Democratic attorneys general say Education Department is hiding 1,300 documents on its layoffs

Attorneys general from more than 20 states are pressing the Education Department in federal court to turn over roughly 1,300 documents the agency has withheld from a lawsuit challenging its mass layoffs, arguing the records would show how the cuts were actually decided.

The Trump administration laid off more than 2,000 Education Department employees, nearly half the agency’s 4,000-person workforce, in a reduction in force carried out during last year’s government shutdown. Democratic attorneys general, including from New York and California, along with faculty unions and Somerville Public Schools in Massachusetts, are suing over the layoffs.

The Education Department has identified nearly 2,500 responsive documents in the case but is withholding more than 900 of them, according to Inside Higher Ed. A privilege log the department filed lists about 1,300 withheld records, including emails among senior officials, spreadsheets and draft plans. One listed document, dated March 5, 2025 and titled “RIF Brief,” is described in the log as reflecting the “timeline and scope of the potential RIF activities prior to final RIF decisions.”

In their filing, the plaintiffs wrote that “the privilege log references documents containing information central to plaintiffs’ claims that Defendants stated, under oath, did not exist. These documents do exist, and defendants must produce them.”

U.S. District Judge Myong Joun, who is overseeing the case, has already found the agency’s public explanation for the layoffs thin. “As the administrative record currently stands, there is virtually no reasoning backing the agency’s decision-making process,” Joun wrote.

The Education Department has argued that discovery is “generally inappropriate” in cases brought under the Administrative Procedure Act and that the deliberative process privilege shields the withheld records from disclosure.

The dispute is playing out alongside separate pressure on the agency. The department’s own inspector general reported in June that the workforce cuts, along with the transfer and elimination of agency programs, have shut down some of the department’s statutory oversight and monitoring functions.

The American Federation of Government Employees, whose Local 252 represents Education Department employees, joined three former education secretaries from the Obama and Biden administrations this month in calling on the inspector general’s office to open a formal investigation into the “cost and impact” of the RIFs and the “subsequent reinstatements and rehiring of hundreds of employees,” according to K-12 Dive. Between September 2025 and May 2026, the department posted 114 open positions with descriptions nearly identical to those of employees it had just laid off.

The Government Accountability Office found that the department spent nearly $1 million a week on Office for Civil Rights staff placed on administrative leave starting in March 2025, with total salaries for those employees reaching $38 million by December 2025. The GAO concluded the department “lacks reasonable assurance that its actions achieved the stated goal of reforming the federal workforce” or that the cuts saved taxpayer money.

AFGE Local 252 also joined House and Senate Democrats this month at an event urging the administration to halt further dismantling of the department.

Education Secretary Linda McMahon has continued to defend the reorganization publicly, while the department has moved to hand off portions of its programs to other federal agencies in the year since the layoffs began.

The document dispute remains before Judge Joun, with no ruling yet on whether the department must turn over the withheld records.