On June 16, Secretary of Education Linda McMahon announced that the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services (OSERS) and the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) would be moved out of the Department of Education. OSERS goes to the Department of Health and Human Services. OCR goes to the Department of Justice. This follows the earlier transfer of the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education to the Department of Labor.
Federal law requires these offices to sit within the Department of Education. Only Congress has the authority to move them, but Congress did not act, the administration moved them anyway.
What OSERS Actually Does
OSERS is the operational backbone of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, the 1975 legislation guaranteeing every child with a disability a free and appropriate public education. It provides oversight, enforcement, programming, and technical support to more than 7.5 million students with disabilities across the United States.
Moving it to HHS is not a neutral administrative decision. HHS operates from a medical model of disability, one that treats disability as a condition to be diagnosed, managed, and treated. IDEA was built on a civil rights model. The two frameworks produce radically different outcomes for students.
Under the civil rights model, a child with a disability belongs in a mainstream classroom with appropriate support. Under the medical model, their disability is a problem to be addressed in a separate, specialized setting. That distinction shapes everything: what a student’s school day looks like, what peer relationships they build, what futures they are told are available to them.
Before IDEA, children with disabilities were largely excluded from public school entirely, educated at home or in institutional settings. In 2025, we marked the 50th anniversary of the law that changed that. These transfers put that progress at direct risk.
OCR Protects Every Student, Not Just Students With Disabilities
The Office for Civil Rights enforces federal civil rights protections for all students in federally funded education programs, across race, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, religion, and disability, in both K-12 and higher education. It also administers the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, which protects the privacy of student records.
Transferring OCR to the Department of Justice moves it into an agency that is already under-resourced and not built for education-specific civil rights enforcement. For disabled students already navigating discrimination, bullying, and in some cases dangerous seclusion and restraint practices with fewer advocacy resources than ever, the question of who will investigate and enforce their rights just got a lot murkier.
Why The Business Community Should Be Paying Attention
Disabled people represent a $490 billion consumer market in the United States. They are also a significant and demonstrably capable segment of the workforce. Organizations that invest in inclusive hiring and education pipelines see measurable returns.
What happens in classrooms today determines what the workforce looks like in ten years. When the federal infrastructure supporting equitable education for disabled students gets dismantled, it narrows the talent pipeline. It increases the remediation costs that fall on employers and workforce development organizations downstream. Prevention is cheaper. Inclusion at the start costs less than catching up at the end.
What Needs To Happen
The transfers are unlawful. Advocates, disability rights organizations, educators, and families are calling for immediate legislative intervention to stop them and restore these offices to their legally mandated home.
The civil rights infrastructure being dismantled here was not built for a narrow constituency. It was built on the principle that every student has the right to a quality public education. When we allow that principle to erode for the most marginalized students, we are not holding the line for everyone else.
This article was originally published on Forbes.com
