WASHINGTON — Layoffs of more than half of the employees at the U.S. Department of Education this week ramped up uncertainty and anxiety at Minnesota schools that were already reeling from new Trump administration directives and funding cuts.
The latest directive was a letter sent Monday by new Secretary of Education Linda McMahon to 60 colleges and universities across the nation, including the University of Minnesota, warning them they could be prosecuted under the Civil Rights Act for a failure to protect Jewish students on campus and warning them of massive cuts in federal funding.
“The Department is deeply disappointed that Jewish students studying on elite U.S. campuses continue to fear for their safety amid the relentless antisemitic eruptions that have severely disrupted campus life for more than a year. University leaders must do better,” McMahon wrote.
She also said “U.S. colleges and universities benefit from enormous public investments funded by U.S. taxpayers. That support is a privilege, and it is contingent on scrupulous adherence to federal antidiscrimination laws.”
The University of Minnesota is one of the five initial schools that were told in February they were under investigation by the Education Department under a Trump executive order called “Additional Measures to Combat Anti-Semitism.”
The other schools were Northwestern University, Portland State University, the University of California-Berkeley and Columbia University, which in deference to Trump’s executive order had more than $400 million in grants slashed this week. Much of the money Columbia lost involved research grants funded by the National Institutes of Health.
In a statement, the University of Minnesota said the letter it received this week “does not change anything” from the notice it and the four other schools received in February, advising them of an investigation into how they treated their Jewish students.
“As we said at that time, we are confident in our approach to combating hate and bias on our campus and will fully cooperate with this investigation,” the university said.
It also said the school “continues to stand firmly against antisemitism” and “will continue to respond promptly and fully to any reports of harassment, intimidation, or bias against Jewish students — or any other members of our university community — in accordance with our university values, our own policies, and our responsibility under the law.”
There are other threats to federal funding of the state’s colleges.
Trump and his allies have repeatedly ridiculed federally funded research that touches on race and gender and have vigorously sought to eliminate anything related to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) issues.
That’s why the Education Department has cut grants to universities for a program that trains teachers, simply because some of that training is focused on how to meet the needs of a diverse student body.
The University of Minnesota has lost one of those teacher training grants and the University of St. Thomas has lost two.
A loss in relationships
The firing of workers this week is part of Trump’s efforts to gut the Education Department, established in its present form by Congress in 1980 to — among other things — prohibit discrimination and ensure equal access to education.
Trump wants to eliminate the department, but that could only be done by an act of Congress. So, the president is doing what he can do to shrink it as much as possible.
Besides the 1,300 Education Department employees who were fired, another 600 staffers agreed to resign or retire over the past seven weeks, nearly halving the employees of the federal government’s smallest cabinet-level agency.
On Thursday, 21 Democratic attorneys general, including Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, sued the Trump administration to try to block the layoffs.
“I’ll say it as often as I have to: Donald Trump is not a king and I will not let him be a dictator. He does not have the authority to effectively shut down an entire federal department that is authorized by Congress, and his attempt to do so is illegal and unconstitutional,” Ellison said in a statement.
There are also concerns about continued funding cuts.
While Minnesota receives only about 10% of its annual education budget — or a little more than $1.4 billion this year — for its public elementary and secondary schools from the Education Department, that money goes to programs that help the state’s most vulnerable young students.
For instance, the federal agency gave Minnesota nearly $194 million last year to bolster the education needs of low-income students. More than $233 million was allocated to the state from the Education Department under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act to help pay for programs for children with learning disabilities.
The Trump administration said federal education money to states will continue to flow.
But Gov. Tim Walz, a former teacher, said there’s uncertainty about future federal funding of state schools, especially when it comes to competitive grants issued by the department.
At a press conference Wednesday at Hayes Elementary School in Fridley, Walz said those grants would now be subject to ideological litmus tests. “If you agree with them, they’ll give you the money,” Walz said.
He also said the loss of experienced Education Department employees and experts in the field of education will hurt state efforts to deliver quality education.
“I guarantee you there weren’t a lot of parents that went into the voting booth and voted to have their schools undermined, to have the $1.4 billion be at risk, the nearly 860,000 students in Minnesota that are impacted by this (and) 2,500 schools,” Walz said.
The Minnesota Department of Education has asked the Trump administration for clarity about how investments will be transitioned if the federal Education Department is dissolved, said Minnesota Education Commissioner Willie Jett during the news conference. Jett said the state has not yet received a response.
Sam Snuggerud, spokeswoman for the Minnesota Department of Education, said the massive layoffs mean that staff at the state agency is likely to result in a loss of important allies in Washington, D.C., who had regular contact with them and helped them do their jobs.
“There are relationships there,” she said.
Snuggerud also said the state Department of Education was “panicked” on Wednesday because it could not access federal education money for much of the day through a website called G5.gov.
Snuggerud said the website featured a notice that said, “Due to staffing constraints we are not able to provide IT support at this time.”
The state was eventually able to receive its reimbursements.
‘Impossible to plan’
The turbulence in the U.S. Department of Education has also caused anxiety among many of the state’s teachers.
“The uncertainty is the worst,” said Denise Specht, the president of Education Minnesota, a teacher’s union.
Specht said local unions are beginning the process of negotiating their two-year employment contracts, which she hoped would include pay hikes, better working conditions and help with “exploding health care costs.”
“However, it’s almost impossible to plan when the federal government is threatening to defund K-12 schools in Minnesota by more than $500 million from the U.S. Department of Education,” Specht said.
She also said those funding cuts will likely be paired with a sharp reduction in funding from the U.S. Department of Agriculture for school meals that helps the state provide free breakfasts and lunches for all of Minnesota’s K-12 students.
Specht also said “the survival of the state’s two-year colleges is near the top of my mind.”
“Those schools depend on students with Pell Grants and U.S. Department of Education funding streams for students from historically disadvantaged groups that the administration may consider “DEI,” although the MAGA definition of the term has been a moving target for some time now,” she said.
Regarding K-12 schools, Specht predicted that schools that serve the most vulnerable students, such as those with special education needs or those living in poverty, “will feel the biggest hit from the plan to defund public education.”
“I worry about the survival of every program outside the core curriculum — athletics, music, theater, speech, vocational-technical education, etc.” she said.
Ana Radelat
Ana Radelat is MinnPost’s Washington, D.C. correspondent. You can reach her at aradelat@minnpost.com or follow her on Twitter at @radelat.
Winter Keefer
Winter Keefer is MinnPost’s Metro reporter. Follow her on Twitter or email her at wkeefer@minnpost.com.
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