Officials from Chicago and Illinois are sounding the alarm as the U.S. Department of Education plans to lay off about half of its workforce, putting its future in peril while causing “chaos” for students and schools throughout the country.

At least 50 staffers were fired in Chicago or pushed out, including the entire Office for Civil Rights. The layoffs are part of a dramatic downsizing directed by the president.

The Education Department’s civil rights branch is losing nearly half its staff in the Trump administration’s layoffs, effectively gutting an office that already faced a backlog of thousands of complaints from students and families across the nation.