Massachusetts Judge Vacates OMB’s Executive Order Footnotes on Education Research Funds as Special Education Oversight Moves to HHS

An analytical overview of the September 17, 2026 Memorandum and Order in National Center for Learning Disabilities v. Office of Management and Budget, and of the June 2026 agreements that moved federal special education and civil rights operations to HHS and DOJ.

Introduction

On September 17, 2026, Judge Allison D. Burroughs of the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts issued a 46-page Memorandum and Order in National Center for Learning Disabilities, et al. v. Office of Management and Budget, et al., Civil Action No. 1:26-cv-13019-ADB (ECF No. 69), signed “/s/ Allison D. Burroughs.” The ruling arrived six days after Kelly Rogers, the acting assistant secretary who headed the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services (OSERS), resigned effective September 11 — and a week after most of her staff began physically reporting to a Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) building under a June 2026 interagency agreement. Burroughs granted the plaintiffs summary judgment on the heart of their challenge: the Office of Management and Budget’s binding apportionment footnotes, which conditioned federal education research funds on compliance with two executive orders, were held to exceed OMB’s statutory authority and to be arbitrary and capricious. The court’s operative order states that it “vacates and sets aside the Executive Order Footnotes as contrary to law and arbitrary and capricious in violation of 5 U.S.C. § 706(2).” The remainder of the case — including the claim that the government is unlawfully failing to obligate roughly $180 million in education research funds before they expire on September 30, 2026 — was deferred, with a status report due by the earliest of September 28, 2026 or the date all obligations are completed.

That sequence — a resignation, a staff relocation, and a judicial opinion striking down funding conditions in the same week — captures how the federal role in special education is being rebuilt. The story of 2025 and 2026 is one of attrition and paperwork: a headcount that fell from 4,133 employees to roughly 2,183 by March 2025; a shutdown-season reduction in force that cut the office administering the nation’s special education programs to a handful; a court order blocking those layoffs; a continuing resolution rescinding them; four interagency agreements signed June 15, 2026 that left every statute in place while relocating the day-to-day administration of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) to a health agency; and footnotes that quietly tied appropriated research dollars to executive policy compliance.

Both threads run directly through Massachusetts. The Massachusetts Teachers Association — approximately 117,000 members across some 400 local associations, headquartered in Quincy — is a named plaintiff in the case against OMB, and its presence is what gives the federal court in Boston venue over the dispute. The Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP), whose staff were laid off en masse in October 2025 and then restored by court order and statute, is the office whose January 2025 monitoring findings required the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) to revise the Notice of Procedural Safeguards that every family in the Commonwealth receives.

The stakes are easiest to state as a pair of figures. OSERS and OSEP administer roughly $15 billion in annual federal special education funding — a figure rendered as “nearly $15 billion” by the National Down Syndrome Society’s June 2026 fact sheet and as “about $15 billion” by NPR on September 9, 2026 — for the 8.4 million children IDEA counted as served in 2023. Alongside them, the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) runs the complaint pipeline for disability discrimination in schools, which in 2025 resolved 73 disability-discrimination agreements through early December, against 390 in 2024 and more than 1,000 in 2017, while carrying roughly 25,000 pending complaints and 7,000 open investigations.

This article tells the story in order: the architecture of federal oversight, then the 2025 shocks and the structural move of June 2026, then the lawsuit and the September 17 holding claim by claim, and finally the Massachusetts implications, the administration’s stated rationale, and a forward calendar running from the September 28 status report to the fall’s appropriations fight. A note on method: every figure and quotation below traces to a court document, an agency release, a congressional letter, or reporting from NPR, K-12 Dive, Disability Scoop, or USA Today; primary documents are identified by name, date, and signer, and where a fact could not be verified the article says so rather than guessing.

The Federal Architecture of Special-Education Oversight

To understand what moved in June 2026, and what the September 17 ruling actually protected, it helps to be precise about what the federal machinery does. Three offices matter. OSERS is the Education Department’s mainline office for disability programs, housing both OSEP and the Rehabilitation Services Administration (RSA). OSEP administers IDEA: the Part B formula grants that flow to every state for school-age children, the Part C grants for infants and toddlers, the Part D grants for national support programs, and a large portfolio of discretionary awards. OCR enforces Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act and Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) in schools — the statutes protecting students whose disabilities do not involve special education at all. Each office pairs money with oversight, and the oversight is where most of the 2026 changes land.

OSEP, OSERS, and the $15 Billion Grant Pipeline

The scale of OSEP’s portfolio is the first number to fix. The National Down Syndrome Society’s fact sheet, published in June 2026 as the transfer was announced, described OSERS as overseeing “nearly $15 billion in state special education funding”; NPR’s September 9, 2026 report used “about $15 billion,” and the Council for Exceptional Children’s September 11, 2026 statement said “more than $15 billion.” The Council’s October 17, 2025 post, written days after the layoffs described below, put the beneficiary count at “more than 8 million children eligible for special education services,” pegged to the 8.4 million children served under IDEA in 2023. Those are the numbers the staffing fights are about — and an office that employed roughly 90 staffers at the start of 2025.

Administration of that portfolio is more than writing checks. OSEP issues the annual state performance determinations under each state’s State Performance Plan and Annual Performance Report (SPP/APR); it collects the Section 618 data that aggregate states’ child counts, placements, and discipline; it runs fiscal compliance reviews and drawdown monitoring; and it conducts Differentiated Monitoring and Support (DMS) reviews of how states handle specific IDEA requirements. In Massachusetts, OSEP’s DMS report of January 16, 2025 identified findings — number 1.3 on state complaints and number 2.2 on independent educational evaluations — that required DESE to revise its documents; DESE’s revised Notice of Procedural Safeguards, submitted April 16, 2025, satisfied both findings in OSEP’s July 1, 2025 approval letter for the Commonwealth’s FFY2025 IDEA Part B application.

The money side worked through 2025 as well. Massachusetts’s FFY2025 IDEA Part B award was paid in two installments — July 1 and October 1, 2025 — and the October 1 installment landed the day the federal government shut down, exactly as the Department’s September 28, 2025 contingency plan said IDEA grants would. As the National Association of State Directors of Special Education (NASDSE) put it through executive director Audrey Levorse, in comments Disability Scoop reported: “For now, the federal government disbursed IDEA funding Oct. 1… The question really becomes what does funding look like down the road?” The disbursement machinery functioned; the question was whether the people who run it would still be there.

OCR and the Disability Complaint Pipeline

OCR’s work is different in kind: a family that believes a district failed a child under Section 504 or the ADA files a complaint, and OCR investigates and, where it finds violations, negotiates resolution agreements. The 2025 numbers tell their own story. NPR reported on December 10, 2025 that, since the administration’s return, OCR had resolved 73 ADA and Section 504 disability-discrimination agreements, against 390 in 2024 and more than 1,000 in 2017, while the office carried approximately 25,000 pending complaints and about 7,000 open investigations. The office’s January 2025 headcount was about 620; by the end of 2025, only 62 employees — roughly ten percent — had never received a termination notice at some point during the year.

What the Machinery Delivered When It Functioned

The Education Department’s OSEP Update newsletter of June 2026 highlighted a graduation statistic from the Department’s EDFacts Part B Exiting collection: students with disabilities ages 14 through 21 earned regular diplomas at a rate of 77.9 percent in 2023–24, an increase of 14.3 percentage points since 2010–11. The 50th anniversary of IDEA fell in November 2025. Chad Rummel, the Council for Exceptional Children’s chief executive officer, put it to Disability Scoop that October: “Until we see special education staff back in place at OSEP, teachers and parents of children with disabilities should be concerned,” and, in the formulation that became the episode’s signature line, “the guardrails are gone” — adding that the situation amounted to “we’re literally in the pre-1975 era.”

The 2025 Shocks: Buyouts, Reductions, and an October Mass Layoff

A Department Cut in Half Before the First Frost

The workforce story begins with arithmetic. On January 20, 2025 — inauguration day — the Department of Education employed 4,133 people, per the K-12 Dive layoffs timeline, updated January 5, 2026. February and March brought voluntary buyouts and deferred resignations, and on March 11, 2025 the Department announced a reduction in force that, with the buyouts, would cut the headcount to approximately 2,183 — more than 1,900 employees affected in the first wave, across all divisions. The next day, March 12, 2025, seven of OCR’s twelve regional offices closed, covering roughly 60,000 schools and more than 30 million students. The stated endgame followed on March 20, 2025, when President Trump signed an executive order directing Secretary McMahon to “take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education.”

Suits, Orders, and an Appeals-Court Green Light

The litigation began almost immediately. A suit over the March layoffs at the Institute of Education Sciences was filed April 4, 2025 by the Association for Education Finance and Policy and the Institute for Higher Education Policy; the American Educational Research Association and the Society for Research on Educational Effectiveness followed on April 14, 2025. On June 18, 2025, a federal judge ordered the Department to reinstate laid-off OCR staff, finding the remaining workforce “incapable of addressing the vast majority of OCR complaints.” On July 14, 2025, the Supreme Court, in a per curiam opinion in New York v. McMahon, allowed the March 2025 reductions to proceed while the lower-court litigation continued. On August 19, 2025, following another court order, the Department said it would return more than 260 OCR staff in waves between September 8 and November 3, 2025. On September 29, 2025, the First Circuit overturned the “status quo” order, allowing the Department to proceed with plans to cut half of OCR’s staff as the litigation continued — the same restrain-comply-resume pattern that reappears in October.

October 10: The Reduction Reaches OSEP

The government shut down on October 1, 2025, in the fiscal 2026 appropriations impasse. The Department furloughed roughly 95 percent of staff outside the Federal Student Aid office; OCR investigations paused and new grant-making paused, while the contingency plan stated that IDEA grants would still be distributed — and they were, on October 1. On Friday, October 10, 2025, reduction-in-force notices went out across the federal government; court filings showed 466 Department of Education employees affected. Within OSERS the cuts were near-total: the Council for Exceptional Children reported 121 special-education experts fired, leaving “fewer than a handful” in an office that had about 90 staffers at the start of the year, and NASDSE reported that only the two most senior OSEP staff and one RSA staffer remained. OCR lost 137 staffers in the same action, and the offices handling student achievement and school safety, budgeting, and postsecondary education were also hit, as K-12 Dive reported on October 12, 2025, USA Today on October 11, 2025, and Disability Scoop on October 14, 2025.

Secretary McMahon stated on October 15, 2025, in a social media statement Disability Scoop quoted on October 16, that the shutdown “confirms” that the “federal Department of Education is unnecessary, and we should return education to the states,” and that “No education funding is impacted by the RIF, including funding for special education.” NASDSE’s statement of October 12, 2025, quoted by K-12 Dive, said: “These RIFs, if true, will make it impossible for the Department to fulfill those responsibilities… There is significant risk that not only will Federal funding lapse, but children with disabilities will be deprived” of a free, appropriate public education. The distinction the record supports is that the Secretary’s claim concerned funding disbursement, which was true at that moment — IDEA funds had gone out October 1 — while the advocates’ claims concerned administration and oversight capacity, which the layoffs had plainly gutted. Larry Wexler, formerly OSEP’s director of research to practice, described the office’s internal state to K-12 Dive on October 12, 2025: “If the mood could be described as despondent, it would be such an improvement over what it is… These people are shattered.”

The RIFs Unravel: Courts, Congress, and a January Retreat

Illston Blocks the Layoffs

The check came from California. On October 15, 2025, Judge Susan Illston of the Northern District of California, ruling in a suit by federal employee unions against the Office of Management and Budget, temporarily blocked shutdown-period reductions in force government-wide, calling the roughly 4,000-employee shutdown RIF “illegal, exceeds the administration’s authority and is arbitrary and capricious.” On October 28, 2025, she extended the pause with a preliminary injunction reaching non-union-represented staff as well, ordering that fired employees “cannot be separated from their jobs while the injunction is in place.” The case — American Federation of Government Employees v. United States — froze the October cuts, OSEP’s included.

Congress Rescinds the RIFs — and the Appeal Ends Quietly

Congress then legislated the RIFs out of existence. On November 12, 2025, President Trump signed the continuing resolution that ended the 43-day shutdown, funding the Department through January 30, 2026, requiring back pay for furloughed employees, rescinding the October 10 reductions in force, and prohibiting new RIFs through January 30, 2026 — NPR’s November 13, 2025 headline carried the residual anxiety: “Federal special education staff may get their jobs back. But for how long?” In December, NPR reported, the Department recalled the fired OCR attorneys — of 299 placed on paid administrative leave since March, 52 had quit and 247 remained — ordering them back to regional offices on December 15 while continuing to litigate the underlying reductions. Julie Hartman, the Department’s press secretary for legal affairs, told NPR: “The Department will continue to appeal the persistent and unceasing litigation disputes concerning the Reductions in Force… but in the meantime, it will utilize all employees currently being compensated by American taxpayers.” Rachel Gittleman, president of AFGE Local 252, answered: “By blocking OCR staff from doing their jobs, Department leadership allowed a massive backlog of civil rights complaints to grow, and now expects these same employees to clean up a crisis entirely of the Department’s own making.” Maggie Heilman, a parent of a daughter with Down syndrome whose OCR complaint was disrupted by the cuts, described: “it’s telling families with children like [my daughter] that their hurt doesn’t matter.”

On January 2, 2026, the government withdrew its emergency appeal of the Illston order to the Ninth Circuit and abandoned the shutdown RIFs without explanation, as K-12 Dive’s timeline reported, citing the court filing. More than 400 Department of Education employees affected by the October action were out of jeopardy, many having already been recalled. OSEP was thus still standing — and, by June 2026, demonstrably functioning: the OSEP Update bulletin of June 2026 documented the office releasing guidance and competitions, issuing state performance determinations, and announcing a $144 million IDEA Part C supplement for early intervention. What happened next was not another layoff; it was the relocation of the work.

What the Whiplash Cost

Two audited and contested figures quantify the cost of the attempted cuts, and they should never be merged. The Government Accountability Office’s February 2026 report, GAO-26-108320, found that the Department paid OCR investigators up to $38 million not to work — the audited figure. The union’s own estimate, which NPR specifically could not verify, put the figure at “more than $40 million in taxpayer funds,” in Gittleman’s words. On the output side, the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee’s minority released a report in April 2026 finding that OCR reached zero resolution agreements in 2025 across five categories of cases — sexual harassment or violence, seclusion and restraint, racial harassment, and discriminatory school discipline — despite more than 2,700 pending cases in those categories. Those figures, cited on July 21, 2026 by the 86 House Democrats who demanded the administration abandon the transfers, are the cost side of the ledger.

June 2026: Four Interagency Agreements and a New Federal Map

The Announcement

The structural move arrived as paperwork. On June 16, 2026, the Department of Education announced four new interagency agreements, signed and dated June 15, 2026: an ED–HHS Special Education and Rehabilitative Services Partnership covering OSERS (OSEP and RSA functions); an ED–DOJ Civil Rights Partnership; an ED–DOJ Student Privacy Protection Partnership; and an ED–DOJ Training and Advisory Services Partnership. The four brought the Department’s total to 14 interagency agreements with six other agencies, built on 10 earlier ones under the Department’s “Returning Education to the States” initiative, as K-12 Dive counted on June 17, 2026. The ED–HHS agreement — “Interagency Agreement Between the U.S. Department of Education and U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Relating to Special Education and Rehabilitative Services,” executed under 20 U.S.C. § 1231(a)(1) and related authority — is signed for HHS by Chris Klomp, Chief Counselor, and for the Department by Madison Biedermann, Chief of Staff; it took effect immediately, remains terminable on 90 days’ written agreement, obligates no funds itself, and details its personnel primarily from Education to HHS.

The Department’s press release announcing the four agreements — “U.S. Department of Education Announces Additional Partnerships to Strengthen Coordination for Individuals with Disabilities Programs, Bolster Civil Rights Enforcement,” June 16, 2026 — framed the moves as efficiency. Secretary McMahon said: “The Trump Administration has been clear: as we scale back federal micromanagement when it hinders success, we are equally committed to bolstering the efficacy of federal oversight where it is essential,” and, of the HHS partnership: “Through our partnership with HHS, we will align federal services with the goal of strengthening academic outcomes and supporting individuals with disabilities so that they can achieve greater independence, key life skills, and meaningful employment.” Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said the agencies would “cut bureaucratic barriers, better align federal resources, and deliver more effective support for individuals with disabilities and their families,” adding: “Together, we will improve education and employment outcomes, uphold the rights of individuals with disabilities, and help every child reach their full potential.” Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said: “Every student has an unequivocal right to learn and participate in school activities free from discrimination… one that makes clear that discrimination on the basis of race, sex, or ability will not be tolerated in our schools.” McMahon’s letter to parents of individuals with disabilities, published the same day, framed the legal theory: “IDEA, as an education law, ensures that a child’s disability isn’t viewed as a medical condition that needs to be treated.” And the Education Department’s stakeholder letter — signed by OCR’s Kimberly Richey and OSERS’ Kelly Rogers — assured the disability community, as NPR quoted it on June 16, 2026, that the teams “will continue to partner together, just as they always have, to vigorously enforce the law to ensure states and schools are in compliance.”

What Moved to HHS

Section 3.A of the ED–HHS agreement assigns HHS an enormous list: support administration of IDEA Part B, C, and D formula and discretionary grants; OSERS enforcement, compliance, and monitoring activities; the annual state performance determinations; collection, reporting, and analysis of IDEA Section 618 data; fiscal compliance and audits; and drawdown monitoring of federal funds. It extends beyond IDEA: Rehabilitation Act programs (with a carve-out for the American Indian Vocational Rehabilitation Services program), the Randolph-Sheppard vending program, the Disability Innovation Fund, Special Olympics Sport and Empowerment Act programs, the Education of the Deaf Act including the National Technical Institute for the Deaf, the Helen Keller Act, the American Printing House for the Blind, and Gallaudet University — along with stakeholder outreach conducted jointly with HHS’s Administration for Children and Families and Administration for Community Living.

What Stayed at Education

Section 3.B is where the legal architecture lives. ED-OSERS retains management and leadership under the Department of Education Organization Act; final and conclusive authority over everything “assigned by statute to the Secretary of Education,” including “final determinations with respect to any enforcement decisions, programs, policies, practices, personnel decisions”; Federal Register notices and competition criteria; grant-document clearance; audit resolution; human resources for OSERS employees; budget formulation; and performance reporting to Congress. The Maryland Association of Boards of Education supplied the most precise neutral reading in a July 6, 2026 analysis: statutory duties cannot legally be shed without Congress, but day-to-day implementation can be relocated — and MABE predicted “an increase in enforcement action against school districts and states by ED and DOJ.”

The DOJ Partnerships

The three ED–DOJ agreements restructure civil rights enforcement without moving its front door. Disability discrimination complaints — like all complaints — are still filed with OCR, and OCR retains authority to investigate discrimination on the basis of race, color, national origin, sex, disability, or age; the Education Department, per the agreement documents, “will retain all statutory authorities and functions.” The Student Privacy Protection Partnership sends Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) complaints to the Justice Department for review and investigation, with final authority remaining at Education. The Training and Advisory Services Partnership covers desegregation technical assistance under 42 U.S.C. § 2000c-2. Kenneth Marcus, who led OCR during the first Trump administration, told NPR on June 16, 2026: “Much will depend on implementation … but if done right, this could mark a critical step forward for students whose rights have gone unprotected on campuses across the country.” Catherine Lhamon, OCR’s head under Presidents Obama and Biden, called the same arrangement “a terrible idea,” telling NPR that the Justice Department has “no interest and no expertise in doing the kind of work that OCR does.”

Mechanics: G5, GrantSolutions, and a Physical Move

Fiscal 2026 grants continue to be awarded through the Education Department’s G5 system; subsequent years will run through HHS’s GrantSolutions and Payment Management systems. The personnel clause stopped being theoretical in September: most OSERS staff were scheduled to begin physically moving to an HHS building around September 10, 2026. States, districts, and families are therefore looking at a grant administration apparatus that changes systems, buildings, and interlocutors mid-stream.

The Opposition Gathers

On June 18, 2026, 731 civil rights and education organizations sent a letter to Congress asking lawmakers to revert the OSERS and OCR transfers, writing that the agreements “undermine the core foundation of federal disability, education, and civil rights policy and implementation” — a letter hosted by the National Down Syndrome Congress and quoted by K-12 Dive on July 14, 2026. On June 30, 2026, four Senate Democrats — Tammy Baldwin, Patty Murray, Bernie Sanders, and Elissa Slotkin — sent their own letter to Secretary McMahon opposing the four new agreements. On July 13, 2026, 13 former federal special-education officials, serving every administration since Nixon’s including the first Trump administration, wrote to Congress that shifting IDEA functions to HHS “dismantles, rather than relocates, the federal infrastructure built over five decades,” and that “moving IDEA’s implementation into a health agency risks substituting medical management for educational access.”

The House followed. On July 15, 2026, the House Education and Workforce Committee marked up a package of ten bills — including Representative Mark Harris’s H.R. 9610, the “Less Bureaucracy, Better K-12 Education Act,” and H.R. 9611, the “Less Bureaucracy, Better Higher Education Act” — that would permanently move certain K-12 and higher-education functions out of the Department, a package that notably does not include the special-education or civil-rights transfers, which proceeded administratively instead; 93 education, disability, and civil-rights groups condemned the package. On July 21, 2026, 86 House Democrats, led by Representative Bobby Scott, sent a letter demanding the administration abandon the transfers, citing the GAO’s February 2026 finding that the Department paid OCR investigators up to $38 million not to work and the Senate HELP Committee’s April 2026 report documenting zero resolution agreements in five case categories despite more than 2,700 pending cases. Its Massachusetts signers were Representatives Jake Auchincloss (MA-04) and Lori Trahan (MA-03). On September 4, 2026, a bipartisan trio — Representatives John Mannion (D-NY), Bobby Scott (D-VA), and Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA) — introduced legislation to prevent the Department’s offices, including OCR and OSERS, from being dismantled or outsourced, per the Council for Exceptional Children’s Policy Insider.

The practitioner objections were consistent in theme. Denise Marshall, chief executive officer of the Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates, told NPR on June 16, 2026: “There is no logical sense why anyone would move [students with disabilities] under HHS,” elaborating on July 9: “This proposal appears to add another layer of bureaucracy while creating additional confusion and uncertainty for families, educators, and state agencies.” Rummel’s formulation to NPR that day was the compact version of the former officials’ argument: IDEA “is an education law… That means we need to have special education interacting with all of education at the department, not over here on its own in a medical environment.” Denise Forte, president and chief executive officer of EdTrust, framed it as intent: “This is another vindictive attempt to undermine public education… at this moment, when we know that children with disabilities need more support, not less — HHS is not the place for that.” Former OSERS employees, anonymous to NPR on June 16, 2026, were sharpest: “This isn’t a late-model Toyota that you can sell for parts and get the best bang for your buck”; “my stomach drops for children and parents”; “this move would separate out oversight of the implementation of IDEA and it would decimate civil rights protections that have been in place for more than 50 years”; “I’m really concerned that we are going to go 50 years backwards.” The Education Department’s spokesperson Ellen Keast, quoted by K-12 Dive on July 14, 2026, supplied the official answer: “While Obama and Biden-era appointees continue to defend a failing status quo marked by bureaucracy and inefficiency, the Trump Administration is reforming the federal education and workforce systems by streamlining program management and reducing unnecessary bureaucracy…”

The Staffing Collapse That Followed

A Request to Cut More Than 80 Percent

Even with the October RIFs rescinded by injunction and rescinded again by statute, the budget record shows the same reductions returning as a request. The Department’s fiscal year 2027 congressional justification, in its salaries and expenses overview, proposes cutting more than 80 percent of remaining OSERS staff — a figure the Council for Exceptional Children’s Rummel characterized to NPR on September 9, 2026, and a document that exists as a primary source on the Department’s own site. The pattern is consistent with the recent past: the fiscal 2026 request had proposed zero funding for the Comprehensive Centers program and zero for Education Innovation and Research, and Congress rejected nearly all of those cuts. A request is not a reduction — Congress controls the purse — but a budget that assumes an office one-fifth its current size says something about what the administration believes the office is for.

The precise state of OSERS staffing in September 2026 is, candidly, unknown: no published headcount exists for the office after the RIF rescission, the recall cycle, and the HHS detailing, and the outlets covering the story give ranges rather than totals. What is documented is the arc: roughly 90 staff at the start of 2025; a near-total layoff in October 2025; restoration by injunction in October and by statute in November 2025; a fully functioning operation through June 2026, including SPP/APR determinations, guidance, competitions, and the $144 million Part C supplement; and a fiscal 2027 request to cut what remains by more than 80 percent.

Resignation on the Eve of the Move

Kelly Rogers’s tenure compressed the whole saga into four months. She was appointed Deputy Assistant Secretary and Acting Assistant Secretary for OSERS on May 21, 2026, per the OSEP Update newsletter of June 11, 2026. By June 16 she was the agreement’s point of contact and co-signing the stakeholder letter reassuring families. At the 34th annual OSEP conference in Arlington, Virginia on August 4–5, 2026 — an event drawing 1,250 attendees — she told the field, per NPR’s reporting of her remarks: “At its core, this partnership strengthens its federal capacity, so we can better support your capacity,” and, of the partnership’s promise: “Through this partnership, OSERS is leveraging HHS’ expertise, research and broad portfolio of programs to improve services across the lifetime.” Secretary McMahon, keynoting the same conference, called the OSERS–HHS agreement her most significant achievement and said: “As we strengthen our processes and coordination, none of the rights guaranteed to individuals with disabilities under federal law will change… My hope is that decades from now, Americans will look back on the work that we’ve done today and see it as a start of a brighter future for millions of individuals with disabilities.”

On September 9, 2026, Rogers announced her resignation, effective September 11 — announced less than a day before most OSERS staff were scheduled to begin physically moving to an HHS building, a move that began on Thursday, September 10. Her letter to staff, quoted by NPR that day, read: “I have made the decision to resign from my position as Deputy Assistant Secretary/Acting Assistant Secretary for OSERS to return home to Florida, effective September 11, 2026. While I am stepping away, I remain confident in the team’s ability to continue moving forward with strengthened outcomes for individuals with disabilities through the HHS partnership.” On September 11, the Department told staff that Kirsten Baesler, the assistant secretary for elementary and secondary education, would take over OSERS starting September 14; whether that arrangement is permanent is not publicly determined. Rummel’s assessment to NPR: “There’s not clarity as to who’s overseeing this outsourcing of special education through the IAA.”

Then the court spoke. On September 17, 2026 — six days after Rogers’s resignation took effect, and a week after the staff began reporting to HHS — Judge Burroughs issued the Memorandum and Order described in the second half of this article, handing the plaintiffs their largest win to date. The administrative dismantling proceeded by personnel action while the court, on the separate funding track, struck down the financing side of the same project; neither event controlled the other, and parents are left to track both.

NCLD v. OMB: The Case Against the Footnotes

While the interagency agreements were being signed, a separate case was assembling in Boston. The complaint in National Center for Learning Disabilities, et al. v. Office of Management and Budget, et al., Civil Action No. 1:26-cv-13019-ADB, was filed in the District of Massachusetts on June 30, 2026 — 57 pages, ECF No. 1 — the same day four Senate Democrats sent their letter opposing the agreements. The theory is not about DEI as policy; it is about the mechanism by which a president’s policy preferences became binding conditions on money Congress had already appropriated.

Parties, Venue, and Counsel

The plaintiffs are four organizations. The National Center for Learning Disabilities, a District of Columbia nonprofit focused on learning disabilities, leads the case. Knowledge Alliance is a nonpartisan association of education organizations whose chief executive officer, Rachel Dinkes, also sits on its board and submitted a declaration. BNP Education Partners LLC is a women-owned small business operating from Denver and Portland that holds a Regional Educational Laboratory contract. The Massachusetts Teachers Association is a labor organization headquartered in Quincy with approximately 117,000 members and some 400 local associations, affiliated with the National Education Association — and its principal place of business is what places the dispute in Boston. Assigned to Judge Allison D. Burroughs on July 6, 2026 after the parties declined consent to the magistrate judge, she heard arguments in Courtroom 17 in Boston on September 8 and ruled there on September 17.

The counsel roster shows the coalition’s shape: Protect Democracy (Benjamin L. Berwick, local counsel from Watertown, Massachusetts, Bar No. 679207, with Cerin Lindgrensavage and Jacek Pruski) and Jacobson Lawyers Group PLLC (Daniel F. Jacobson, Lynn D. Eisenberg, and Stephen K. Wirth), with National Education Association counsel Alice O’Brien and Marissa Marandola and MTA counsel Ryan Leach representing the MTA. Michael Velchik entered his notice of appearance on July 9, 2026 for all defendants: the Office of Management and Budget; its director, Russell Vought; the Department of Education; Secretary McMahon; Matthew Soldner, the acting director of the Institute of Education Sciences; and the United States.

Max Page, at the July 1, 2026 launch statement: “The OMB has repeatedly shown a complete disregard and even contempt for public education and the future of our children. This research is crucial for educators to fulfill our calling of providing the best education we can to our students. On behalf of the 117,000 educators of the MTA, I demand the OMB respect the law and allow this critical research to continue.” Daniel Jacobson stated the theory in one sentence: “This case is about a simple but fundamental principle: Congress gets to decide how federal funds are spent, and the Executive Branch must carry out Congress’s will.” And Cerin Lindgrensavage, Protect Democracy’s counsel, framed the history: “Time after time OMB has tried to evade accountability for withholding education research funds appropriated by Congress, this case seeks a way to end those unlawful abuses of the apportionment process, and ensure OMB does not hold up these and future education research funds.”

Four Appropriations and One Theory

The case concerns four appropriations the complaint calls the Covered Appropriations. The first is the Institute of Education Sciences’ fiscal 2025/2026 appropriation of $793 million under Pub. L. 119-4, the 2025 continuing resolution, sections 1101–1103 — which, after a $25 million fiscal 2026 rescission, leaves $768 million net, available through September 30, 2026. The second is the fiscal 2026 Comprehensive Centers appropriation of $50 million (140 Stat. 295), expiring September 30, 2026. The third is the fiscal 2026 Education Innovation and Research appropriation of $235 million (140 Stat. 296), expiring December 31, 2026. The fourth is the fiscal 2026/2027 IES appropriation of $789,606,000 under the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2026 (Pub. L. 119-75, 140 Stat. 303), available through September 30, 2027.

The special-education stake runs through IES’s National Center for Special Education Research, which — per the complaint and the court’s recitation — “sponsor[s] research to expand knowledge and understanding of the needs of infants, toddlers, and children with disabilities,” and which Congress directed to study 17 identified areas, including “the extent to which overidentification and underidentification of children with disabilities occurs.” IDEA Section 1464 directs the Secretary of Education to delegate special-education research duties to IES — so the money the footnotes tied up includes the research program Congress wrote into IDEA’s own statute.

The complaint organized nine counts (the ninth was withdrawn before decision): that the apportionments, and the failure to apportion, were contrary to law under Section 706(2)(A)–(C); that the failure to apportion funds was unlawfully withheld under Section 706(1); that the Executive Order footnotes were contrary to law; that they were arbitrary and capricious; that the May 2026 IES apportionment was unlawfully undisclosed; that the “Unallocated” line policy was unlawful; that the defendants failed to follow congressional explanatory statements; and that the failure to obligate funds before their expiration was unlawfully withheld or delayed under Section 706(1).

What the Footnotes Actually Did

The mechanism is worth unpacking, because it is the opposite of a headline. Under 31 U.S.C. § 1513, the Office of Management and Budget apportions appropriated funds to agencies in increments — the gatekeeping step between an appropriation and an agency’s ability to obligate it. The IES apportionments carried binding footnotes. One required that funds be used consistent with “the latest agreed-upon spend plan for Fiscal Year 2025.” Others required that uses be consistent “with… Executive Order 14151” — Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing, 90 Fed. Reg. 8339 (Jan. 20, 2025) — and with Executive Order 14332, Improving Oversight of Federal Grantmaking, 90 Fed. Reg. 38929 (Aug. 7, 2025). The fiscal 2027 IES funds were apportioned partly to an “Undistributed” line carrying the same footnotes. In plain terms: money Congress had already appropriated for education research could not move except in accordance with two executive orders the plaintiffs argued had nothing to do with the appropriation.

The record is a ledger of withheld capacity. As of the June 30, 2026 filing, the complaint alleged (paragraph 199) that $476 million of the $768 million remained unobligated, that only $442,000 of the $50 million Comprehensive Centers appropriation had been obligated, and that only $59,235 of the $235 million Education Innovation and Research appropriation had been obligated. In May 2026, OMB had apportioned an additional roughly $250 million of the fiscal 2025/2026 IES funds — visible on the June 2026 SF-133 report — but did not publicly disclose the apportionment and spend plan within the two business days required by the note to Section 1513; the spend plan was publicly posted on August 1, 2026. On July 21, 2026, OMB removed the Executive Order footnotes from the Comprehensive Centers apportionments — a fact the September 17 order records from the agreed statement of facts (paragraph 61). And on August 20, 2026, the Department notified Congress of its intent to reprogram $68,653,580.92 of appropriated IES funding toward other programs and activities. The defendants’ own brief noted that the fiscal 2026 Comprehensive Centers competition notice had been published May 12, 2026 (92 Fed. Reg. 27038), but stated that the Department “cannot… obligate” under the apportionment then in force. The sequence had begun before the footnotes: on June 4, 2026, the Department had announced that it was moving the Comprehensive Centers program to IES, per the complaint’s paragraph 52.

The Road to the September 17 Ruling

On August 11, 2026, the plaintiffs moved for summary judgment (ECF No. 46), supported by declarations — including from Jacobson, from declarants Carlile and Fadel, and from Knowledge Alliance’s Dinkes — a statement of undisputed facts, and a proposed order (ECF No. 46-1) seeking declaratory relief; an order that OMB apportion the full amounts immediately and without Unallocated lines; an order that the Department obligate the expiring funds by September 30, 2026; a permanent injunction against conditioning funds on Executive Order 14151 or 14332 compliance, against Unallocated or Undistributed withholding, and against late disclosure of apportionments; re-apportionment within three business days of any new appropriation; a compliance plan within seven days; weekly status reports until October 2, 2026; and a final certification by October 2, 2026. On August 14, 2026, the National Center for Learning Disabilities announced the filing in a press release in which its chief executive officer, Dr. Jacqueline Rodriguez, said: “Congress appropriated these funds for a reason, and continued delays have real consequences for students and schools. We need to see the funds actually made available and obligated. Announcing future grant competitions is not the same as ensuring that Congress’s funding reaches the research, data, and programs students with disabilities rely on.” (The press release’s date matters because some coverage anchored the case’s timeline to August 14, when the court’s decision actually issued on September 17.)

The defendants answered on August 25, 2026 with a motion to dismiss or, in the alternative, for summary judgment (ECF No. 56), arguing mootness, ripeness, the absence of APA jurisdiction on the theory that the Impoundment Control Act and the Anti-Deficiency Act preclude it, the zone-of-interests limit, the agency-discretion exception, the absence of final agency action, and standing. The motions were argued in person on September 8, 2026, in Courtroom 17 in Boston, and taken under advisement (ECF Nos. 65–66). The Memorandum and Order issued nine days later ran 46 pages.

The September 17 Holding, Claim by Claim

Counts 3 and 4: The Footnotes Fall

The core holding went to the plaintiffs. The Executive Order Footnotes — the binding apportionment conditions requiring uses consistent with Executive Order 14151 and Executive Order 14332 — were held to exceed OMB’s statutory authority under 5 U.S.C. § 706(2)(C). The court’s reasoning followed the Supreme Court’s major-questions logic in West Virginia v. EPA: executive agencies act only on “clear congressional authorization,” and the notes to 31 U.S.C. § 1513 contain only “a singular mention of footnotes,” which is not authorization for policy-conditioned apportionments. Independently, the footnotes were held arbitrary and capricious under Section 706(2)(A): the record contains no reasoned explanation and no contemporaneous justification for conditioning these funds on these orders. On both grounds the court stated its disposition: it “vacates and sets aside the Executive Order Footnotes as contrary to law and arbitrary and capricious in violation of 5 U.S.C. § 706(2).”

Two limits matter for what comes next. First, the court declined the plaintiffs’ separation-of-powers ground — the Section 706(2)(B) theory — applying the constitutional-avoidance principle the Supreme Court articulated in Ashwander v. Tennessee Valley Authority, and resolving the case on statutory grounds. Second, it reserved the plaintiffs’ request for a permanent injunction. The vacatur itself is the operative relief: the footnotes, as instruments, are set aside.

Count 7: The Explanatory-Statements Claim Fails

The plaintiffs’ seventh count argued that the defendants’ practice of allocating IES funds in accordance with non-binding congressional explanatory statements was itself a change from a long-standing unwritten policy of funding programs as the explanatory statements directed. Judge Burroughs rejected it — the defense’s one clear merits win. The evidence, she found, was too thin to establish the baseline policy the claim required: allocations consistent with the explanatory statements for fiscal 2022 through 2024, plus one declarant’s account of his own tenure, did not establish a policy of the kind that could have been “changed.” The holding is narrow but real: the court declined to convert a few years of consistent behavior into a binding administrative tradition.

Count 8: Deferred, With a Deadline

Count 8 alleged that the failure to obligate the expiring funds before September 30, 2026 was action unlawfully withheld under Section 706(1). The court applied the D.C. Circuit’s six-factor TRAC framework for unreasonable agency delay. Factors one and two favored the defendants: a hard deadline — September 30, 2026 — exists, and defense counsel stated an intent to obligate all the funds. Factor three leaned to the plaintiffs: the funds support research and services for children with disabilities, which the court wrote “leans slightly more towards the health and welfare category.” Factor six — the history of impoundment attempts, including the Child Trends litigation in which a Maryland federal court compelled the obligation of fiscal 2025 Comprehensive Centers funds — also leaned to the plaintiffs. Weighing these, the court wrote that “granting summary judgment on the record before the Court would require weighing defense counsel’s statements that the money will be obligated against Plaintiffs’ contention that the money will not be timely obligated,” and that the more prudent course was to await notice that all funds had been obligated.

The deferral came with teeth. The court’s treatment of the government’s assurances turned on what its declarations said: they promised “intent” and a “plan” rather than saying the funds “will” be obligated — and, as the court put it, “[g]iven the historical context… the current Administration has already attempted to cancel or substantially cut the programs but was prevented by Congress from doing so, the Court will not rely on mere ‘intentions.’” At the September 8 hearing, per the transcript, the programs were acknowledged to be ones the administration “disfavor[s] on policy grounds” and asked Congress to cut — but “Congress said no.” Accordingly, the court ordered the defendants to file a status report by the earliest of September 28, 2026 or the date all September 30 obligations are completed, and warned that it “may reconsider whether there has been undue delay warranting injunctive relief” if the funds are not obligated by September 30.

Standing and Justiciability

The holding ran through the government’s justiciability gauntlet, and the court declined every gate. Standing was found on multiple grounds: the denial of the opportunity to compete for grant funds — competitive standing, following the D.C. Circuit’s Global Health Council v. Trump, 153 F.4th 1 (2025); informational injury, grounded in statutes requiring public dissemination of IES data; and the chilling harm from the footnotes, with association members, per the order, “chilled from mentioning their work involving equity and disabilities in their funding applications.” The Impoundment Control Act and the Anti-Deficiency Act, the court held, do not preclude APA review — distinguishing Global Health Council and Department of State v. AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition, 146 S. Ct. 19 (2025), which precluded APA claims only “to enforce the ICA itself.” The statutory program requirements supplied “meaningful standards” that defeat the agency-discretion exception, distinguishing Lincoln v. Vigil; and the unlawfully-withheld claim in Count 8 requires no “final agency action,” under the line through Cobell v. Norton. Mootness failed on Count 8 for a simple reason: the funds were apportioned but not obligated, so nothing about the defendants’ promises made the claim disappear.

What the Court Did Not Decide

It is as important to list what the order leaves open. The court reserved judgment on Counts 1, 2, 5, and 6 — the general contrary-to-law and withheld claims, the nondisclosure claim, and the Unallocated-line claim. It declined the separation-of-powers ground. It reserved the permanent injunction and, with it, the plaintiffs’ proposed remedial apparatus — the three-day re-apportionment clock, the weekly status reports, the October 2 certification. The September 17 order is thus a final, appealable partial decision that grants summary judgment in part and holds the rest against a calendar: a status report due by September 28, and a September 30 expiration for roughly $180 million of the IES funds and approximately $49.5 million of the $50 million Comprehensive Centers appropriation. As of September 18, 2026, the public docket reflects no appeal.

The order also situates itself in a substantial line of cases on presidential control of appropriated funds, citing directly: Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump, 607 U.S. 229 (2026), the Supreme Court’s most recent impoundment decision; City of New Haven v. United States, for the proposition that Congress amended the Anti-Deficiency Act’s judicial-review provisions “to preclude the President from relying on that Act as authority for implementing policy impoundments”; National Endowment for Democracy v. United States, 795 F. Supp. 3d 63 (D.D.C. 2025); American Federation of Government Employees v. OMB, 807 F. Supp. 3d 1004 (N.D. Cal. 2025), permitting APA review of apportionment-conditioned claims; and, as impoundment history, Child Trends, Inc. v. U.S. Department of Education, 795 F. Supp. 3d 700 (D. Md. 2025) — the earlier case that compelled the obligation of fiscal 2025 Comprehensive Centers funds — alongside Global Health Council v. Trump and the Supreme Court’s per curiam disposition in Department of State v. AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition. Measured against that line, September 17 is the second major impoundment-adjacent loss for the administration in education funding, after Child Trends — and the first to squarely vacate policy-conditioned apportionment footnotes as beyond OMB’s statutory authority. The theory is narrow: the apportionment statute gives OMB an accounting function, and the notes to Section 1513 mention footnotes once; a mechanism that exists for executing appropriations does not thereby become a vehicle for conditioning them on executive policy preferences without “clear congressional authorization” for the specific conditions imposed.

What This Means for Massachusetts

Massachusetts sits at the center of both halves of this story. The venue fact is the simplest: the MTA’s headquarters in Quincy is what places the case in Boston, which makes the strongest judicial check on the apportionment practice to date a Massachusetts ruling, argued in Courtroom 17 on September 8 and issued on September 17.

The monitoring fact is more concrete. OSEP’s Differentiated Monitoring and Support review of Massachusetts — the January 16, 2025 report with findings 1.3 on state complaints and 2.2 on independent educational evaluations — is what required DESE to revise the Notice of Procedural Safeguards it submitted on April 16, 2025, and OSEP’s July 1, 2025 approval of the Commonwealth’s FFY2025 IDEA Part B application confirmed both findings resolved. Every Massachusetts family that receives the procedural-safeguards notice receives a document OSEP’s monitoring process required the state to fix.

The state’s forward calendar runs through the interagency agreement. The annual state performance determinations — the SPP/APR machinery in which K-12 Dive reported on June 23, 2026 that more than half of states missed their improvement and compliance targets — move to HHS under the agreement, with final authority remaining at Education; the first determinations issued under the new structure would land in 2027, and whether they arrive on schedule is an open operational question. Massachusetts’s own fiscal mechanics were visible in October 2025, when the second installment of the Commonwealth’s FFY2025 IDEA Part B award landed on the day the government shut down — the disbursement machinery NASDSE’s Audrey Levorse was questioning at the time (“what does funding look like down the road?”), now a question spanning two agencies. Two further facts belong on the record: Representatives Jake Auchincloss (MA-04) and Lori Trahan (MA-03) signed the 86-member House letter of July 21, 2026, and the plaintiffs’ local counsel, Benjamin Berwick, practices from Watertown (Bar No. 679207). No verified public statement from DESE or the Governor’s office on the transfers was located in the research for this article; the absence is recorded here rather than papered over.

What This Means for Parents

Start with what has not changed. The statute has not changed: every right IDEA grants, and every protection Section 504 and the ADA provide, remains exactly as it was. The ED–HHS agreement itself keeps final authority “assigned by statute to the Secretary of Education,” and the Secretary said at the August 4, 2026 OSEP conference that “none of the rights guaranteed to individuals with disabilities under federal law will change.” A parent who disagrees with an IEP still uses the same district processes, the state complaint system at DESE, and the same due-process machinery. A family that believes a district discriminated under Section 504 or the ADA still files with OCR, which retains its authority to investigate disability discrimination.

What has changed is the capacity around those rights. Maggie Heilman — the parent of a daughter with Down syndrome whose OCR complaint was disrupted during the 2025 staffing fight — described to NPR on December 10, 2025 what that capacity gap communicates to families: “it’s telling families with children like [my daughter] that their hurt doesn’t matter.” The rights are unchanged; the office that answers the phone is not what it was.

The research stake is the quieter one, and it is not small. The National Center for Special Education Research — the IES center whose funds the vacated footnotes tied up — is the office Congress directed to study, among 17 areas, “the extent to which overidentification and underidentification of children with disabilities occurs.” Dr. Rodriguez’s formulation is the precise worry: “Announcing future grant competitions is not the same as ensuring that Congress’s funding reaches the research, data, and programs students with disabilities rely on.” For parents, that research base answers the practical questions — which interventions work, how identification disparities arise, what services produce outcomes — now unencumbered by the footnotes a court has vacated, with the obligation question still open until the defendants report back.

The practical guidance follows from the structure. Families’ day-to-day rights run through districts and DESE, which the interagency agreement does not touch; the federal changes affect the machinery above the state, not the IEP meeting downstairs. The moments worth watching are the seams the next section lists.

What to Watch

The status report, due by September 28, 2026. The court ordered the defendants to report by the earliest of September 28 or the date all September 30 obligations are completed. It is the first hard evidence of whether defense counsel’s stated intent has become fact.
The September 30 cliff. Roughly $180 million of the fiscal 2025/2026 IES appropriation and approximately $49.5 million of the $50 million Comprehensive Centers appropriation expire on September 30, 2026. The court has already written that it “may reconsider whether there has been undue delay warranting injunctive relief” if the funds are not obligated in time.
The Education Innovation and Research deadline of December 31, 2026. Approximately $11 million of the $235 million EIR appropriation remained unobligated as of the September 17 order
An appeal. The vacatur is a final, appealable partial decision; the public docket showed no notice of appeal as of September 18, 2026. Whether the administration tests that holding on appeal is an open question this article does not predict.
Fiscal 2027 appropriations. The budget request proposes cutting more than 80 percent of remaining OSERS staff; the House package marked up July 15, 2026 (H.R. 9610 and H.R. 9611) excludes special education and civil rights from its transfers; and the bipartisan Mannion–Scott–Fitzpatrick bill introduced September 4, 2026 would statutorily bar dismantling or outsourcing the offices. Congress’s choices will determine whether the staffing whiplash of 2025 becomes structural.
The HHS transition itself. The first state performance determinations issued under the interagency agreement would land in 2027, and the fiscal 2027 grant cycle moves to HHS’s GrantSolutions and Payment Management systems. Those two checkpoints are the operational test of the administration’s claim that the work moves without loss.

Conclusion

The federal role in special education is being restructured by two delivery vehicles at once, and the September 17 ruling checked only one of them. On the personnel track, the attempted layoffs of October 2025 — 466 Education Department employees, including 121 of OSEP’s experts — were blocked by a federal court, rescinded by a continuing resolution, and then abandoned by the administration on January 2, 2026; OSEP was demonstrably functioning through June 2026, issuing determinations, guidance, competitions, and a $144 million Part C supplement. But the same administration’s fiscal 2027 request proposes cutting more than 80 percent of the office that remains, and the June 2026 interagency agreements relocate the work itself — IDEA grant administration, state performance determinations, data collection, and drawdowns — to HHS, keeping every statute at Education while the personnel take their desks in a health agency’s building.

On the funding track, the court’s September 17 order vacated the Executive Order footnotes that had tied roughly $768 million in expiring IES funds, $50 million in Comprehensive Centers funds, and $235 million in Education Innovation and Research funds to executive policy compliance — as beyond OMB’s statutory authority and arbitrary and capricious — while reserving the rest against a September 28 status report and a September 30 expiration. The order is the second major impoundment-adjacent ruling against the administration in education funding, after Child Trends, and the first to squarely hold that the apportionment mechanism cannot carry policy conditions without “clear congressional authorization.”

What unites the two tracks is the mechanism, not the rhetoric. Nothing about the past eighteen months required a vote to abolish the Department of Education, and none occurred; the change has been accomplished through attrition, rescission-and-retry budgeting, interagency paperwork that relocates work while preserving statutory authority, and footnotes that quietly conditioned appropriated funds on executive preferences. The check the court applied — a narrow, statutory one, resting on “clear congressional authorization” — is proportionate to the mechanism. What happens next belongs to the calendar the court set: a status report due September 28, a September 30 expiration for roughly $180 million in unobligated IES funds and approximately $49.5 million in Comprehensive Centers funds, an appeal window with nothing filed as of September 18, and a fiscal 2027 appropriations process in which Congress will decide whether the office that administers the nation’s special education programs remains an office at all.

Sources

Memorandum and Order, National Center for Learning Disabilities, et al. v. Office of Management and Budget, et al., Civil Action No. 1:26-cv-13019-ADB (D. Mass.), 46 pages, ECF No. 69, signed by Allison D. Burroughs, September 17, 2026.
Complaint for Declaratory and Injunctive Relief in the same case, 57 pages, ECF No. 1, filed June 30, 2026; Plaintiffs’ Memorandum in Support of Motion for Summary Judgment (ECF No. 50) and Proposed Order (ECF No. 46-1), filed August 11, 2026; Defendants’ Motion to Dismiss or, in the Alternative, for Summary Judgment (ECF No. 56), filed August 25, 2026.
Interagency Agreement Between the U.S. Department of Education and U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Relating to Special Education and Rehabilitative Services, dated June 15, 2026, signed by Chris Klomp (Chief Counselor, HHS) and Madison Biedermann (Chief of Staff, ED); and the three ED–DOJ interagency agreements (Civil Rights Partnership; Student Privacy Protection Partnership; Training and Advisory Services Partnership), dated June 15–16, 2026.
U.S. Department of Education press release, “U.S. Department of Education Announces Additional Partnerships to Strengthen Coordination for Individuals with Disabilities Programs, Bolster Civil Rights Enforcement,” June 16, 2026; Secretary Linda McMahon, Letter to Parents of Individuals with Disabilities, June 16, 2026; the Department’s “Returning Education to the States” initiative page.
OSEP Update newsletter, June 2026 (Kelly Rogers appointment of May 21, 2026; $144 million IDEA Part C supplement; EDFacts graduation data); OSEP, FFY2025 IDEA Part B Grant Award Letter to Massachusetts, July 1, 2025 (enforcing the Differentiated Monitoring and Support findings of January 16, 2025).
U.S. Department of Education, Contingency Plan for the Lapse of Fiscal Year 2026 Appropriations, memorandum, September 28, 2025; FY2027 Department of Education Congressional Justification, Salaries and Expenses Overview.
U.S. Government Accountability Office, GAO-26-108320, February 2026; U.S. Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee minority report on 2025 OCR enforcement, April 2026.
Letters: 86 House Democrats to Secretary McMahon, led by Representative Bobby Scott, July 21, 2026 (Massachusetts signers: Representatives Jake Auchincloss, MA-04, and Lori Trahan, MA-03); Senators Tammy Baldwin, Patty Murray, Bernie Sanders, and Elissa Slotkin to Secretary McMahon, June 30, 2026; 13 former federal special-education officials to Congress, July 13, 2026; and 731 civil rights and education organizations to Congress, June 18, 2026 (the last two as hosted by the National Down Syndrome Congress).
NPR, June 16, 2026 (partnership announcements and stakeholder letter); July 9, 2026 (OSERS staffing after the HHS move); September 9, 2026 (Kelly Rogers’s resignation, updated September 11); and October 13, November 13, and December 10, 2025 (special-education layoffs, the continuing resolution’s RIF rescission, and the OCR recall).
K-12 Dive, October 12, 2025 (OSERS RIFs) and layoffs timeline updated January 5, 2026; June 17, 2026 (the 14 interagency agreements) and June 18, 2026 (ED–HHS agreement takeaways); June 23, 2026 (state performance determinations); July 14, 2026 (former officials’ letter and House bill package, including ED spokesperson Ellen Keast’s statement); August 4, 2026 (34th annual OSEP conference and Secretary McMahon’s keynote).
USA Today, October 11, 2025 (October 2025 OSEP layoffs during the government shutdown).
Disability Scoop, October 14, 2025 (OSEP layoffs) and October 16, 2025 (court block of the layoffs).
Council for Exceptional Children, “Mass Layoffs in the Office of Special Education Programs Put Special Education in Jeopardy,” October 17, 2025; Policy Insider, September 4, 2026 (bipartisan House bill to protect Education offices); September 11, 2026 (OSERS head’s resignation ahead of the staff move to HHS).
National Center for Learning Disabilities, press releases of July 1, 2026 (lawsuit announcement) and August 14, 2026 (summary-judgment motion).
National Down Syndrome Society, fact sheet on the OSERS and OCR transfers, June 2026.
Maryland Association of Boards of Education, analysis of the ED transfers of IDEA administration and civil rights enforcement to HHS and DOJ, July 6, 2026.