We Need to Preserve What U.S. Department of Education Continues to Remove
Monitoring reports disappeared when U.S. Department of Education launched the redesign of its site in 2024—and some guidance documents have been missing for years. What happens if USDOE closes?
When U.S. Department of Education (USDOE) rolled out its redesigned site in 2024, broken links took up residence where federal oversight once lived. Pages that once housed documents such as Differentiated Monitoring and Support (DMS) reports, guidance documents, and Dear Colleague letters now redirect—or vanished entirely.
As Special Education Action continues to migrate from its older WordPress platform to Substack, an unexpected amount of time is being spent repairing links to USDOE materials that no longer exist or have been quietly relocated. For example, the old DMS Part B page is still accessible (as of 11.10.25) and lists older DMS findings that aren’t on the new page. However, the links on the old page no longer open the actual reports and letters cited.
Now, with talk of shuttering USDOE and moving everything to Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the stakes are rising fast. What happens to the public reading rooms? The DMS reports? Office for Civil Rights (OCR) findings? OCR guidance? Dear Colleague letters? All the other documents that define students’ rights under IDEA, Section 504, and the ADA?
Fast and government rarely appear together. If everything moves, how long will we wait? As long as it takes a turtle to crawl through a vat of peanut butter? Longer? Shorter?
We Can’t Rely on the SEAs or LEAs
Neither the state education agencies (SEA) nor the local education agencies (LEA) can be relied upon to proactively share the records related to them. In addition, if parents do obtain the letters of findings (as one example) against SEAs or LEAs, they sometimes remain inaccessible. For example, the Virginia LEA Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS) heavily redacted an OCR finding against it (obtained via FOIA). However, once OCR published the finding, it was clear FCPS over-redacted the version it released. Had the FOIA not been submitted, would FCPS have proactively released the findings? Based on historical inactions, it’s safe to assume the answer is no.
Moving USDOE’s digital infrastructure to another agency could mean months—or years—of lost access to critical records. This assumes a one-to-one migration. Previous administrations have culled USDOE’s site before, so what might be removed or quietly added next?
In addition, to my knowledge press releases haven’t accompanied the removals/additions. For example, Florida was missing from the Part B section of USDOE’s June 20, 2025, online release of its 2025 Determination Letters on State Implementation of IDEA. Wayback Machine’s September 22, 2025, snapshot of the page confirms the omission. If you look at the bottom of the September 22nd snapshot via Wayback Machine, it was last updated June 20, 2025—the day the determinations were released. Florida was absent under Part B.
I filed a FOIA request September 25, 2025, because I was curious whether the omission was intentional or accidental. September 26, 2025, USDOE responded (my fastest USDOE FOIA response ever) to ask clarifying questions about my FOIA request. I replied the same day. Sometime between then and the September 30 (at midnight) government shutdown, the page was updated to include Florida under Part B as “Needs Assistance (one year).” As of today, the page lists September 30, 2025, as its last modified date. So . . . When was it changed, and why? With all the cuts to the agency, it was surprising that someone had time to squeeze in the addition before the shutdown.
Also odd: To date, Florida Department of Education’s site only lists “FFYs 2017 through 2024 Part B SPP/APR” under the “State Performance Plan/Annual Performance Report (SPP/APR)” of its site. Why no mention of 2025?
Oversight doesn’t work when the evidence disappears or is quietly moved or added.
A Home for DMS Reports
To safeguard access, Special Education Action has begun archiving DMS reports and status letters directly on its site instead of linking to unstable USDOE URLs. Dear Colleague letters and other key guidance documents are next.
If history is any guide, once these materials disappear, they’re difficult to recover. Let’s not let oversight vanish in a redesign, a USDOE closure, or a move to another department.