The cuts, coupled with the Trump administration’s decision to examine and possibly rescind guidance meant to protect minority students from racial discrimination in discipline and special education decisions, inflamed a debate about the department’s approach to minority students.
“Your head is in the sand about racial bias and racial discrimination,” Ms. Lee said, adding: “You just don’t care about civil rights of black and brown children. This is horrible.”
Ms. DeVos said that she was “very proud of the record of the Office for Civil Rights,” and that it had learned to do more with less, including resolving complaints faster. She said the office would continue to uphold laws preventing discrimination.
She also said the budget preserved funding levels for poor students, and proposed school choice programs that could help minority and poor students get to better schools.
“I believe this budget does very much not only protect but encourage students of color to pursue their education,” Ms. DeVos said.
She also defended her agency’s re-examination of guidance issued in 2014 that sought to curb racial disparities in school discipline. The department had been eyeing the guidance for months, but it recently became a target of congressional Republicans who linked it to discipline policies at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., where 17 people were killed in a mass shooting last month.
“The stated goal of the guidance is one that we all embrace, and we are committed to reviewing and considering this guidance and taking appropriate steps,” Ms. DeVos said. “But I have nothing to say at this point about where that is.”
Ms. DeVos will lead a school safety commission created by President Trump to review the guidance, among other factors believed to contribute to school shootings. On Tuesday, Ms. DeVos said the commission would comprise the heads of the Departments of Health and Human Services, Homeland Security and Justice. It will meet in the next couple of weeks and hold forums with experts across the country.
Ms. DeVos stopped short of relating any gun-control measure to school safety, but said she was not a member of the National Rifle Association.
Ms. DeVos said a driving force behind the budget plan was an order from Mr. Trump to agency leaders to “spend taxpayer dollars efficiently.”
The directive has not only resulted in a trimmer budget, but also an overhaul of Ms. DeVos’s department that drew questions from the Appropriations Committee.
One week before Ms. DeVos was to go before the committee, a career staff member in the Education Department emailed members of the panel alleging that the agency was withholding information about a departmental overhaul from its budget justifications. The email was obtained by The New York Times.
“Our concern is about a breakdown in communication, a culture of secrecy and a fear of retaliatory action that has prevented Budget Service from providing House and Senate appropriators and staff, and for that matter, the public, with key information about the department’s plans for fiscal year 2019,” the email said. “Given the potential for some of these proposals to radically impact the way the department carries out its mission, Congress should probably see this.”
Liz Hill, the Education Department spokeswoman, said that it was “absolutely not true” that the department intentionally withheld details from Congress, and that “no final determinations have been made and therefore there is nothing to present.”
“The deliberative reorganization document is just that — a deliberative document not in final form,” she said. “We are following normal protocols for department reorganization.”
While it is not abnormal for education secretaries to reorganize the department, and not many decisions require congressional approval, it is also customary for the department to share details with key committees.
In the email, the staff member leaked a reorganization plan that included a consolidation of a number of administrative offices, cutting the number of regional offices in the Office for Civil Rights and acquiring several programs run by the Labor Department.
Education Department officials said they had since abandoned the civil rights proposals, which were sure to be the most protested part of the proposal. They said the plan remained in flux. It was created last fall to comply with Mr. Trump’s executive order to curb the reach of federal agencies and cut duplication and inefficiency.
Though the plan lays out a long-term vision, through 2022, some of its contents were displayed in a 14-page presentation to employees in February. And last week, the department announced it would reassign its budget director, the first move toward restructuring the budget office to reassign staff members elsewhere in the department. The decision, which officials said was meant to help spread expertise across the department, was made over the opposition of the White House’s Office of Management and Budget, according to Politico. Several other staff changes were announced for 2019.
Representative Rosa DeLauro, a Connecticut Democrat on the Appropriations Committee, told Ms. DeVos on Tuesday that she was disheartened to hear the plans for the budget office, which she said was central to managing the department’s programs and resources.
Ms. DeLauro also said the shuffle, along with limited communication from department staff members, “directly impugns on the critical work of this committee, and it needs to stop.”
Representative Rodney Frelinghuysen, Republican of New Jersey and the chairman of the committee, said he was concerned about “a disconnect” between Ms. DeVos’s administration and his office.
“It’s hard to believe that people who have been on the job for this long don’t have staff that understand how the system works,” Mr. Frelinghuysen said. “It is important to connect with the people who pay the bills.”
The plan aligns with measures Ms. DeVos has taken to shrink her agency, which she has described as bloated. She has shed hundreds of regulations, and hundreds of staff members through attrition and voluntary buyouts.
For the most part, Ms. DeVos’s restructuring plan involves consolidating offices, such as merging the office that oversees charter and private schools with the main office that oversees elementary and secondary education in public schools. The plan would eliminate the Office of the Under Secretary, a position that has helped shape higher education policy, and create an Office of Lifelong Learning. It would also reduce the number of political appointees. The proposal also seeks to acquire several programs run by the Labor Department, including ones that connect unemployed adults and former prisoners with educational services.
Details of the plan surfaced amid a bitter contract dispute between the DeVos administration and the union that represents the department’s 3,900 employees. Union leaders believe the contract gutted protections that would allow its members to defend themselves in the department’s overhaul.
Union officials say the agreement also stripped out previously negotiated provisions for pay increases and promotions, performance evaluations, work schedules, child care and overtime. It also limits the issues that can be brought up as grievances and eliminates a guarantee against retaliation for filing one. The contract also cuts down the use of “official time,” which employees could use to participate in union activities, a benefit Congress extended 40 years ago, and instead requires that representatives take unpaid leave for such activities with permission from their supervisors.
The union said the agreement came “after months of anti-union proposals and hostile behavior at the table,” which concluded with the department’s bargaining team effectively walking away from negotiations before they even started.
The department said that the union “spent more than a year dragging its feet,” and that its team failed to negotiate in good faith, ignored multiple invitations to resolve the impasse and blew multiple deadlines to submit counteroffers.
The department put its final offer in place.
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