The Department of Education’s IT shop lost more than half of its employees to Trump’s reduction in force last year

The Education Department’s Office of the Chief Information Officer lost more than half of its staff in early 2025 during the Trump administration’s reduction-in-force campaign, leaving some suboffices completely empty, the agency’s Office of the Inspector General found in a report issued Monday. The OIG used Microsoft Office and Teams to track down who was subject to the RIF during the first nearly ten weeks of President Donald Trump’s second term, finding it gutted 40% or 1,579 of the agency’s workers in total. The OIG said it was presented with a scope limitation for the review due to the department not providing all requested information or giving unfettered access to Department staff, which limited its ability to fully address the review objective. Specifically in the CIO’s office, the OIG counted 44 remaining employees of the 92 employed in January 2025 — a 52% reduction. About 8% of all separated employees in the agency were in IT management, it found, and about $6 million in OCIO contracts were terminated as part of the Department of Government Efficiency’s massive agency reorganization campaign in early 2025. Suboffices within the OCIO that are statutorily required to oversee all departmental operational enterprise IT infrastructures and software, develop IT investment performance measures and conduct security reviews mandated by the Federal Information Security Modernization Act have no remaining employees, the report said.

NASA issued a long-awaited list of awardees for the latest iteration of a multibillion-dollar cross-government IT acquisition vehicle, moving the large-scale contract forward. In a brief notice on Monday, the agency said it would start processing the awards for the sixth generation of its Solutions for Enterprise‑wide Procurement contract, known as SEWP VI. It also disclosed more than 2,100 awardees across three categories: IT solutions, enterprise-wide IT services, and mission-based IT services. Among the hundreds of awardees, the list includes IBM, Leidos, KPMG, Carahsoft Technology Corp., Peraton, REI Systems, Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), CACI, Cherokee Nation Government Solutions, Amivero and Guidehouse. All of the awards are indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity, with a 10-year ordering period and a maximum ordering value of $20 billion. The contract period begins Nov. 1 and will run through October 2036.

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