the battles for us,” the Hawaii Democrat said. “No, we are in it together.”

The rally came as department leaders announced this week that they would be cutting a substantial number of the agency’s staff, prompting concerns over how the department could carry out its responsibilities when roughly halving its workforce.

The layoffs make huge cuts to the Office for Civil Rights, Office of Federal Student Aid and Institute of Education Sciences, among other units, according to the nonprofit Education Reform Now, which advocates for more resources for education.

Fulfilling responsibilities

Some of the department’s many responsibilities include administering federal student aid, enforcing civil rights cases, providing Title I funding for low-income school districts and guaranteeing a free public education for children with disabilities via the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, or IDEA.

Through a spokesperson, the department said Thursday its core responsibilities would not be impacted by the cuts.

But protesters Friday worried about the path to dismantling the department.

Molly Cronin, a special education teacher in Virginia, told States Newsroom that “if IDEA is not protected, if Title I is not protected, if Head Start is not funded, our most vulnerable children are going to be failed by the system, and we have a duty as educators to protect all students.”

Cronin, a member of the National Education Association who serves on the board of her local union, said one of the biggest misunderstandings about the agency “is that people think that the federal department is in control of the states and states’ curriculum and programs and all of that, when, in fact, that’s not true.”

Trump has vowed to shut down the department in his quest to move education “back to the states,” despite much of the funding and oversight of schools already occurring at the state and local levels. Legally, the federal government cannot control the curriculum of schools.

Legal challenges to the sweeping cuts are already taking shape, after 21 Democratic attorneys general sued the Trump administration Thursday over the efforts.

Prior to the mass layoffs, the department already witnessed dramatic downsizing in the weeks since Trump took office, with major contract cuts and staff buyouts.

Cuts make mission harder

Antoinette Flores, who worked for the Education Department during the Biden administration, said she knows many of the people harmed by the layoffs. 

“These are colleagues, these are friends, these are dedicated public servants that help students, and it’s devastating to see what’s happening.”

Flores, who focuses on higher education, told States Newsroom the massive cuts are “going to make it much more challenging for students to receive grants and loans that they’re entitled to.”

Rather than go after inefficiencies in the federal government, as Trump and Musk have said is their goal, Flores said a smaller federal workforce would actually “increase fraud, waste and abuse.” 

Elon Musk and Donald Trump are busy smashing the state. Wisconsinites will have a chance to weigh in on candidates who support and oppose the anti-government crusade on April 1. | Getty Images Creative

Wisconsinites voted for Donald Trump by a narrow margin in November. Does that mean a majority of voters here want to cancel farmers’ federal contracts, shut down Head Start centers across the state and turn loose Elon Musk to feed federal agencies into the woodchipper while hoovering up private citizens’ financial information?

The new Trump era is putting Republican nihilism to the test. In our closely divided swing state, the first official indication of whether Trump voters are developing buyers’ remorse will come, fittingly, on April Fool’s Day. 

In the Wisconsin Supreme Court race, candidate Brad Schimel has received Elon Musk’s endorsement and is benefitting from a huge ad buy by Musk’s political action committee. And while some Republicans have expressed qualms about Trump and Musk’s assertions that they have unchecked power to ride roughshod over judges and the U.S. Constitution, Schimel has, notably, sided with Trump and Musk against the courts. 

Last month, Schimel took to Vicki McKenna’s rightwing talk radio show to denounce the prosecution and sentencing of the Jan. 6 rioters who stormed the U.S. Capitol after Trump lost in 2020, saying juries in Washington, D.C., were too liberal to deliver a fair verdict. Recently, on the same talk radio program, he criticized federal judges for blocking the ransacking of federal agencies by Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), accusing the judges of “acting corruptly” by daring to issue temporary restraining orders.

The race between Schimel and Democratic-backed candidate Susan Crawford will determine the ideological balance of the Court and, it seems, whether a majority of justices believe in the integrity of the court system at all. 

Also on the April 1 ballot is the race for state schools superintendent, which pits a lobbyist for the private school voucher industry against a defender of public schools — an existential choice as the growth of schools vouchers is on track to bankrupt our state’s public school system and enrollment caps on voucher programs are set to come off next year.

The ideological struggle over the future of our state was on stark display this week as Gov. Tony Evers presented his budget plan — an expansive vision that uses the state surplus to boost funding for K-12 schools and the University of Wisconsin, health care, clean water and rural infrastructure, and leaves a cushion to help protect communities against what Evers called the “needless chaos caused by the federal government” under Trump.

In a familiar ritual, Republican legislators immediately shot down Evers’ plan, denounced it as “reckless spending” and promised to throw it in the trash and replace it with a stripped-down alternative based on austerity and tax cuts.

“Wisconsin voted for Donald Trump and his agenda to cut spending and find inefficiency in government,” Assembly Speaker Robin Vos declared.

But did they? 

It’s not clear that most Wisconsinites wanted what Trump and Musk are delivering — cuts to health care and veterans’ services, the claw-back of infrastructure projects, mass firings at the park service and the chaotic suspension of promised federal funds for child care and other essential services in Wisconsin.

For generations, Republicans have complained about “red tape” and “big government” and promised “freedom” and lower taxes to constituents who liked the sound of all that. Under Trump, we are seeing anti-government ideology reach its full, unchecked fruition. Trump’s No. 1 private donor, the richest man in the world, is laughing all the way to the bank. He’s using his access to trillions of dollars in taxpayer funds to cancel food programs for poor children and to bolster federal contracts that enrich himself. 

This, in the end, is what privatization is all about — taking the collective wealth of millions of people who contribute to maintaining a decent, healthy society and concentrating it in the hands of one very rich, self-interested man.

The long-term, existential struggle between private wealth and the public good in Wisconsin includes the fight over whether to fund public schools or give away money to subsidize the tuition of private school families. It includes whether to be the second-to-last state to finally offer 12 months of postpartum Medicaid coverage to new mothers — something even our Republican legislators support, minus Vos. The two sides of our divided government are locked in a battle over whether our universities, public parks, infrastructure, clean water and affordable housing are a boondoggle or something we ought to protect. 

Given what’s happening to our country, Wisconsinites will have to think hard about which side they’re on.