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By Timothy Gardner
(Reuters) -The U.S. Department of Education is expected to cut approximately half of its 4,000 employees in sweeping layoffs set to begin on Tuesday evening, CNN reported, citing three people familiar with the plan.
The department's offices in the Washington area had already been ordered closed from Tuesday evening through Wednesday for "security reasons," according to an internal announcement seen by Reuters.
President Donald Trump has vowed to eliminate the Education Department as part of his aim to transfer more responsibility for education to the states.
Earlier, a reporter for the global media platform Semafor had said half of the Education Department workforce was expected to be eliminated and that "reduction in force" notices would go out in the evening. Fox News also reported that "nearly half" of the department would be let go.
Reuters could not immediately confirm the reports.
The memo said no staff would be allowed inside the Education Department building from 6 p.m. on Tuesday. The memo said offices would reopen on Thursday.
An Education Department spokesperson did not immediately respond to questions about the closures.
This is not the first time the Trump administration has abruptly ordered an agency to close its doors to employees.
Similar instructions were given to the U.S. Agency for International Development, which provides aid to the world's needy, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which protects Americans from unscrupulous lenders.
Both agencies' headquarters were then shuttered as part of Trump's efforts to shrink the size and cost of the federal bureaucracy. Trump's Republican Party views USAID as pursuing a liberal agenda, and the CFPB as an example of government over-reach by the Democratic Obama administration.
The Education Department, which was created in 1980, employs about 4,000 people.
(Reporting by Timothy Gardner, Tim Reid and Ryan Patrick Jones, editing by Ross Colvin and David Gregorio)
