ATLANTA, Ga. - More than 170 Georgia employees of the U.S. Department of Education are employed in Georgia and could be among those who lose their jobs as part of the Trump administration’s efforts to dismantle the department and shrink the size of the federal workforce.

The divisions with the most employees are the Federal Student Aid office, with 97 employees, and the Office for Civil Rights, where there are 46 employees.

On Tuesday, department staff got a notice that its headquarters in Washington, D.C., and regional offices, including in Atlanta, would be closed Wednesday for “security reasons.”

The notice said staff were permitted to work from home Wednesday and offices would reopen Thursday.

The Atlanta office was closed as planned Wednesday.

Employees received the notice the same day the department announced it plans to lay off more than 1,300 employees, roughly half its workforce.

Among the nationwide layoffs announced Tuesday were roughly 240 in the department’s Office for Civil Rights, nearly half its staff, according to a list obtained and verified by The Associated Press.

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The layoffs effectively gut the civil rights branch, which already faced a backlog of thousands of complaints from students and families across the nation. In Georgia, there are currently 593 open civil rights cases with the Education Department since 2011.

The Trump administration has not said how it will proceed with thousands of cases being handled by staff it’s eliminating. The cases involve families trying to get school services for students with disabilities, allegations of bias related to race and religion, and complaints over sexual violence at schools and college campuses.

In Georgia, schools get an average of 15% of their funding from the federal government.

Lisa Morgan, president of the Georgia Association of Educators, is worried that funding cuts will follow the personnel cuts, and Georgia taxpayers will have to make up the difference.

“Either local taxpayers or the state are going to have to fill those gaps,” said Morgan. “For more of our rural districts, it’s not 15%, it’s 25, 30, or even 35% of their funding comes from the federal government, and many of these rural districts don’t have the tax base.”

Georgia public schools educate 90% of students in the state, and 95% of Georgia students with disabilities.

“When you eliminate half of the people ensuring that things are working, things are going to get lost, that’s just inevitable,” said Morgan. “This is not going to be good for our students, no matter who they are.”

The Department of Education itself dates back to 1979, and was created by then-President Jimmy Carter.

The department layoffs are part of a dramatic downsizing directed by President Donald Trump to slash the federal workforce.

“Feel very badly, but many of them don’t work at all,” said Trump, speaking from the White House this week. “When we cut, we want to cut, but we want to cut the people that aren’t working or not doing a good job.”

Thousands more federal government jobs are expected to be cut across the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Social Security Administration and other agencies.

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