OCR Can Move Forward With RIFs, Appeals Court Says

"In March, the department enacted a reduction-in-force plan to eliminate nearly half of its employees, including 276 at OCR, as part of wider effort to dismantle the 45-year-old agency. Those RIFs prompted multiple lawsuits against the department, including New York v. McMahon and the Victim Rights Law Center v. Department of Education; while the former challenged RIFs across the entire department, the latter case was restricted to the RIFs within OCR. Federal district judges issued injunctions in both cases during the litigation process."

"The government appealed that decision and requested a stay of the RIF injunction. On Monday the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit granted that request, giving OCR the green light to fire half its staff. "We note the district court's careful analysis concluding that the Department's decision to reduce by half the staff of OCR, a statutorily-created office, imperils Congress's mandate that OCR 'enforce federal civil rights laws that ban discrimination based on race, sex, and disability in the public education system,'" the court's opinion read. "In this stay posture and at this preliminary stage of the litigation, however, we cannot conclude that this case differs enough from McMahon to reach a contrary result to the Supreme Court's order staying the injunction in McMahon.""

The Education Department enacted a reduction-in-force plan in March to eliminate nearly half its workforce, including 276 employees at the Office for Civil Rights (OCR). Multiple lawsuits followed and federal district judges issued injunctions that blocked the planned cuts. The U.S. Supreme Court allowed similar RIFs to proceed in McMahon, but a Massachusetts judge kept OCR-specific protections in place. The government appealed and the First Circuit granted a stay of the OCR injunction, allowing the department to fire half the OCR staff. The appeals court acknowledged concerns about impairing OCR's statutory civil-rights enforcement mandate but found the case not materially different from McMahon.

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