Dismantling the Education Department

Conservatives have been working to correct President Jimmy Carter’s mistake ever since he made federal education programs into a cabinet-level agency. For decades, Republicans have said they wanted the U.S. Department of Education abolished as billions of dollars have been spent at the federal level, yet student test scores have steadily declined. Now, President Donald Trump is really starting to dismantle it.

Significant moves came immediately after Trump took office, with outside contract freezes and cancellations along with generous incentives for staff to leave the agency. About 600 staffers took an offer to quit. The first huge move, though, came this week, when about 1,300 staff learned that their services were no longer desired or required.

These staffing cuts reduced the workforce by roughly half—from 4,133 to about 2,200. But the bigger part of the story is that entire areas of the education bureaucracy are simply being closed. The law doesn’t require them, and on balance, they have been a net negative to society.

Entire regional offices are also being closed. This consolidation will hit the Office for Civil Rights staff the hardest, since the office’s enforcement follows a regional model. That is, a civil rights complaint was processed by one of a dozen regional offices, depending on the state in which a violation allegedly occurred. Now, with about half the regional offices closed, expect a new configuration of complaint management.

Additionally, the various Education Department buildings in Washington, D.C., reportedly will be consolidated into one building.

Combine these moves with the directive to staff that they work at the office rather than from home, and we may soon see an even smaller workforce as people choose to quit rather than return to in-person work.

From an organizational chart that I have seen, other parts of the education bureaucracy being consolidated or canceled include the International and Foreign Language Education programs, the Office of English Language Acquisition, and much or most of the Office of Communications and Outreach, the Institute of Education Sciences, and the Office of Federal Student Aid.

The International and Foreign Language Education program has long been a focus of complaints by conservatives who note that the graduate programs and students who receive funding from the program tend to be ideologically biased and tend to promote the countries being studied in preference over America.

I believe the Education Department when it argues that these changes will “better serve students, parents, educators, and taxpayers.” The cuts to superfluous offices will help the department focus on its statutory duties and essential services, such as processing federal student aid applications.

What comes after this for the department? It’s hard to predict. With or without a presidential executive order to dismantle the department to the fullest extent possible, and short of congressional action, Trump Secretary of Education Linda McMahon can still take many actions.

A key tool McMahon can use in dismantling the department may prove to be the General Education Provisions Act, which permits the secretary to offload programs to other agencies. The funding for such “projects of common interest” also may be transferred to the new host agency.

Requests to Congress to rescind annual funding for the department is another highly valuable tool.

After all, the billions upon billions of dollars spent to prop up states’ K-12 systems have not noticeably improved outcomes. Meanwhile, more than 40 million federal student loan borrowers hold around $1.6 trillion in debt, while large numbers have debt but no degree. The federal student loan system has been in utter chaos due to President Joe Biden’s several unlawful, unjust, extremely expensive schemes to cancel student loans.

Several other unlawful regulations and overzealous enforcement actions targeted against disfavored religious or for-profit colleges have further diminished the department’s credibility. At least this week’s dismantling reportedly includes ending the Office of Enforcement, the source of such Kafkaesque investigations and punishments.

Meanwhile, Trump’s government-wide executive order to rescind 10 regulations for every new one created should be a boon to the deregulatory aspect of dismantling the department.

Finally, one should hope that we see an end to the little feel-good programs and announcements that cost department resources but do not improve education. For example, “Green Ribbon Schools” celebrating environmentalism are an easy cut, and so are “Blue Ribbon Schools” celebrating “progress in closing achievement gaps.”

One would expect that we’ll see much more dismantling of a department that never should have existed in the first place and has proved that for 45 years running.

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