Donald Trump issued a bold campaign promise to his voters: he would eliminate the US Department of Education and give states all power to control education.
He didn’t lay out how he could get rid of the cabinet-level agency, but he alone cannot eliminate a department, making it an extremely difficult task to accomplish. Congress is requested to approve the creation or demise of an agency.
But, without cutting out the department itself, the incoming Trump administration, buoyed by a rightwing backlash to public schools that intensified after the Covid-19 pandemic, could alter key parts of the department’s budget and policies in ways that would be felt in schools nationwide. Project 2025, the conservative manifesto, also suggested getting rid of the department, signaling that it’s one area where much of the conservative movement is aligned.
Composed of about 4,000 employees, the Department of Education distributes federal funding to schools for specific programs, aimed mostly at lower-income students and students with disabilities, and sets some policy directives for those programs. It manages the country’s student loan profile. It oversees some civil rights policies as they relate to education, such as Title IX.
Much of education in the US is managed locally. Most funding comes from state and local sources, and state legislatures, education agencies and school boards set most standards and policies for their local schools.
Nonetheless, dismantling the department is a longtime conservative talking point that signals a desire to overhaul public education and, for some, to deprioritize public schools.
“At some level, it’s the wrong conversation, because you could abolish the Department of Education and little to nothing would actually change unless Congress also voted to cut or zero out funding for the various programs,” said Rick Hess, director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative thinktank.
But it’s not just symbolic – achieving it would cause major changes to K-12 and higher education throughout the country.
The elimination would send a “clear signal that we don’t view education as important in a democratic society”, said Kelly Rosinger, associate professor in the department of education policy studies at Penn State. Beyond just a signal, though, “there is some very real damage that could be done, regardless of whether a Department of Education exists, but especially if it doesn’t”, she said.
Could it be done?
Dismantling the education department has been a conservative rallying cry since the agency was created in 1979 by the Democratic president Jimmy Carter, who broke up what was then called the Department of Health, Education and Welfare. Ronald Reagan, Carter’s successor, called for the new department to be dismantled – but it remained intact.
Since then, removing it has been a mainstay of the conservative platform. Efforts to get rid of it typically don’t make it as far as a vote.
For Republicans, the department is an example of federal overreach and unneeded bureaucracy, Hess said. It’s also seen as creating a “VIP lane” for teachers’ unions and education advocacy groups to lobby and have a backchannel to the federal government, he said.
“They think it’s a gross violation of the constitutional scheme,” Hess said. “They think it takes too much power from communities and shifts it to bureaucrats in Washington.”
Education is not explicitly mentioned in the constitution as under the purview of the federal government, Rosinger noted. But the federal government now has an established role in ensuring students have “access to excellent educational opportunities”, regardless of their backgrounds, she said. It also has a clear role in maintaining civil rights in schools.
Despite the staying power of the conservative quest to dismantle it, the Department of Education probably won’t go away under Trump unless the filibuster is abolished.
In order to pass legislation in the US Senate, 60 senators in effect need to vote for an item because senators can use the filibuster to delay a bill indefinitely. Republicans will have 53 senators in 2025 – not enough to surpass the filibuster threshold.
Some of the department’s programs – like funding low-income schools and students with disabilities – are broadly popular with both parties, Hess said. Hypothetically, if the department were eliminated, but its components left largely intact, the programs could return to other agencies and revert to the structure in place before Carter created the department.
“Whether one abolishes the department or doesn’t abolish the department is an interesting kind of symbolic debate, and it matters because it tells us what people think, but it doesn’t significantly change the federal role,” Hess said. “What changes the federal role is whether these programs themselves get cut or changed, or whether the rules are rewritten.”
If the department were cut and programs moved elsewhere, Rosinger argues, there would be a loss of institutional knowledge on how these programs are administered. “It moves us away from a professional bureaucracy, a group of experts in education who are implementing policies that have to do with education,” she said.
Changes go beyond department itself
Instead of federal programs, Republicans propose sending states a chunk of money in the form of a no-strings-attached block grant, Hess said.
“Republicans would like to dramatically reduce the number of federal strings involved, and they would like to have a lot fewer bureaucrats,” he said.
Criticisms of block grants often include that money won’t go where the need is because there are minimal restrictions on its use, and that block grants are a way to cut and then phase out funding because they don’t meet the full need of what they’re intended to fund.
Programs that don’t fund students directly, like those that go toward teacher training, could be on the chopping block, Hess said.
Higher ed would also be affected by any changes. Student loan repayment and forgiveness plans that Biden implemented could be done away with under Trump.
Policies designed to promote racial equity and eliminate gender discrimination are likely to be in the crosshairs for Republicans, who will seek to rid federal policy of diversity, equity and inclusion programs and policies that they see as promoting LGBTQ+ ideology. For example, the Biden administration sought to expand Title IX to cover gender identity, which Trump is likely to roll back.
Project 2025 suggests various ways to expand vouchers and parents’ oversight of their children’s education that could be on the table.
Rosinger said that policies suggested by the project would make the public “lose trust in public education to be able to do the job that the federal, state and local governments are supporting it to do, in order to justify further defunding public schools and colleges”.