The Department Of Education May Be On The Chopping Block. What Could That Look Like?

The Department of Education could be next on the chopping block as the Trump administration looks to take a paring knife to government bloat.

Trump is reportedly considering an executive order to dismantle the Education Department’s major functions and call on Congress to work on eliminating it altogether. The department has already placed dozens of staffers on leave.

Trump campaigned on shuttering the department, an ambitious goal that comes amid backlash to what critics say is the agency’s runaway spending and focus on “woke” indoctrination as students’ grades decline.

“I say it all the time, I’m dying to get back to do this. We will ultimately eliminate the federal Department of Education,” Trump said at a September rally in Wisconsin. “We will drain the government education swamp and stop the abuse of your taxpayer dollars to indoctrinate America’s youth with all sorts of things that you don’t want to have our youth hearing.”

The proposal was met with cheers on the campaign trail. But it’s also received support from experts like Jim Blew, who served as Assistant Secretary for Planning, Evaluation and Policy Development at the Education Department during Trump’s first term. Blew told The Daily Wire in November that there’s no doubt in his mind his former workplace should be eliminated.

“All of the Education Department’s core functions could and should be performed by other federal agencies,” said Blew, who also co-founded the Defense of Freedom Institute.

Blew’s proposal gets at another major criticism of the Education Department: it doesn’t do much educating. Though it spends $80 billion in taxpayer dollars each year, it has no say over public school curriculums, which are decided at the state and local levels. Instead, it doles out $18.4 billion annually for Title I, the low-income school district program, and $15.5 billion for special education. It also enforces certain Title IX civil rights laws and sets the rules for colleges to participate in the $1.6 trillion federal student loan program.

The Trump administration could potentially reassign some programs to other agencies while scrapping others. For example, some critics have proposed assigning the student loan program to the Treasury Department, having the Justice Department enforce Title IX, and turning Title I into a state block grant program with minimal federal oversight.

But Blew acknowledged that one way of doing this — no-strings-attached block education grants to local governments — could result in worse spending decisions.

“But they would be hard-pressed to do worse than the current system,” he said. “We’re betting that the local districts understand their communities better than people in D.C., that they know their students’ needs best, and that they can use the money more effectively.”

During the pandemic, even the hundreds of billions of extra COVID dollars the department doled out were not enough to keep children from failing academically. Students nationwide fell hopelessly behind in core subjects. Nine-year-olds saw their average reading scores fall five points in 2022, the largest decline since 1990, and their math scores fell seven points, the first-ever decline in math.

Parents lashed out at schools that kept depressed children stuck at home, struggling to learn through a laptop screen, then forced them to mask and social distance all day when they did return to the classroom. At the same time, remote learning allowed parents to catch a glimpse of the “woke” material their kids were learning.

Trump is not the first Republican to try to abolish the Education Department. Ronald Reagan also campaigned on getting rid of it, but he was met with resistance from Congress. However, the current frustration with public schools could be the tipping point Trump needs to nix the department.

The Education Department is responsible for enforcing certain civil rights laws, a mandate the Biden administration took full advantage of with a dramatic rewrite of Title IX guidance, which redefined sex to include “gender identity,” erasing protections for biological women in schools. The new interpretation garnered significant backlash and was reversed by the Trump administration this week.

Trump also signed an executive order on Wednesday prohibiting federal funding for schools teaching “radical, anti-American ideologies” including critical race theory and gender ideology.

Jonathan Zachreson, a conservative on the Roseville City School Board near Sacramento, said that while he agrees with slashing federal bureaucracy, the Trump administration could also use the department to reign in California’s far-left education policies.

Zachreson cited California’s recent legislation forcing schools to allow trans-identifying students to use the bathroom of the opposite sex, as well as prohibiting schools from having parental notification policies.

“I believe both of those things are a violation of federal law, but if you get rid of the Department of Education how are you to hold California and some of these very leftist states accountable? So that’s my biggest concern,” Zachreson told The Daily Wire in November.

“Before you abolish the Department of Education, I think you need to fix a couple of things,” Zachreson said, including making Title IX guidance “very clear.”

Andy Smarick, an education expert and senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, agreed that without a federal bureaucracy, Trump and future presidents would have less power to drive their education agenda.

“I’m fine with allowing state leaders to do more. But Mr. Trump and future presidents may like the idea of having federal power to advance their priorities,” Smarick told The Daily Wire last year.

“Federal rules unquestionably create burdens for school leaders and can create headaches for state and local policymakers,” Smarick said, but he cautioned, “If we get rid of the Department of Education, we have to be comfortable with the idea of lots of federal money and reduced oversight.”

Federal funding is not always a positive, though, Zachreson observed. California’s teachers’ unions “held kids hostage” during the pandemic by refusing to open schools until the Education Department gave them federal COVID relief money, he said.

To eliminate the Department of Education outright, Trump would need to clear a couple of hurdles, first and foremost, getting congressional buy-in. Trump would have to convince the slim Republican majorities in the House and Senate to pass legislation to close the department, and some experts have cast doubt on whether he will be able to do so since he needs a supermajority of 60 votes in the Senate.

But Republican lawmakers have already made moves. Senator Mike Rounds (R-SD) introduced a bill in November that would abolish the Education Department and transfer its programs to other federal agencies.

So far, it looks as though Trump is leaning towards reshuffling the department with an executive order, with the arduous route of a congressionally approved closure coming later.

And then there are teachers’ unions, which have always been linked to the agency. When President Jimmy Carter signed legislation creating the Department of Education in 1979, he was fulfilling a campaign promise to the National Education Association. And teachers’ unions still very much want the department around. This month, Randi Weingarten, the head of the country’s biggest teachers’ union, slammed Trump’s plans to close it.

Whatever the Trump administration is able to accomplish, it will take years to reverse the learning loss students have suffered recently. Blew, the former Education Department official, lamented that so many children are underserved by the current education system.

“The reform movement will continue until that injustice is erased,” he said.