The Trump administration recently announced the firing of nearly a third of all U.S. Department of Education workers. It’s the latest step in their effort to gut the department, with the ultimate goal of fully dismantling it, despite having no legal authority to do so.
This reckless move by Donald Trump and Elon Musk eliminates essential services for our nation’s students in order to fund tax cuts for billionaires. In the process, they are dismantling core protections for the religious freedom of our nation’s students.
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Our public schools guarantee admission to students of all religions and backgrounds, and provide religious freedom protections to all students. Trump instead favors sending funds to private schools, which can and do discriminate in their hiring and admissions practices, on the basis of religion, disability, and other protected characteristics. Ninety percent of students in our country attend public schools. They depend on them to protect their civil rights and civil liberties, and all students depend on federal dollars for support, particularly students with disabilities or students from low-income families.
The Department of Education currently requires that every state and school district in the nation certify annually that they are upholding the rights of all students to engage in constitutionally protected prayer and religious expression in public schools. When I served in the department as director of the Center for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, my colleagues and I ensured that the department’s official guidance reflected the latest case law and even issued a set of frequently asked questions to help schools navigate complicated questions around church-state separation. Some of these colleagues have since been fired. Gutting the department severely limits this check on states to ensure they are upholding the freedom of religion.
Trump officials may engage in a lot of fluff speech around religious freedom, but their administration has already dismantled critical services protecting religious freedom in schools. During my time at the department, we developed resource pages on our Center for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships website and supported technical assistance centers’ efforts to improve religious inclusion in public schools. Within the first few weeks of the Trump administration, those pages were wiped clean, likely in the name of ending “diversity, equity, and inclusion.”
Last month, the administration terminated funding for its four regional equity assistance centers. These centers were created by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to serve as desegregation centers and are therefore congressionally mandated. They provide support to schools and school districts who reach out to them asking for help protecting rights for all students on the basis of four categories—religion, race, sex, and national origin.
Furthermore, the Trump administration fired approximately half of the already underfunded staff leading new and ongoing investigations into civil rights complaints. The Department’s Office for Civil Rights is required to open and investigate complaints of violations of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, including Title VI, which also protects students who “are or are perceived to be Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Sikh, Hindu, Buddhist, or of another religious group.” This administration is touting its efforts to address antisemitism, but as Senator Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) said last week in a Senate Judiciary hearing on antisemitism: “You can’t have it both ways. You can’t declare this is wrong and we need to stop it … and then shut down in your funding and your philosophy the venues that are important for this to happen. That, to me, seems so obvious.”
Instead, the Trump administration has promised to pull federal funding from any institution of higher education that has protests it dislikes—a clear violation of the First Amendment—and to deport noncitizens without due process for exercising free speech that the president doesn’t like. Make no mistake—undermining our basic freedoms and pulling funding from schools will not address the real problem of antisemitism and will certainly not help students receive an education.
This is part of the authoritarian playbook. As United to Protect Democracy reported, “the heart of Trump’s agenda is not to address particular policy challenges or advance public policy goals; it is to aggrandize the executive branch’s powers and use them for retribution.”
Part of how authoritarians grab power is by making the public believe they already have it. But they do not. The White House already delayed issuing an executive order to dismantle the Department of Education, as a result of the widespread public backlash.
So keep lifting your voice for freedom. Protect public education, defend religious freedom, and take action.
Maggie Siddiqi is a senior fellow at Interfaith Alliance. She recently served as director of the Center for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships in the Office of the U.S. Secretary of Education.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.
