WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump this week reiterated his aim to shut down the U.S. Education Department “immediately.” Elon Musk’s budget-slashers have already started doing their part.

Six people are carrying out the work of Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency at the agency, reviewing operations, auditing student loan data and searching for fraud or waste, the government said in a court document filed Thursday. DOGE as of Monday said it has directed nearly $900 million in cuts.

The department has also limited new contracts costing more than $25,000 to “mission-critical contract actions,” according to an email viewed by Bloomberg that was sent to employees from a generic internal address. Actions that “have not been deemed mission-critical” include “Development, Modernization, and Enhancement (DME) work to an existing, functional system” as well as “any requirements that exceed minimum needs,” the message said.

From the seventh floor of the Education Department’s Washington headquarters, DOGE’s initial cuts are an opening salvo in President Donald Trump’s broader push to eliminate the agency, which provides funding for low-income schools and special education, enforces federal civil rights law in schools and universities and oversees the federal student loan program. Trump on Wednesday called the agency “a big con job” and has said he wants Linda McMahon, his nominee for Education Secretary, to “put herself out of a job.”

“I am really all for the president's mission, which is to return education to the states,” McMahon said in her confirmation hearing Thursday. “I believe, as he does, that the best education is closest to the child and not certainly in Washington, DC.”

The White House, the Education Department and DOGE members working there didn’t respond to requests for comment on their current actions and future plans for the agency.

DOGE staff arrived late last week and quickly had access to the Education Department systems and data, including internal emails, schedules and recordings and transcripts of meetings, according to people familiar with their access and screenshots shared with Bloomberg.

The people familiar with the Education Department’s inner workings spoke to Bloomberg on condition of anonymity because they have concerns about being targeted, or because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly about the matter.

In a court filing, the government defended the breadth of DOGE’s access. “They need access to large datasets (including material that may be covered by the Privacy Act) to carry out their (again, Presidentially-directed) functions,” the filing said.

The DOGE team at the Education Department includes Adam Ramada, 35, a Miami-based investor and a co-managing partner of Spring Tide Capital as recently as August. Ramada has also been detailed to the Labor Department to help improve IT and data systems as part of his DOGE remit.

Other DOGE staffers assigned to the Education Department include Alexandra Beynon, 36, who recently worked at the medicinal ketamine startup Mindbloom; Akash Bobba, 21, recently a student at University of California, Berkeley, who touted internships at Meta Platforms Inc. and Palantir Technologies Inc.; and Ethan Shaotran, 22, who went to Harvard and developed an AI scheduling assistant called Spark, which won a $100,000 grant from OpenAI in 2023.

Ramada said Thursday in a legal filing that he has been detailed to the department since Jan. 28, tasked with “auditing contract, grant, and related programs for waste, fraud, and abuse,” including its “federal student loan portfolio to ensure it is free from, among other things, fraud, duplication, and ineligible loan recipients.”

Sen. Patty Murray, a Democrat from Washington State, said in a statement this week that the Trump administration and Musk are “gutting” the department’s Institute of Education Sciences. On its official social media account on X, the Education Department trumpeted the cuts, saying that “students are no better off” for the money spent on research.

“The Department of Education is committed to investing taxpayer dollars in student outcomes,” it wrote. “We want to ensure that every dollar being spent is directed toward improving education for kids – not conferences and reports on reports.”

The group’s actions at the Education Department are now subject to legal challenge. In a suit filed Feb. 7, the University of California Student Association asked a federal judge in D.C. to block what it called the “unlawful ongoing, systematic and continuous disclosure of sensitive personal and financial information.” The lawsuit cited reporting that DOGE was “feeding sensitive data from ED’s systems into artificial intelligence systems maintained by third parties and subject to significant security risks.”

On Tuesday, the agency agreed to temporarily restrict DOGE staffers’ access to certain internal systems until a judge could rule on whether to block it. That agreement, which the judge approved, is in effect until Feb. 17.

In a separate suit filed Feb. 10, a group of unions and individuals asked a Maryland federal judge to shield private records from DOGE staff, citing concerns about “the implications of this government-facilitated breach of their personal information,” including “Social Security numbers, bank account numbers, dates and places of birth, and other extraordinarily sensitive records.”

Some of the DOGE-directed cuts affirm Trump’s campaign against diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. In addition to cutting “programs, contracts, policies, outward-facing media, regulations and internal practices that fail to affirm the reality of biological sex,” department workers were also told in a Feb. 7 email viewed by Bloomberg that employee groups that “promote gender ideology and do not affirm the reality of biological sex” could no longer meet on government property or during work hours.

Within the department, career staff have been trying to stay focused on their work and avoid drawing attention, people familiar with the situation said. Employees have received minimal communication from DOGE leadership or the acting secretary of the department beyond the cost-cutting emails and the government-wide offer of a deferred resignation.

Dozens of the department’s employees have already been placed on leave as part of the new administration’s anti-DEI efforts, according to their union, the American Federation of Government Employees. One is the career staffer who oversees the $1.4 billion Perkins grants for career and technical education, according to American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten, whose union had reached out to them to try to coordinate activities for Career and Technical Education month.

“It’s going to gum up the works,” Weingarten said. DOGE’s work at the Education Department isn’t “being done with any sense of what’s effective and what isn’t,” she said. “It’s simply a crash-and-burn situation here.”

(Sarah McBride, Joshua Green, Akayla Gardner and Zoe Tillman contributed to this report.)

©2025 Bloomberg L.P. Visit bloomberg.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.