WASHINGTON — Education Secretary Betsy DeVos asked her department’s Office of Inspector General if grounds existed to prosecute employees who leaked budget data to The Washington Post and unclassified information to Politico, according to an internal department report.

The response: It would be difficult because the department has ‘‘little’’ written policy or guidance on how employees are supposed to handle information.

‘‘While evaluating the . . . incidents of alleged unauthorized releases of non-public information, we identified challenges to criminal prosecution or taking significant administrative actions against individuals responsible for the release of this type of information,’’ the report said.

The author of the report, Assistant Inspector General for Investigations Aaron R. Jordan, recommended the department establish policies to address unauthorized release of information and that it train employees on the protection and marking of ‘‘controlled unclassified information.’’

Jordan wrote that implementing the proposed recommendations could make it easier for department officials to punish future leakers and ‘‘may increase the potential’’ for the inspector general ‘‘to obtain a criminal prosecution in certain cases.’’

In a footnote, however, he added that any new policies should ‘‘take into consideration whistle-blower rights and protections’’ because ‘‘there may be times when what may be viewed as a ‘leak’ or unauthorized release of non-public information could involve a protected disclosure.’’

The Education Department did not respond Wednesday to a request for comment. Jordan also did not respond to a request for comment. His report said the department ‘‘did not provide a formal response to the suggestions’’ he had made.

The Education Department leaks were hardly rare in the Trump administration; there are routine leaks of information from the White House, and President Trump has taken to Twitter to urge the FBI to find those responsible.

DeVos routinely bars the press from department forums on key issues and rarely gives interviews. Her public schedule is often released late.

The department request to the inspector general and the response were detailed in Jordan’s report, which is dated March 29, and was sent to Kent Talbert, who is acting as the Education Department’s No. 2 official. The Office of the Inspector General investigates ‘‘prosecutable violations of law by department employees within the scope of their employment,’’ the report says. It generally focuses investigative efforts on ‘‘federal felonies’’ though it may also pursue non-criminal probes of ‘‘serious misconduct’’ by employees.

In May 2017, days before the administration made public its 2018 budget, The Washington Post published information from the Education Department’s budget. There was deep interest in the education world about the administration’s budget priorities for education because Trump and DeVos had said they were charting a new course for US public education.

Their top education priority, they said, would be expanding alternatives to traditional public schools, and the proposed budget made deep federal funding cuts to traditional public schools — which educate the vast majority of America’s schoolchildren. It also sought about $400 million to expand charter schools and vouchers for private and religious schools and $1 billion to push public schools to adopt policies that encourage alternatives to traditional public schools. Congress rejected much of that budget proposal.

The administration’s proposed 2019 budget had some of the same elements in it, and Congress has made it clear it will again reject them.

Administration sources, who asked not to be identified because they feared repercussions, said DeVos was furious with the budget document leaks to the Post, and officials sought to find the person or people who leaked the documents. One source said DeVos believed the leak came from the Budget Service office and that led her to seek to split the now-centralized budget office during her major reorganization of the Education Department.

Congress took a dim view of that idea, inserting language into the massive spending bill passed last month that not only rejected many of DeVos’s 2019 budget priorities but also forbade her from making fundamental changes to the budget office. DeVos had wanted to send staff members in the Budget Service office to different sections of the department.