Senator Kim Calls Out Education Secretary McMahon for Hiding from Senate HELP Committee, Demands Answers to Questions

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, Senator Andy Kim (D-NJ), member of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor & Pensions (HELP), released the following statement after Secretary of Education Linda McMahon canceled last minute on a planned, bipartisan roundtable with the Senate HELP committee scheduled for today: “It is bad enough that Secretary McMahon won’t come before our committee which oversees the Department of Education for a public hearing, but now she’s canceled a bipartisan roundtable conversation with us. Thanks to her and Trump, parents and students are feeling anxious and abandoned right now. They see key disability and civil rights programs under direct threat, funding being pulled, and a crusade against the very foundation of public education in our country. We deserve answers from Secretary McMahon.” During the roundtable, Senator Kim had planned to press the Secretary on active threats to crucial programs that support students with disabilities, including staffing reductions at the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services (OSERS), and plans to move oversight of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) from the Department of Education to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and/or the Department of Labor. Specifically, Senator Kim’s questions included: How can OSERS possibly fulfill its statutory obligations to enforce civil rights law under IDEA with only 31 staff? According to data published last year by the Center for Appropriate Dispute Resolution in Special Education, nearly 10,000 state complaints were filed during the 2023-2024 school year. Currently, President Trump’s proposed budget request reduces the number of full-time employees in OSERS from 163 to 31 and does not have them accounted for in any other agency where it may be transferred. How would moving IDEA to either HHS, a health-focused agency, or the Department of Labor, a workforce-focused agency, maintain the educational integrity of those [Individualized Education Program] plans and protect students with disabilities? At a committee hearing last week with HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Senator echoed local families’ concerns about singling out students with disabilities by moving IDEA to HHS, and engaging them as patients, instead of students. Alongside his fellow Democratic colleagues on the HELP committee, the roundtable was going to be an opportunity to voice Americans’ concerns about Secretary McMahon’s illegal transfer of more than $33 billion in federal funding for over 100 different programs from the Department of Education to other federal agencies. In December of last year, the Democratic members had called on HELP Committee Chairman Bill Cassidy (R-LA) to hold an immediate public hearing with Secretary McMahon to hold her accountable for ongoing efforts to dismantle the Department of Education. ###