President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to cut the Department of Education and move its responsibilities back “to the states.” The change would be an unprecedented move as no Cabinet department has ever been dissolved without being reorganized in some way.
The Washington Examiner spoke to three leading education policy experts, who explained how cutting the Education Department would work, if it is realistic, and what the effects would be.
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“I think it’d be fine,” Frederick M. Hess, senior fellow and director of education policy studies for American Enterprise Institute said. “The Department of Education is extraordinarily bureaucratic. It creates extraordinary amounts of red tape for the nation’s schools, especially relative to the money it actually provides.”
Hess said that under the Obama and Biden administrations, the department became “a political entity frequently engaged in promoting particular ideological nostrums” which he called “massively problematic.” He added that the two Democratic presidents “make the best possible case for abolishing the department. So, yeah, I think downsizing the department, or even abolishing it, is certainly wholly sensible.”
What is the process to dissolve the Department of Education?
In order to dismantle the department outright, congressional legislation would be required. “You need 60 votes in the Senate” unless the filibuster were to be abolished first, Hess said. “So that’s not going to happen.”
Instead, it is more likely that a reconciliation bill is passed, which could defund a number of programs and bureaucratic positions. This would only require 50 votes in the Senate, with Vice President-elect J.D. Vance casting the tiebreaking vote. This type of bill is often used to make changes to federal spending in a way that aligns with the congressional budget resolution.
“Congress would also have to amend legislation that grants the Secretary of Education authority to make certain decisions to the new secretaries, or other officials,” Neal McCluskey, director of the CATO Institute’s Center for Educational Freedom ,said.
A third option would be for Trump to use executive action to “move some functions out of” the department, Chester E. Finn Jr., distinguished senior fellow & president emeritus of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute said.
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“Eliminating the agency isn’t the same as eliminating the myriad programs that it runs, billions that it sends out, and multitudinous regulations that it enforces (mostly pursuant to laws enacted by Congress),” Finn, who is also Volkner senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, added. “Undoing those functions, programs, activities means dealing separately with the laws that created them — dozens and dozens.”
If the department is abolished, but its Congressionally-mandated functions are not, Finn said this would be “a mostly symbolic act” akin to simply “taking the name off the door.” Before the DoE was created in 1979, the now-defunct Department of Health, Education, and Welfare had an “education division that was virtually equivalent to the Dept of Ed without being a separate Cabinet department.”
Depending on how dissolving or reducing the DoE is executed, McCluskey said he thinks “the transition could be done in a couple of years, though three might be more realistic for the government.”
He said that if K-12 programs are eliminated, they could likely be block-granted to the states “and either kept that way and administered by some other department, or dissolved over maybe six years, with the initial amount reduced by a third every other year.”
“Student aid programs could be similarly phased out, starting with caps on grants and loans and reducing those every two years,” McCluskey added.
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How many federal workers would this affect?
There are currently over 4,000 bureaucrats employed by the Department of Education. If the department were to be eliminated entirely, Finn estimated that only “a few hundred — attached to the ‘office of the secretary,’ ‘office of the deputy secretary,’ etc. — would be eliminated. But the rest are attached to programs and functions.”
McCluskey said that much of the reduction “depends on the characteristics of each employee” and whether they have federal job protections. Theoretically, every DoE employee could “simply be transferred” to another department, particularly if that department absorbs the program they are attached to.
However, McCluskey said, “Presumably, there would be some redundancies with the merging department,” and this may impact which bureaucrats would be transferred and which would be terminated.
On the other hand, Hess said that through a reconciliation bill, “you could eliminate funding for many, or most of those positions.”
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What programs would be immediately cut?
The Department of Education has spent about $80 million in 2024. Its main functions include developing and implementing policy, providing federal funding to schools, enforcing civil rights, supporting special education, managing student financial aid, performing data collection and research, and providing resources for teacher development.
To eliminate many programs, Finn said that Congress would have to terminate, rewrite, or amend the authorizing legislation “or stop funding via the appropriations process,” but mentioned there would be “serious pushback” against this from “interests that benefit from the money.”
Hess identified three key programs that the DoE spends the most on and could be eliminated if the department was abolished: Pell Grants for low-income students to go to college, Title I, which gives money to school districts serving low-income children, and special education, which provides funding for children with special needs.
The government allocated $24.5 billion for the Pell Grant in 2024, $18.6 billion for Title I, and over $15 billion for special education. McCluskey said that the savings “could be used for debt reduction.”
One of the “complexities” in eliminating these programs, Hess said, is that “not only do Democrats not want to cut” them, but neither do Republicans for the most part “even though they don’t like the federal footprint and all the federal rules.”
The move would not affect school lunches, as the National School Lunch Program is handled by the Department of Agriculture, and would have little-to-no impact on summer care or transportation as those are mostly handled by state and local governments with minimal federal funding, except for emergency relief.
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What would replace the Education Department?
It is unlikely that an outright abolition would happen, because, as Hess said, “you’re not going to get seven Democrats to vote to abolish the department of education no matter what.”
However, many of its responsibilities can be transferred to other departments. For example, Finn said “There’s been talk of transferring the student loan mess to [the] Treasury.”
McCluskey noted that, “The first Trump administration proposed merging the Education Department and the Department of Labor, creating a new department. Education could also be rolled into Health and Human Services, basically recreating what existed before the Education Department: the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare.”
“The parts could be sent to various other departments; student aid to Treasury, the Office of Civil Rights to [the Department of Justice], and K-12 functions to HHS,” he added. “Or, though very unlikely, all the programs [the Department of Education] administers could be dissolved, and the Department just eliminated.”
Finn also speculated that, if not the DOJ, the Office for Civil Rights could fall under Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s jurisdiction as Trump’s appointee for the Department of Health and Human Services under something similar to what used to be the HEW.
Would some states be impacted more than others?
The matter of which states would be most impacted largely comes down to which receive the most money from Title I, due to a higher concentration of low-income students, as well as special education.
McCluskey noted that “Poverty rates tend to be highest in southern states,” so they may face a disproportionate loss of federal K-12 funding.
Finn said, “POOR states would suffer the most, states full of poor folks (many of whom I believe voted for [Trump]!)”
Hess, on the other hand, noted that the overall impact would be “modest” because “in K-12 education, the federal share of spending is really very small, which is part of what makes all the federal overreach and rules so problematic.”
He said that “the feds only kick in about 10 cents on the dollar” overall, and that’s just two cents on the dollar for Title I. “So we’re not really talking about huge impacts from what might be realistic cuts.”
“It’s not clear that you would have big winners or losers among the states, because it tends to be earmarked based on which kids have been identified with special needs… some states might lose slightly more, some slightly less,” Hess added, but in terms of “the actual dollars involved, there’s not going to be a huge difference, one state to the next.”
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Would this mean a tax increase?
The Department of Education currently counts for around 10% of total education funding. If the states wanted to “compensate” for this, Finn says, “they’d definitely have to raise taxes.”
However, McCluskey and Hess paint a more optimistic picture. They suggested that states would be able to spend even less on education, and would therefore not result in tax increases.
“Were [the Department of Education] to disappear, state DoEs could likely be shrunk, because they are tasked with complying with federal dictates and helping to administer federal programs,” McCluskey said. “The federal government adds to state administrative burdens in exchange for federal funds.”
To the same point, Hess said many states employ up to a “couple hundred bureaucrats” whose jobs largely focus on “ensuring reporting requirements so that their schools get clean audits.”
“If you downsize the federal regulations and the federal demands, it’s not like you would need to grow the state agencies,” he added. “In fact, you would also be able to downsize the state agencies, because you would need fewer people filling out federal paperwork.”
What would happen to the ongoing Civil Rights investigations?
Following the Oct. 7, 2023 terrorist attack on Israel, accusations of civil rights violations against Jewish students on campus have skyrocketed. This has prompted countless lawsuits, and over 100 investigations by the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights.
Trump promised to remove federal funding and accreditation for schools found to have violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which ensures that all students have a right to an equal education. Under the Biden administration, no school has lost funding or accreditation over Title VI violations.
The Office for Civil Rights, or at least its responsibilities, would not be dissolved if the DoE is abolished, because “federal civil rights laws have to be enforced somewhere, unless terminated or amended by Congress,” Finn said.
The top department mentioned by all three experts where these responsibilities could be transferred to is the Department of Justice. If this happened, Hess predicts OCR “would be moved over wholesale, just with supervision of ideally a Cabinet that has a stronger culture of due process and careful investigation.”
He said that regardless of what department is in charge of upholding civil rights on campus, Trump will likely use the “Obama administration playbook” to tackle campus antisemitism, which he says Biden’s Secretary of Education “chose to be completely disinterested in actually addressing.”
This entails putting “extraordinary pressure to settle” on universities fostering antisemitic activity by “doing public record requests, launching an investigation, and threatening that if it finds evidence that these colleges have violated Title VI, that they will be deemed ineligible for federal funds, which would cost schools like Columbia or UCLA or Harvard potentially over $1 billion a year.”
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He explained that this is how Obama “got campuses to do star chambers” where he coerced schools to more forcefully address allegations of sexual assault by suing them until they “agreed to drop the evidentiary standard” in order to “kind of make this go away.”
“So you can imagine the Trump OCR, whether in the Department of Education, or somewhere else, going after these colleges with billions of dollars on the line, forcing them to acknowledge misconduct and embrace very aggressive remedies,” Hess said. “And then use that to make clear to the rest of the field that if institutions don’t want to be investigated for violating civil rights statutes, this is where they need to be.”
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
