For Immediate Release: February 2, 2026
Contact: Jess Davidson, jdavidson@aapd.com; 202-465-5528
WASHINGTON, DC – The American Association of People with Disabilities (AAPD) is deeply concerned by the findings of a new Government Accountability Office (GAO) report released today regarding the impacts of the widespread staffing cuts at the US Department of Education (ED).
Some of the most concerning findings were those showing that ED wasted up to $38 million of taxpayer money by paying its investigators in the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) not to work. This number represents close to a quarter of the Office for Civil Rights’ annual budget for all of 2025, which could have been used to support students, educators, and school districts. During this time, ED also permanently closed seven of its twelve OCR regional offices and assigned its entire caseload to the remaining five offices.
ED also summarily dismissed 90% of the 9,000 discrimination complaints submitted during this period, without review. This came after 2024, a year in which a record number of complaints were submitted.
The Office for Civil Rights is an organization within the Department of Education that is charged with protecting students from discrimination based on race, sex, disability, color, national origin, and age. Students are often given pathways to file discrimination complaints within their school or college. When the school’s efforts are insufficient, or, as they are too often, non-existent, a student can then file an OCR complaint.
Any student who has experienced discrimination in an educational setting can write an OCR complaint on their own, without hiring an attorney, and file it against their school. OCR’s staff is then supposed to investigate the school and, if OCR finds the school did indeed violate that student’s civil rights, hold the school accountable for the necessary changes to protect the rest of its student body from experiencing similar harm.
OCR provides a necessary function for disabled students and their families who experience discrimination in schools. Private litigation can take a long time, time that a child being denied special education services under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act does not have before they experience learning, developmental, or curriculum delays that become increasingly difficult to recover. Federal agency investigations, technical assistance, and oversight activities, like those conducted by OCR, take less time, start earlier, and can resolve issues more quickly.
“All students deserve – and have a right to – a free and appropriate public education without experiencing discrimination. For the many disabled students whose rights have been violated, submitting complaints about their school to ED’s Office for Civil Rights has historically been an accessible, low-barrier way for students to enforce their own civil rights and hold institutions accountable without needing to have the resources to hire their own attorney,” said Maria Town, AAPD President and CEO.
“By paying OCR investigators not to work, firing the vast majority of OCR investigators, and simultaneously dismissing 90% of 9,000 claims without even reviewing them, the Trump administration has effectively shuttered an essential tool that students, educators, and administrators alike rely upon. When the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights cannot function effectively, schools miss out on clear guidance to highlight what compliance looks like. Students lose tools to advocate for their accommodations, stop bullying, prevent harassment, or fight back against dangerous seclusion and restraint practices,” Town concluded.
As the report indicates, ED brought many of OCR’s staff back in December 2025. Even with this positive development, a great injustice has still taken place in the last year alone for the thousands of individuals who filed complaints. In order to begin to rebuild and restore justice, the Administration must: stabilize and and sustain OCR’s function within the Department of Education, restore the department’s previous tracking mechanisms to promote transparency so everyone can see how and when complaints are being addressed, and communicate with students, educators and administrators efforts that OCR is taking to vigorously enforce civil rights laws so all students have equal access to education.