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The Trump administration says it wants to close the Education Department to cut bureaucracy and increase efficiency, but NPR found that changes over the last 18 months have cost an unknown amount of taxpayer dollars and made the agency's work more complex and potentially inefficient.
NPR spoke to five Education Department employees to understand how the administration's publicly stated goals are unfolding inside the agency. They all asked not to be named because they are not authorized to speak publicly about the moves and fear professional repercussions for doing so.
"Cutting through layers of red tape in Washington is one essential piece of our final mission," Education Secretary Linda McMahon has said.
But some of the employees NPR spoke to said the changes have made it more difficult for them to serve states and schools who rely on billions of dollars in federal money to educate students who need the most support, including low-income students and those with disabilities.
The administration has also made costly changes around where staffers work — changes that some employees say don't seem to have been made with particular improvements in mind.
"A lot of the frustration we feel is from the fact that they came up with a solution for a problem they have not identified," an Education Department worker says.
Four of the staffers NPR spoke with are among the hundreds of Education employees who are now scattered across at least nine other agency buildings in Washington, including the special education and civil rights offices, which moved this month.
Getting money to students is becoming more complicated
Despite being the smallest cabinet-level agency, the Education Department manages one of the biggest pools of federal grants, sending billions of dollars each year to states and schools. "The funding will continue to flow," McMahon said in an interview with Fox News last year. "If the Department of Education moves different programs to different agencies, that will not shut down the funding."
The agency now says how that money gets to kids, however, should change: Some of those grants will now be sent through platforms used by other agencies instead of the single system long used at Education.
Education Department employees told NPR that other agencies' systems — including at the Departments of Labor and Health and Human Services — are not set up for education grants.
"Many of the students we serve are the kids that need extra support," says one worker responsible for overseeing hundreds of millions of dollars in grants. "Personally, I'm very worried [about the money reaching those students] because they're now going to be sending out funds through a challenging, complicated system."
For instance, Title I grants, worth roughly $18.4 billion per year, go to schools where many students are from low-income families. Employees from the office that oversees those grants have been moved to the Labor Department.
Staff say these changes make it more complicated to get money to students. They say the department has tried twice to use Labor's systems to send out Title I money and other large grants, and both attempts were halted after states pushed back, citing concerns about technical problems and lack of trained staff. The next tranche of Title I money, going out to students on Oct. 1, will be sent via the Education Department's system. But the department will, according to employees, try Labor's system again next year.
Other smaller, competitive grants have already switched to Labor's platforms.
"It's not efficient for us and it's not efficient for them," one staffer says, referring to states and other groups that rely on grant money. "This was done haphazardly. People don't feel like they've received sufficient training on new systems." Some employees must learn how to use three separate grant management tools instead of one. The people who receive the grants are having to do the same.
A staffer at the Office for Special Education and Rehabilitative Services (OSERS) works with dozens of grant recipients and says, "We spend a lot of time calming nerves, which is not what we're paid to do."
Bryce McKibben, a higher education policy expert at Temple University, works with colleges and states who rely on federal grants including for low-income student parents, and says many have been struggling. "It's hard to know where to go for information, the systems/portals have changed, the amount of guidance they've been getting has been going down," he says. "It all seems to be a very intentional effort to simply … make folks less likely to want federal funds in the first place."
One of the grants that was completely transferred to Labor's systems last year was for career and technical education. After that change, several states reported they received their share of the money months late. Some employees who manage grants consider that situation a cautionary tale, although the following round of the same funding was sent on time earlier this summer.
When asked, Education Department press secretary Savannah Newhouse did not share details behind the initial delay but wrote in an email, "I'd hardly call successfully processing over 7,200 payments totaling over $1.93 billion since October 1, 2025, through the Department of Labor's payment system a 'cautionary tale' on inefficiency."
Scattering staff across Washington
The Education Department has physically moved hundreds of employees out of its longtime headquarters to several other federal agencies, among other steps to break up the Education Department.
Over a hundred special education staffers began reporting to work at an HHS building on Sept. 10. Then, dozens of employees who work on student civil rights moved to the Justice Department. The Education Department also confirmed some employees have started moving from its longtime headquarters in Washington, D.C., to a smaller building roughly a block away, with more workers to follow.
It's all in the name of efficiency, McMahon has said: "Partnering with agencies that are best positioned to deliver results for students and taxpayers … will streamline federal education activities on the legally required programs."
The administration is using interagency agreements (IAA) to shift workers around. IAAs have routinely allowed federal agencies to share resources and expertise. Newhouse said as much in an email to NPR: "Detailing employees to partner agencies is standard practice across the federal government — not a new phenomenon."
Although IAAs are not unusual, the way the Education Department is using them as a vehicle to reshape the entire agency is. Some members of Congress, including Republicans, called the scope of the IAAs "unprecedented" in a statement.
And they may come with a price tag. Senate Democrats have requested the Government Accountability Office (GAO) evaluate the costs of the interagency agreements and other steps the Trump administration has taken to split up the Education Department, says Jackie Nowicki, the director of K-12 education research at the GAO, a nonpartisan congressional watchdog.
One worker from the special education office who must now work at a federal HHS building says they see some benefit to collaborating with the agency, but they don't understand what the physical move accomplishes.
"We could walk over there and talk to these folks, have virtual meetings, but to pay … to move us basically across the street, it is asinine. "
The agreement between OSERS and HHS lasts until September 2027. Yet, staff are detailed to HHS only for renewable 120-day blocks — during which time they report to the Education Department while working at HHS. When employees were told they would be moving to HHS, an email from leadership emphasized, "You remain OSERS' team members and Department of Education employees. Your work and responsibilities remain the same."
"So then what? Are we going to move again in 120 days? A year?" an employee of that office says. "They have framed it as a permanent solution to our country and it's not."
There already has been some documentation of how changes at the Education Department have resulted in wasted spending: In a report last year, the GAO found the Education Department spent as much as $38 million dollars between March and December 2025 paying staff not to work after it laid them off. During that time, GAO found that OCR resolved more than 7,000 discrimination complaints, but about 90% were resolved by the department dismissing the complaint, meaning staff received information from complainants but did not proceed to investigate.
Back in January, Congress directed the Education Department to give biweekly briefings about the implementation of IAAs, including on costs and how staff transfers would affect the quality of grant management. According to two congressional staffers familiar with the briefings, the department did not share any information about costs at those meetings. Both congressional staff members, who are not authorized to speak publicly about those briefings, say the department stopped them in June after Rep. Suzanne Bonamici, an Oregon Democrat, proposed impeaching McMahon. Newhouse, the press secretary, wrote that the department has continued to provide "significant updates on the IAAS" to committee members.
Others in Congress, on both sides of the aisle, have proposed legislation to stop the IAAs. They include Democratic Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, who recently said, "Tell Congress and the public what these interagency agreements actually cost taxpayers."
She added, "show us the receipts."
Costs of physical dismantling
The physical unwinding of the Education Department is also coming at a cost to taxpayers, contrary to the department's public claims.
In a March press release, the department announced that staff would leave its longtime headquarters at the Lyndon B. Johnson building in Washington, D.C., for a far smaller space roughly a block south, "saving taxpayers approximately $4.8 million annually in operating costs and eliminating wasted space in a building that is roughly 70% vacant."
The release also announced that staff from the Department of Energy would then leave their "outdated" headquarters and move into the LBJ building:
"By avoiding major and necessary maintenance on their current building, Energy's move to the ED headquarters will save taxpayers over $350 million in deferred maintenance costs," the release said. NPR reached out to the Energy Department for details about their plans and they repeated the same information about cost savings.
NPR also asked the Education Department how it arrived at those numbers. Press secretary Savannah Newhouse did not respond to those questions but wrote, "Taxpayers shouldn't be paying to keep the lights on in empty government buildings, and the Department of Energy shouldn't spend a single dollar building a new facility when an existing one can be renovated and put to better use."
Two key costs of those moves were omitted from the department's announcement.
First, the LBJ building cannot accommodate the needs of Energy staff without a major overhaul. For example, Rachel Gittleman, president of AFGE Local 252, says the Energy Department would need to add back high-cost, high-security rooms to the LBJ building that were recently removed. Republicans on the House committee that manages federal buildings moved quickly over the summer to free up $215 million for such a renovation.
And that costly overhaul would follow a yearslong renovation of the LBJ Building that began during the first Trump administration. In 2019, that renovation was projected to cost $37 million, but, according to government records, since 2021, roughly $49 million has been spent.
The purpose of that renovation was to do the opposite of what's happening now: to take Education staff spread across several federal buildings and, in the name of efficiency and collaboration, move them all to one place.
"This is a huge waste of taxpayer dollars," says Gittleman.
She also says the Education Department is paying for the employees moved to other offices to have up to three desks each: at the department's current headquarters, its new headquarters, and at agencies where they are being detailed. "This is not efficiency, this is chaos."
Every employee who spoke to NPR shared a similar sentiment, and each says they are sticking it out because they care about the department's mission of serving American students.
One education staffer who now works out of the Labor building says they feel physically and ideologically further from that mission. "I reported to a building this week that doesn't say 'education' anywhere."
Edited by: Nirvi Shah
Copyright 2026 NPR
