The University of Southern California is cutting 65 information technology workers at its Viterbi School of Engineering, the second round of layoffs to hit the school in a year.

The layoffs, disclosed in a state filing under the federal Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act, will take effect between Nov. 4 and Dec. 3. Employee notifications began the week of Aug. 31.

The separations are permanent.

Melissa Gerdes-Leonard, associate vice president of client services in USC's human resources department, wrote in a Sept. 1 letter to the state Employment Development Department that Viterbi is restructuring its IT operations because of funding cutbacks and budget reductions. The letter was amended Sept. 9.

A USC spokesman told the Daily News that the university is aligning its teams and resources with long-term strategic priorities.

The cuts span multiple locations. Affected workers are based at USC's University Park campus, the Information Sciences Institute in Marina Del Rey and the Institute for Creative Technologies in Playa Vista. Job titles range from systems administrators and software engineers to web developers, network engineers and instructional operations managers.

A pattern of cuts

Viterbi laid off 55 professors, academic program directors, adjunct instructors and student services advisers in fall 2025. That round was part of a broader university-wide reduction of about 975 positions since July 2025, as USC confronted an operating deficit that topped $200 million for the fiscal year ending June 30, 2025, Higher Ed Dive reported.

The deficit had ballooned from $158 million the prior year. Provost Andrew Guzman told the Academic Senate in September 2025 that USC faced a projected structural deficit of $230 million for the fiscal year ending June 30, 2026.

"Notwithstanding this encouraging news, we cannot afford the luxury of complacency," President Beong-Soo Kim wrote in a November 2025 message to the USC community, after the university had issued more than 900 layoff notices.

In February 2026, Kim struck a more optimistic tone, telling a crowd at the Health Sciences Campus that USC was on track to generate a roughly $30 million operating surplus for that fiscal year, according to the Daily Trojan student newspaper, as the Daily News reported. Whether that surplus materialized has not been publicly confirmed.

USC's workforce now stands at 23,942 faculty and staff, about 500 fewer than the prior year's count. That figure does not include 9,632 student workers.

What's next for affected workers

The WARN filing states that new positions will be posted as part of the restructuring, and affected employees can apply. Laid-off workers do not have seniority-based displacement rights.

USC has partnered with the City of Los Angeles' Rapid Response Team to offer free employment transition services, including sessions on job opportunities, unemployment benefits, health care and training.