Education CIO office lost more than half of its employees to Trump’s reduction in force, watchdog says

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.

“We were presented with a scope limitation for our review due to the Department not providing all requested information to the OIG, or permitting us unfettered access to Department staff, which limited our ability to fully address our review objective,” the report said. 

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.

Also, suboffices that developed departmental cybersecurity policies, implemented programs to comply with federal information management requirements and provided leadership in IT management were left vacant, it said.

However, the agency said the possible characterization that “certain statutory responsibilities were no longer being executed” is “inconsistent with its continued fulfillment of these responsibilities for more than a year following the RIF,” though the OIG said they could not verify this “as no corroborating evidence has been provided” to support it. 

Further, the agency said the OIG “stopped their ‘analysis’ just two weeks after the RIF” and does not account for orders back to work later in the year.

“These and other deficiencies were brought to the OIG’s attention numerous times throughout their inquiry,” Ellen Keast, press secretary for higher education, said in a statement. “With nearly half the staff, ED has effectively implemented some of the most sweeping higher education reforms in decades while returning education to the states.”

The report said the agency cancelled OIG interviews with staff and insisted lawyers attend, something Deputy General Counsel Philip Rosenfelt called “a necessary safeguard rather than a barrier” in light of ongoing litigation.

“However, we maintain that a claim that information is the subject of litigation does not justify withholding documents from the OIG, particularly since we are a component of the Department and have a long-standing history of reviewing and protecting sensitive Department information, including materials related to ongoing litigation,” the OIG said in the report.

The OCIO was not the only office stripped of staff, the report found. 

The suboffice that statutorily developed educational technology policy within the Office of the Deputy Secretary was unoccupied. Within the Federal Student Aid arm, the suboffice providing primary IT services for all FSA lost at least half of its staff.

The local American Federation of Government Employees, which claims to represent 2,000 current, former and retired federal workers, said, “Nothing is fine, and this report proves it.”

“This confirms what we’ve been saying all along: The Trump Administration has been systematically destroying the Education Department,” AFGE Local 252 President Rachel Gittleman said. “The Inspector General makes clear that the Department can no longer do its job — it cannot fulfill its congressionally mandated duties, prevent waste, fraud and abuse, or follow federal law. “