Mass layoffs at the Education Department included steep cuts to the office responsible for investigating civil rights abuses at American schools and universities, including allegations of antisemitism. 

The Office for Civil Rights, which has opened more than 100 investigations into antisemitism at educational institutions since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terror attacks, will close seven of its 12 regional offices, ProPublica reported. The affected offices include those in New York, Boston and San Francisco, cities that are home to some of the worst allegations of antisemitic discrimination in K-12 schools and on college campuses. More than half of the investigative staff members at OCR, which had about 550 employees, lost their jobs on Wednesday. 

Prior to the layoffs, Education Department officials in the Biden administration and Jewish advocacy organizations said the existing staff was too small to sufficiently deal with the number of investigations into antisemitism and other forms of bias, including racism and discrimination against people with disabilities. 

Last June, a coalition of 23 Jewish groups — ranging from the right-wing Zionist Organization of America to the more liberal National Council of Jewish Women — urged Congress to increase funding for OCR. Republicans have long been skeptical of funding increases for the office, saying it needed to do a better job of prioritizing the cases it already opened. Open investigations often take years to reach a resolution. 

Ken Marcus, who oversaw OCR in the first Trump administration, argued that President Donald Trump has made antisemitism a priority, so he expects those cases to continue to get attention, even with a smaller staff.

“The administration can, if they choose, focus on the antisemitism cases and address them vigorously and forcefully, even with the significantly diminished numbers,” Marcus, the founder and chairman of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, told Jewish Insider. “The real question is going to be how they deal with everything else.” 

The official who ran OCR in the Biden administration disagreed with Marcus’ assessment. Catherine Lhamon, the assistant secretary of education for civil rights under President Joe Biden, said investigators were already overburdened, managing 50 cases per person when she left the office on Jan. 20. 

“There are no other people to pick up those cases,” she told JI. “I think what we have left after yesterday is an Office for Civil Rights in name, not in reality.”

Madi Biedermann, the Education Department’s deputy assistant secretary for communications, told JI on Wednesday that OCR is changing its operations “to better serve American students and families.”

“OCR’s staff is composed of top-performing personnel with years of experience enforcing federal civil rights laws. We are confident that the dedicated staff of OCR will deliver on its statutory responsibilities,” said Biedermann. An Education Department official said OCR recently updated its policies and regulations to attempt to move investigations along more quickly.

After Oct. 7, OCR became the address for Jewish students who wanted to report instances of antisemitic discrimination on their campuses, or for parents to raise issues that their children had experienced in K-12 schools. 

It was not always a smooth process; the requisite forms are often laden with bureaucratic jargon, and open cases might not be resolved by the time the child graduates or leaves the school. But Jewish organizations committed resources to helping Jewish families navigate the system. A legal hotline set up by the Anti-Defamation League, the Brandeis Center and Hillel International in conjunction with the law firm Gibson Dunn fielded hundreds of inquiries from Jewish students, and helped some of them file complaints with OCR. 

The ADL said Wednesday that the mass layoffs at the Education Department raise “profound concerns about the federal government’s ability to protect students from antisemitism and other forms of discrimination and ensure equal access to quality education for all students.” 

The Trump administration has taken swift, unexpected steps to address antisemitism, although the efficacy and legality of their actions remains unclear. That’s in contrast to the Biden administration, which stuck to the letter of the law and followed a slow-and-steady approach to investigating schools where antisemitism was alleged to have occurred.

Lhamon claimed some of Trump’s actions have been “performative,” noting that letters sent by Education Secretary Linda McMahon on Monday to 60 universities under investigation for antisemitic harassment “includes schools that already have resolution agreements with the Office for Civil Rights about exactly how to remedy specifically that” and excludes K-12 schools, whose students “also deserve protection against antisemitic and other harms.”

But Marcus said that by publicly calling out antisemitism and taking unorthodox actions, such as cutting $400 million in federal contracts and grants to Columbia University, Trump is setting a new precedent for how the U.S. government might combat antisemitism in education. 

“It’s a movement away from staff-intensive, slow, bureaucratic processes to a more aggressive set of threats in the instance of serious wrongdoers,” said Marcus. “That the Trump administration moves fast and punches hard can potentially have a much stronger deterrent effect on recalcitrant institutions than the slow, grinding process that the bureaucracy has used in the past.”

Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s drafted blueprint for how a second Trump administration might govern, called for eliminating OCR entirely and having its functions taken up by the Justice Department, with a focus on select litigation against institutions, rather than a more bureaucratic civil investigation process. Marcus referred to this as one option for the future of civil rights enforcement at universities. A Justice Department spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.

Lhamon disagreed: “It is not possible that another entity could pick up the work of the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights,” she said, pointing out that the functions of OCR are congressionally mandated. 

With a significantly smaller staff, OCR will be more subject to the whims of the political appointees at the Education Department. Marcus doesn’t see this as a problem now, given Trump’s embrace of efforts to counter antisemitism. But he acknowledged the concern that a reduction in size could backfire if a future president does not care about antisemitism.

“The real question is going to be how they deal with everything else, and how antisemitism cases will be addressed in the future, if antisemitism does not remain a priority for future administrations,” said Marcus.