The Quiet Coup Inside the Department of Education

The Department of Education has announced this week that it will hand off the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services, known to insiders as OSERS, to the Department of Health and Human Services. OSERS oversees about $15.5 billion in funding for early intervention and K-12 special education services. That money pays for speech therapists, classroom aides, and the IEP coordinators who keep schools out of court. It now belongs to an agency that has never administered a school contract in its existence.

The administration calls this a "partnership," a word people reach for when they want a hostile takeover to sound consensual. Officials briefed reporters on the new arrangement on the condition of anonymity, which is an odd amount of cover to need for a policy the administration insists will help 7.5 million children. Education Secretary Linda McMahon frames the move as aligning federal services to strengthen academic outcomes and help people with disabilities achieve independence and meaningful employment. HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. echoes the sentiment, promising the arrangement will cut bureaucratic barriers and deliver more effective support for individuals with disabilities and their families. This is the same Kennedy who, fourteen months earlier, told a press conference that autistic kids will never hold a job, never play baseball, and never use a toilet unassisted, before later clarifying on Fox News that he meant only the subset with more severe presentations. Independence and employment make a strange promise coming from a man who needed a walk-back to clarify which disabled kids he thinks have a future.

The Arc of the United States warns that HHS lacks the Education Department's school-specific expertise, and that the shift pushes students toward a medical model where disability becomes a diagnosis to manage rather than a part of ordinary human life. Robyn Linscott, the organization's director of education and family policy, draws the line clearly: IDEA belongs with an education agency because it concerns classrooms, IEP meetings, behavior support, and whether kids can learn alongside their peers. Nobody at HHS runs an IEP meeting. The building was never built for it, and the secretary running it has already had to clarify, after the fact, which disabled kids he was insulting.

Two former OSERS employees told NPR what the move actually looks like from inside the building, speaking on condition of anonymity because they feared professional repercussions for saying it publicly. One put it bluntly: the transfer "would separate out oversight of the implementation of IDEA and it would decimate civil rights protections that have been in place for more than 50 years." The other, a parent of an adult with disabilities, said simply, "my stomach drops for children and parents." Worth noting who needs anonymity here and who doesn't. The officials selling this plan hid behind it too, but they did so to avoid accountability. The employees warning against it hid behind it to avoid getting fired for telling the truth.

House Democrats warned in a December letter that transferring IDEA programs to HHS would violate congressional intent, since the Education Department remains the only federal agency with the expertise and established relationships to administer them properly. The Education Department executes this through interagency agreements rather than legislation, the same mechanism it used to ship K-12 programming to the Department of Labor, and Congress has not authorized any of it. The agreements themselves show HHS handling much of the administrative grind while the Education Department keeps formal management and leadership, likely because IDEA's legal language requires it. Permission has apparently become optional, as long as you call it a partnership, brief reporters anonymously, and keep just enough paperwork at the old address to claim nothing really moved.

This is not the department's first transplant surgery. Education already shipped Title I oversight toward the Department of Labor under the same blueprint, and a federal watchdog found that earlier staffing cuts to the department's Office for Civil Rights had already weakened its ability to enforce disability protections before this latest move ever got announced. OSERS is not an isolated decision. It is the next domino in a sequence that started months ago and shows no sign of slowing down.

Denise Forte, president and CEO of the education policy group EdTrust, did not bother with diplomatic hedging. She called the move "another vindictive attempt to undermine public education." Vindictive is a strong word for a press release. It is a fair word for a pattern.

This move traces back to Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation's blueprint, which calls explicitly for shifting special education to HHS and converting its funding into a voucher system handed to individual families instead of guaranteed through federal law. A voucher is not a guarantee. It is a coupon, and coupons expire. Lindsey Burke, who wrote that chapter of Project 2025, now works inside the Education Department as deputy chief of staff, where she has publicly called this kind of restructuring a "blunt instrument" even while helping swing it.

Rachel Gittleman, who leads the union representing department employees, skips the administration's optimism entirely, warning that families already struggling to get services will end up with fewer people whose job is actually fixing that.

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