Democrats on Capitol Hill are accusing the Trump administration of undermining efforts to fight antisemitism by reportedly cutting more than half of the Department of Education Office for Civil Rights’ staff and regional offices, while Republicans are largely more sanguine about the cuts and their potential impact.

Sen. Jacky Rosen (D-NV), the co-chair of the Senate antisemitism task force, told Jewish Insider, “We need robust and proactive measures at the Department of Education to tackle antisemitism, and these firings will only weaken our ability to do so.”

“At a time of rising antisemitism on college campuses and at schools across our nation, I am deeply concerned by the Trump administration’s decision to slash Department of Education civil rights staff, including those working to hold schools accountable for protecting students from antisemitic harassment and discrimination,” Rosen continued.

Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL) argued that the move shows that President Donald Trump “is full of it when he says he’s fighting surging antisemitic attacks on college campuses.”

“By burning down the Office for Civil Rights — the key driver in holding colleges and universities accountable, investigating, and disciplining dozens of universities for antisemitism — along with the rest of the Education Department, Trump lets antisemitism on campuses continue to run rampant,” Wasserman Schultz said.

She added that the move is “no surprise” given House Republican efforts to cut OCR funding last year and that “Trump has stuffed his administration with far-right extremists who are more concerned with conspiracy theories than countering antisemitism.”

Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY), a co-chair of the House Jewish Caucus, said, “The Trump Administration’s hypocrisy on antisemitism is on full display,” and accused it of gutting Jewish students’ “best line of defense.”

“Gutting the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights cripples the office responsible for protecting Jewish students from discrimination at a time when it’s needed most,” Nadler said in a statement. “Donald Trump[‘s] claim to fight antisemitism on college campuses is a sham. He cannot dismantle the very office that investigates antisemitism on college campuses and helm an administration that hires and associates with antisemites, while credibly claiming to combat antisemitism.”

Nadler also slammed the administration for its detention of Columbia University anti-Israel protest leader Mahmoud Khalil and plans to revoke his green card and deport him.

Democrats have argued, especially amid spiking antisemitism complaints since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks on Israel, that OCR needs significant funding increases to grow its staff to handle the deluge of complaints.

Biden administration officials said that investigators at the office were severely overtaxed, handling dozens of cases each.

Republicans, even those who have backed OCR’s antisemitism work in the past, seem largely unconcerned that the cuts will negatively impact the office’s ability to deal with campus antisemitism cases.

One Senate Republican told JI they were looking into the reports of OCR cuts, but said that many constituents in their state had been frustrated by “absurd” Title IX investigations — which concern sex and gender discrimination on campus — that had been launched under the Biden administration.

“There’s so much frustration about some of the DEI things they were doing on Title IX that there are not going to be a lot of people in my state that are heartbroken about that,” the senator said.

OCR’s role in investigating allegations of discrimination against transgender students under the Biden administration has been a source of concern and frustration among Republicans, driving some of the support for funding cuts in the House.

Asked about how the cuts might impact OCR’s ability to clear the backlog of antisemitism complaints it faces, which has prompted bipartisan concern, the senator said that OCR can and should “prioritize the things that should be a priority, like doing the antisemitism investigations, rather than chasing things that are not.”

The senator argued that the Department of Education has also failed in its duty to prioritize protecting special needs students, one of its core responsibilities, as it pursues other priorities.

Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA), the chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committee, said in a statement that he had spoken to Secretary of Education Linda McMahon, who “made it clear this will not have an impact on [the Department’s] ability to carry out its statutory obligations. This action is aimed at fulfilling the admin’s goal of addressing redundancy and inefficiency in the federal government.”