The Education Department’s civil rights office has been among the hardest hit by layoffs, with the Trump administration shuttering seven of its 12 regional offices and laying off nearly half of its staff.

The US Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) is undergoing a significant transformation, shifting its focus from traditional student protections to cases aligned with the administration’s political agenda.

The Education Department’s civil rights branch is losing nearly half its staff in the Trump administration’s layoffs, effectively gutting an office that already faced a backlog of thousands of complaints from students and families across the nation.