Newly confirmed Secretary of Education Linda McMahon has just sent an initial email to the staff at the Education Department (ED):
Our job is to respect the will of the American people and the President they elected, who has tasked us with accomplishing the elimination of bureaucratic bloat here at the Department of Education—a momentous final mission—quickly and responsibly … We must start thinking about our final mission at the department as an overhaul—a last chance to restore the culture of liberty and excellence that made American education great.
Secretary McMahon’s directive could just mean a root-and-branch reform of ED, or it could mean the ED will be eliminated. Either way, the ED has a great deal of work to do.
The National Association of Scholars’ (NAS) Waste Land: Legislative Guide provides a how-to guide for that work. The Legislative Guide follows up on our in-depth audit of ED, Waste Land: The Education Department’s Profligacy, Mediocrity, and Radicalism, which mapped the ED’s current labyrinth of unaccountable and counterproductive spending programs and catalogued how bureaucrats and policymakers have weaponized its regulatory powers. Waste Land recommends that the ED focus on its four core functions—disbursing Title I funds for disadvantaged K-12 students, distributing special education funds for mentally and physically disabled students, disbursing Pell Grants to disadvantaged postsecondary students, and granting direct student loans to postsecondary students—and eliminate or relocate to other federal departments virtually every other program. The Legislative Guide identifies each of the dozens of statutes that must be repealed or amended to carry out these reforms.
ED reform, if it will endure, must include statutory reform. The ED’s spending isn’t just perverse bureaucratic misinterpretation of the law—although, of course, that is an essential aspect of how the ED has functioned for decades. Dozens of different statutes explicitly authorize the ED spending, from 20 U.S. Code 70 Part B—21st Century Community Learning Centers (§§ 7171 – 7176) to 20 U.S. Code 28 § 1059g. Asian American and Native American Pacific Islander-serving institutions to Code 28 Part U—University Sustainability Programs (§ 1161u).
[RELATED: Linda McMahon Confirmed as Education Secretary]
If the Trump administration simply shuts down the ED, all of these programs would continue in a different department.
If the Trump administration cuts off spending for these programs by administrative action, a future administration could just resurrect them by the same administrative action since the authorizing laws would still be there.
Defenders of the status quo claim to be worried that the Trump administration will raze the ED to the ground. Education reformers should be worried that that is all the Trump administration will do. ED’s statutes are its underground roots, which will keep it alive even if reformers use a chainsaw on every above-ground part of the ED. Education reformers cannot be satisfied with just using a chainsaw. They can only be sure of eliminating the ED by digging up its statutory roots.
That’s a hard task—it requires assembling a legislative majority in both Houses of Congress and possibly a supermajority in the Senate. That’s why Waste Land and the Legislative Guide both recommend an approach to reforming the ED that we think is more likely to gain legislative support. The four core ED functions we mentioned above involve the vast majority of the funds that the ED disburses—so we support retaining those four functions, although reforming them to reduce as much as possible the discretionary power given to ED bureaucrats to tie strings to their disbursement. As a first stage, we support focusing reform efforts on the legislative campaign to repeal or modify the dozens of other statutes that authorize every other ED spending program. While no observer at this point should underestimate the vigor and the ambition of the Trump administration, we still believe that it is reasonable to suggest priority lists for education reformers. Waste Land and the Legislative Guide together provide a good priority list for federal education policy and statutory reform.
That doesn’t mean that the reform of the four core ED functions should be put off forever, nor the elimination of the department. But clearing away the ED underbrush and uprooting all the small weeds will make it easier to see the ED’s four big trees and consider what to do to them. And the American people may still need to be persuaded that the ED’s four core functions need serious reform—whether located in the ED or some other part of the federal government. Once education reformers have uprooted all the smaller programs, they can make a clean case to the American people about what to do with the ED’s core.
Education reformers have a rare chance to make enduring change to federal education policy. They should keep an eye on what really matters for the long run—statutory reform. They should propose eliminating as many authorizing education statutes as they realistically believe Congress will repeal. And if they want to know what statutes to repeal, they can look at the catalogue in Waste Land and its Legislative Guide.
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Image: Department of Education by Andy Feliciotti on Unsplash
This article was originally published at www.mindingthecampus.org
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