Putting the Department of Education to work — if Trump can’t abolish it

On the campaign trail, President-elect Donald Trump promised to abolish the U.S. Department of Education. He made the same pledge in 2016, as did Ronald Reagan in 1980.

It’s a good idea. It would shrink the federal footprint, dramatically downsize the federal education bureaucracy, put an end to the backdoor access to federal influence enjoyed by the teachers unions, college commissars, and assorted left-leaning education advocacy groups, and make it tougher for future Democratic administrations to dictate policy to the nation’s schools and colleges.

But while shuttering the department is a perfectly sensible idea, it’s unlikely to happen. That’s because abolishing a Cabinet agency requires an act of Congress, meaning it needs 60 votes in the Senate. The bottom line is that even if every single Republican senator is on board, an iffy proposition, the GOP will have only 53 votes. And it’s a poor bet that Republicans can get a single Democrat to vote to abolish the department, let alone seven. So, the challenge when it comes to abolishing the department isn’t getting Senate Republicans to fight — it’s that there aren’t enough Republicans in the Senate. It’s a matter of simple math. 

Now, those familiar with the inner workings of Washington might wonder about using the budget reconciliation process, which allows the Senate to pass spending or tax bills with a simple majority. The problem with that method is that the reconciliation process was designed to help balance budgets and is purely a matter of dollars and cents. It only applies to limited categories of spending and can’t be used to dismantle a government agency.

The Trump team might be able to use executive action to reorganize or downsize the agency by, for instance, shifting the federal student-loan portfolio over to the Treasury Department and the Office for Civil Rights over to the Justice Department. That approach has promise, but it’s a stretch to characterize such moves as “abolishing” the Education Department. Moreover, because functions would mostly be shuffled to other agencies, it’s not clear this would necessarily do much to shrink the federal footprint.

So, the department probably isn’t going away. But that’s OK, as it can be aggressively downsized without legislation anyway. Moreover, the reformist energy would be more productively devoted to fulfilling Trump’s promises to expand choice, confront the “woke” bullies, and bust the college cartel.

Just what does the Department of Education actually do anyway? Mostly, it writes rules, houses an expansive bureaucracy, and funnels dollars to states and institutions of higher education. Contrary to the claims of the teachers unions and aggrieved Democrats, it doesn’t educate anyone — and a glance at its thousands of regulations is a reminder that most have much more to do with accounting than with learning. When it comes to K–12 schooling, the federal government only contributes about 10% of what the United States spends each year (the lion’s share is supplied by states and localities).

The bulk of the department’s work boils down to throwing vast sums at higher education, mostly by issuing, managing, and (not) collecting payments for student loans. That’s why insiders have long described the department as a gargantuan bank with a second-rate policy shop attached. Meanwhile, the department employs an army of 4,000 bureaucrats — including 86 senior executive service employees, who earn over $200,000, and more than 1,000 GS-15 managers, all of whom earn more than $160,000 if they work in Washington, D.C. Heck, there are more than 100 staff members just in the office of communications, at an average salary of over $100,000 and an annual cost to taxpayers of more than $13 million.

If this description makes hysterical defenses of the department seem a little unhinged, you’ve got the idea.

While claims about the department’s value may be wildly exaggerated, it’s also proven remarkably tough to kill. After all, Republicans have been calling for the abolition of the Department of Education pretty much since its creation in 1979 at the behest of President Jimmy Carter. Carter was fulfilling a pledge he’d made to the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers union, during the 1976 Democratic primaries. The NEA had wanted a direct conduit to the federal bureaucracy and a symbol of the education lobby’s might, and it got its wish.

Now, it’s important to appreciate that this was not the first time the federal government got involved in education. Several laws dating back to the Civil War era, including the Morrill Land-Grant Act of 1862, the Smith-Hughes Vocational Education Act of 1917, the National Defense Education Act of 1958, and the Higher Education and Elementary and Secondary Education Acts of 1965, expanded the role of the federal government in education. In short, with or without a department, there will be fights over Washington’s role in education.

On the campaign trail in 1980, Ronald Reagan promised to dismantle the newborn department. That didn’t happen. Instead, Terrel Bell, Reagan’s first education secretary, assembled a blue-ribbon commission to document the nation’s education challenges and (he hoped) save his job. That commission’s report, A Nation at Risk, tempered Reagan’s aversion to the department and put an end to talk of its abolition. Since then, promising to abolish the department has generally been a staple of Republican politics, with the exception of the George W. Bush era. Newt Gingrich’s “Contract with America,” Bob Dole’s 1996 candidacy, most of the GOP field in 2012, and Trump himself in 2016 all echoed Reagan’s call.

That none of these calls has gone very far and that the department has grown steadily over time despite them should be a reminder that eliminating it is a heavier lift than casual observers might imagine. For one thing, people say Washington should be spending money on education. Moreover, despite vague calls to prune wasteful spending, Republicans have shown little appetite for cutting the major federal education programs, principally: Title I for high-poverty schools ($18 billion a year), special education funding ($16 billion a year), and Pell Grants and work study for low-income students in postsecondary education ($31 billion a year). Last year, when given the chance to vote on converting Title I into a voucher program — in other words, reforming the program without cutting it — House Republicans could muster barely half their caucus to support the proposal, losing 113-311. Republicans have historically shown little desire to cut spending for low-income students or those with special needs, and that seems even more likely to be the case after a Trump electoral win defined by broad support among working-class voters and parents.

So, the department will likely be with us for the next four years. But that isn’t necessarily bad news for Team Trump.

First, the department can be downsized in important ways. While there’s little evidence that Hill Republicans are eager to trim funds for low-income students or those with special needs, they can certainly take an ax to the constellation of other smaller programs. And there’s lots of room to save millions by trimming staff, which may be as easy as prompting mass resignations by requiring that department staffers actually return to the office.

At the same time, the bulk of the money overseen at the Department of Education concerns student loans, meaning it’s important to fix the mess that President Joe Biden’s team made of student lending. There’s a need to end Biden’s loan “forgiveness” machinations decisively, stop issuing loans to graduate students, require colleges to assume partial liability for repayment of their students’ loans, and start collecting an insurance premium from colleges as a condition for participating in the student loan system. Given that the Biden administration managed to transfer $400 billion from borrowers to taxpayers despite an onslaught of emphatic legal reversals, there’s much a Trump team could do via executive discretion.

Second, even if Congress votes to abolish the department, its programs and staffing will simply shift over to other agencies unless Congress specifically votes to terminate them. So long as those programs exist and the dollars flow, abolition is mostly symbolic. The real fight is over ending, cutting, or reshaping the various programs the department administers. That’s why the administration may not want to spend a lot of political capital on a long-shot fight that could look more like an exercise in flow-chart reorganization than a dramatic shift in federal policy.

Indeed, much of the chatter about closing the department can seem performative, as if it’s a more appealing topic than the nuts and bolts of shrinking the federal footprint or defunding the education blob. It’s just fine if those saying they want to “abolish the department” actually mean they want to slash red tape, turn federal education programs into block grants, or move select units to other agencies. Those are all sensible ideas and would constitute big wins. But the department would still be there. And it’d be foolish to make those wins look like losses by focusing on the semantics of name-brand abolition rather than practical policy wins.

Third, and perhaps most important, a fruitless push to eliminate the department would be a missed opportunity at a time when it can instead be harnessed to address big problems in K–12 and higher education. After all, we may be about to see something truly new: a Republican Department of Education aggressively exploiting its executive authority, just like the Obama and Biden administrations did. Years of battles over school closures, school choice, CRT, DEI, gender, loan forgiveness, Title IX, and campus antisemitism have birthed a web of right-leaning education groups that now offer a playbook of policies. There’s also a deep bench of possible Trump appointees eager to take schools and colleges to task for their many failures, such as neglecting the civil rights of Jewish students and staff, circumventing the Supreme Court’s 2023 ban on race-based admissions, tolerating the kinds of hostile learning environments produced by “anti-racism,” and ignoring federal reporting requirements on foreign gifts. There are immense opportunities for investigation and litigation to right unaddressed wrongs and bar bad actors from accessing millions, or billions, in federal funding.

In short, while abolishing the department would be a fine thing to do, it’s not the most important fight for the new administration. If Trump’s team has a strategy to flip seven Senate Democrats, then, sure, go for it. But if not, there are a host of other education priorities he could accomplish.

Here are a half-dozen places to start.

• Harness the authority of the Office for Civil Rights to ensure that schools and colleges are abiding by equal protection and nondiscrimination laws. While federal officials cannot and should not seek to dictate curricula, they have an obligation to address hostile learning environments and ensure that educators aren’t violating civil rights laws by demeaning racial or ethnic groups, such as through “privilege” exercises or race-based “affinity” grouping. They should also ensure that privacy, student safety, and free speech aren’t eroded or trampled on in the service of gender radicalism.
• Fix the federal student loan program. Indeed, after Biden’s illegal adventurism, it’s no longer a “lending” program by any normal definition. Rather, it’s become a program in which collegegoers borrow taxpayer funds, promise to pay the money back, and then don’t. Through a combination of legislation, executive enforcement, and cleaning up the Biden administration’s detritus, Trump’s Education Department could redesign federal lending so that it’s at least a breakeven for taxpayers and no longer susceptible to future progressive giveaways.
• Bust the higher education accreditation cartel. Today, colleges are governed by a cozy oligopoly of accreditors that raises stiff barriers to entry, mandates DEI, and ignores outcomes. It’s time to encourage the creation of new accreditors more attuned to cultivating dynamic, results-oriented higher education. A good deal of this can likely be accomplished through executive action, though one can also imagine a bipartisan legislative deal that addresses college cost, access, and accountability.
• Protect free inquiry in higher education. In his first term, along those lines, Trump issued a sensible but ineffectual executive order that lacked meaningful enforcement. Now, it’s time to do far more. His Education Department could use federal oversight to ensure that colleges that collect federal research funds actually promote and protect free inquiry, as they promise to do, or else lose those funds and become ineligible for future funds until they get their house in order. The federal education research apparatus should be purged of DEI and other ideological agendas, and the administration should appoint officials committed to translating those commitments into practice.
• Promote alternatives for those seeking high-quality, cost-effective workforce training. Far too much time and energy has been devoted to four-year colleges. This has created bloated academic preserves of groupthink where little is learned and not much gets done. There’s a need to overhaul federal rules governing apprenticeships, make it possible to use Pell Grants at a broader array of providers, such as trade schools, and embrace “skill-based” hiring in which jobs are no longer closed to qualified applicants simply because they lack a paper credential. Trump started on much of this in his first term, and now his team will have a chance to build on that work.
• Deliver on K–12 educational choice. This time round, Trump can finally deliver the big win for school choice that eluded him in his first term, and he can do so without expanding Washington’s educational footprint. Next year’s tax bill will offer a terrific opportunity for Republicans to include a tax credit based on the Educational Choice for Children Act, which would provide a historic federal boost for educational choice by supporting independent, state-based scholarship programs. This would deliver a catalytic boost without involving federal officials in designing or overseeing choice programs.

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This list is far from comprehensive. If Trump 2.0 accomplishes even a decent slice of this, it would constitute a historically successful tenure — whether or not the Department of Education is still standing.

Frederick M. Hess is the director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute.