1. United States
2. Fla.
3. Letter

Congress needs to act immediately to reverse the administration's unlawful transfer of the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services to HHS and the Office for Civil Rights to DOJ. Federal law requires both offices to sit within the Department of Education. Only Congress has the authority to move them — and Congress did not act. Secretary McMahon's June 16 announcement does not change that. OSERS is the operational backbone of IDEA, the 1975 law guaranteeing every child with a disability a free and appropriate public education. It serves more than 7.5 million students. Moving it to HHS isn't a neutral reshuffling — HHS operates from a medical model of disability, treating it as a condition to be managed, while IDEA was built on a civil rights model that puts disabled children in mainstream classrooms with appropriate support. These are fundamentally incompatible frameworks. OCR, meanwhile, enforces civil rights protections across race, sex, gender identity, and disability for every student in a federally funded school. Dumping it into an already under-resourced DOJ guts education-specific enforcement. This is illegal, and it will cause real harm to millions of students. Introduce or co-sponsor legislation to block these transfers and restore both offices to their legally mandated home.