Witnesses at House briefing warn transferring education programs to Labor will disrupt TRIO, adult education

Witnesses at a House Committee on Education and Workforce Democrats briefing said the administration’s use of interagency agreements (IAAs) to move education programs into the Department of Labor (DOL) and other agencies has already disrupted grant administration, delayed funding and undermined program expertise.

Rachel Gittleman, president of AFGE Local 252 and a former Department of Education employee, told the committee that since January 2025 the department has suffered mass personnel losses and reorganizations that she said were not routine. “Since January 2025, the department has canceled or reallocated billions of dollars in grants,” Gittleman said, and she testified that nearly 1,400 staff were unlawfully fired or forced out amid a string of IAAs that relocate parts of ED to six different federal agencies.

That movement, witnesses said, has produced practical problems for states and grantees. Braden Getz, senior policy adviser at New America’s Center on Education and Labor, and Dr. Amy Lloyd, president and CEO of All4Ed and a former assistant secretary who ran OCTAE, described a thicket of duplicated systems and stalled payments. Lloyd cited the departments’ own figures showing almost 5,000 payment requests routed to DOL since OCTAE functions were moved, and said only 43 of 53 states and territories had drawn down funds as of December. “We had one state front $22,000,000 of its own money just to keep programs running,” Lloyd said.

Diane Schultz of the Council on Opportunity in Education warned that TRIO programs — long focused on college access — were reprioritized in a recent grant competition toward workforce-development criteria. Schultz said 128 TRIO grants serving about 41,000 students were canceled last year; a lawsuit by COE produced a preliminary injunction that restored funding for some programs but left the status of dozens of other grants unresolved.

Witnesses described specific cost and capacity concerns. Lloyd said Education continues to spend roughly $13,000,000 per year on a grants payment system now duplicated by other agencies and that DOL requested roughly $9,000,000 to hire 26 staff to run OCTAE programs after the transfer. “Paying Labor to do things that our staff used to do by themselves is nuts,” Getz said, arguing those dollars could instead hire technical-assistance staff or support services for states and districts.

Speakers pressed legal and procedural questions as well. Lloyd referenced what she described as section 512 of the bipartisan Labor-HHS appropriations law, which she said bars transferring appropriated funds to other agencies without explicit authority; she argued the administration did not seek that authority before moving functions. Lloyd and others urged congressional oversight and recommended pausing any markup that would codify transfers into statute until the costs and consequences are documented and reviewed by inspectors general.

Witnesses stressed the human consequences beyond dollars and systems: lost institutional knowledge, the disappearance of staff who provided day-to-day technical assistance, and the backlog of civil-rights complaints that education offices previously managed. “There’s no one to pick up the phone anymore,” Gittleman said, summarizing the practical loss of support for state and local education agencies.

The committee’s ranking member closed the briefing by framing adult education and TRIO as long-standing, education-focused programs that, witnesses said, risk being turned into short-term workforce pipelines if moved wholesale to agencies whose mission is different from ED’s. Witnesses asked members to request inspector general reviews, to vote no on any markup that would permanently reassign these offices, and to preserve statutory protections for programs designed to expand college access.

The committee noted a markup scheduled for the following day and witnesses asked members to put questions on the record and to seek documentation of costs and implementation timelines before any legislative change.