Whither the Department of Education?

What is to become of the Department of Education (DOE)? Trump promised to get rid of it, and Elon and Vivek say they will follow through and “delete” it. What does the Department of Education do, anyway? And will it be missed?

First off, what does the DOE not do? It does not choose textbooks or curricula, and it does not hire teachers. That has for a long time been done on the local or state level. What DOE does, broadly, is administer various entitlement and grant programs, passing down federal funds to local schools and the states. That those funds are often contingent on schools following various social justice dictates, such as Title IX on discrimination in school sports and activities by sex, is where the rub lies. (See Project 2025, below.)

A good place to start in understanding what DOE does is with Sen. Mike Rounds’s (R-SD) Returning Education to Our States Act (S. 5384), which seeks to eliminate the DOE and “redistribute all critical functions under other departments.” Rounds said the department has moved beyond its mission. 

“The Federal Department of Education has never educated a single student, and it’s long past time to end this bureaucratic department that causes more harm than good,” Rounds explained. “Local school boards and state departments of education know best what their students need, not unelected bureaucrats in Washington, D.C.”

Under his plan, DOE programs and presumably some of its 4,200 employees would be spread across the departments of Interior, Treasury, Justice, State, and Health and Human Services as follows:

• Relocate all functions, programs, and authorities of the Secretary of Education under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act to the Department of Health and Human Services.
• Relocate each authority and program of the DOE’s Office of Indian Education to the Department of the Interior.
• Relocate the Fulbright-Hayes program to the State Department.
• Relocate each Impact Aid program to the Department of Health and Human Services.
• Relocate the Federal Pell Grant program, the Federal Family Education Loan Program, the William D. Ford Federal Direct Loan Program, Health Education Assistance Loan program, the programs under the Education Sciences Reform Act of 2002, the Educational Technical Assistance Act, and the Federal Perkins Loans Program to the Department of the Treasury.

Further, the Secretary of the Treasury would make allocations to states to support elementary and secondary education, including career and technical education, based on the number of kids enrolled in public, private, and home schools. States can use this funding for any purpose relating to early childhood, elementary or secondary education. Treasury would do the same for college and university money allocated by in-school population. The Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice would become responsible for enforcing civil rights laws applicable to the grant programs. (DOJ enforces civil rights through litigation, not through the threatened nonjudicial withholding of education funds, as is the case with DOE.)

“For years, I’ve worked toward removing the Federal Department of Education,” said Rounds. “I’m pleased that President-elect Trump shares this vision, and I’m excited to work with him and Republican majorities in the Senate and House to make this a reality. This legislation is a roadmap to eliminating the Federal Department of Education by practically rehoming these federal programs in the departments where they belong.”

Critics, particularly in Heritage’s Project 2025, see efforts like Rounds’s as doing too little to change the philosophy behind a federal role in education. Some might see Rounds’s rehoming bill as something akin to shuffling the deck chairs around on the Titanic. Trump himself says he has bigger plans: “On Day One, we will begin to find and remove the radicals, zealots and Marxists who have infiltrated the federal Department of Education, and that also includes others, and you know who you are. Because we are not going to allow anyone to hurt our children.”

Speaking of his secretary of education nominee, Linda McMahon, Trump said, “As Secretary of Education, Linda will fight tirelessly to expand ‘Choice’ to every State in America, and empower parents to make the best Education decisions for their families.” Taking education choices away from the DOE and handing them to parents is also a central focus of Project 2025.

Project 2025 is a focal point for DOE reform/elimination and goes further than Rounds. The Project says, “Federal education policy should be limited and, ultimately, the federal Department of Education should be eliminated. Ultimately, every parent should have the option to direct his or her child’s share of education funding through an education savings account (ESA), funded overwhelmingly by state and local taxpayers.”

Title I is the largest portion of federal taxpayer spending under this federal education law, and the section provides additional taxpayer resources to schools or groups of schools in lower income areas. Over a 10-year period, federal spending should be phased out and states should assume decision-making control over how to provide a quality education to children from low-income families. Some big changes in there, particularly the use of ESA’s to hand control over education directly to parents, given DOE’s poor track record—federal intervention in education, the Project states, has failed to promote student achievement. After trillions spent on the collective programs at DOE, “student academic outcomes remain stagnant.” The ESA’s would be usable at both public and private schools, a major win for religious education and homeschoolers.

At its core, Project 2025 wants to reduce the Federal level of involvement in education to zero, especially administratively, and leave the states—if not the parents—responsible for funding and controlling education locally.

In addition, the Project wants to treat taxpayers like investors in federal student aid. Taxpayers should expect their investments in higher education to generate economic productivity. When the federal government lends money to individuals for a post-secondary education, taxpayers should expect those borrowers to repay. It says,

The [Biden] Administration drastically expanded college student loan forgiveness. The new administration must quickly commence negotiated rulemaking and propose the department rescind these regulations. In fact, the next Administration should completely reverse the student loan federalization of 2010 and work with Congress to spin off FSA and its student loan obligations to a new government corporation with professional governance and management.

Project 2025 also gets into more “philosophical” areas, redefining sex in strictly biological terms for Title IX purposes, eliminating any benefits based on race, and establishing a Parental Bill of Rights for Education (“No public education employee or contractor shall use a pronoun in addressing a student that is different from that student’s biological sex without the written permission of a student’s parents or guardians,” “Prohibit accreditation agencies from leveraging their Title IV gatekeeper role to mandate that educational institutions adopt diversity, equity, and inclusion policies”) to push back on “woke” ideas in education.

There’s a bit of dissonance in Project 2025 regarding education that will need to be resolved; it also remains to be seen whether the incoming administration views Project 2025 as a poisoned well. The primary goal is the elimination of the DOE, but at the same time, secondary goals such as instituting a Parental Bill of Rights are exactly the kind of federal mandates that require a bureaucratic vehicle such as the DOE to push them down into recalcitrant states. It will be interesting to watch how this is resolved, and important to see what effect it has on the education of our children and the future of our country.