And we're going to focus now on some of the particular layoffs that were announced this weekend at the Department of Education.

On Friday, the Trump administration fired most employees at the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services.

That office is tasked with protecting the rights of some 7.5 million children with disabilities across the country and ensuring they get a fair education.

For more on this, we're joined again by Laura Meckler, National Education Writer for the Washington Post.

Thanks for being with us. Let's start with the basics. Help us understand what this office does

and why people are so concerned about the loss of so many staff members at this office.

What this office does is administers a very important federal law called IDEA,

the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.

And what that does is it provides funding and it has requirements for school districts

to provide a free and appropriate education to students with disabilities.

So it's a $15 billion program, something that a lot of school districts really rely on.

And that money is still flowing as far as we know.

But the point of this office is essentially to oversee this program.

It's a very big program to make sure

that states and school districts are following the law, to answer questions when states have about,

you know, can we do this or can we do that? And essentially to provide oversight. So essentially,

the money is still going out, but without the kind of guarantees and controls that we're used to being in place when we're talking about billions of dollars.

So give us a real-world example of how these cuts would affect students, families, educators in the classroom.

I mean, it takes, you know, it's a little bit removed from a direct impact. But one way you could see it is you can imagine, say, a school district that is sort of systematically not providing a certain type of service that students need. Let's say they need a certain kind of technology in order to communicate students who are nonverbal, for instance. And this district just

isn't doing that. Well, it's the responsibility of the state to make sure that the districts do

this. But let's say the state isn't forcing them to do it, isn't doing its job. Well, then that's

where the federal government comes in. They do audits. They look at data. They look at reports.

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