Education Secretary Linda McMahon told Newsmax on Tuesday night that the planned cuts to about 50% of her agency's workforce began earlier the day with email notices sent to affected employees.
Before President Donald Trump's inauguration, the department said it had 4,133 employees and it will have 2,138 after the cuts. Included in the workforce reduction are nearly 600 employees who accepted voluntary resignation opportunities and retirement over the past seven weeks.
"We wanted to make sure that everybody got [their notice] before they left [for the day]," McMahon told "The Record With Greta Van Susteren." "But [we met with] their department heads and everyone ... this afternoon, both career folks and political folks, to fully discuss [it] with them.
"I've done restructuring in the private sector. And [it was done] as humanitarian as you want to make it for those folks who are leaving. It's always difficult."
The department said affected employees will be placed on administrative leave March 21 and will receive full pay and benefits until June 9. McMahon said their severance packages include one week of pay for every year of employment up to 10 years and two weeks for each of the next five years.
McMahon, who was confirmed March 3 after a 51-45 vote by the Senate, said her department has worked with the Department of Government Efficiency to consolidate "programs that were duplicative." She said the department is going to save about $500 billion "just on what we've done so far."
"When we looked across all of the Department of Education, and we have been working with DOGE and the audit that they came in and showed us a lot of the programs that were duplicative," she said. "When you looked at like 130 departments that each had their HR [human resources] and IT [information technology] and office managers sometimes in an office that only had five people.
"So we've consolidated a lot of that. This is not going to do anything to affect our outward-facing programs: our Pell grants, our loans, the appropriations that are coming from Congress. All of that will continue to be fulfilled. This is really internal, bureaucracy. It is moving people out of a couple of other buildings in Washington, consolidating them. So we're freeing up real estate."
McMahon, who led the Small Business Administration in Trump's first term, said she will be working to fulfill Trump's call to ultimately eliminate the department, which was created by Congress in 1979 at the behest of the Carter administration. Trump reportedly is set to soon sign an executive order to abolish the department, but it can be done only through an act of Congress.
"The president made it very clear that he thought that the Department of Education should totally go away," she said. "And he said that my successful job will be to put myself out of a job. So I'm working to fulfill that mandate that he gave to me. And that's the directive. But in the meantime, we want to make sure that the programs, everything that is put in place, continues to operate in a more efficient way."
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