The momentum to abolish the U.S. Department of Education following the election of Donald Trump, who campaigned on such an effort, has already reached Congress with a newly introduced bill that seeks to dismantle the agency.
The bill, sponsored by Sen. Mike Rounds, a Republican from South Dakota, represents another stab at realizing a perennial GOP objective to dissolve the department, which experts have said would be a challenging undertaking.
This year’s effort comes with internal skeptics mostly out of the way and Democrats losing control of the Senate, meaning there will be fewer guardrails to stand in the way of Trump’s vision.
Still, it will be no easy feat to abolish the department, especially quickly. Ending the agency would require approval from Congress, and the expenditure of political capital that Trump may apply to other campaign promises first.
The most recent bill would have to clear the Senate’s Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions committee before advancing further in the chamber, where most measures require 60 votes to advance. A similar effort, introduced in February 2023 in the House of Representatives, was never taken up by the education and workforce committee there. During Trump’s first term, an effort to combine the Education and Labor departments never got off the ground.
Still, “I don’t think people who are worried about this proposal should underestimate the possibility that they could do it,” said Michael Feuer, dean of the graduate school of education and human development and a professor of education policy at the George Washington University.
The bill would redistribute key programs to other federal agencies
Under the latest proposed legislation, key programs and funding streams would be moved to other federal agencies.
It would send the functions of the Education Department’s Office of Indian Education to the Department of Interior, which conserves and manages natural resources and relationships with the country’s tribal nations. It also oversees the Bureau of Indian Education, which runs and funds tribal schools.
The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, and other federal programs that assist students with special education needs, would move to the Department of Health and Human Services. Meanwhile, the Department of Labor would oversee career, technical, and adult education programs and employment programs for those who are deaf or blind.
A press release about the bill said the State Department would take the Fulbright-Hays Program, an initiative that awards grants to educators studying non-Western foreign languages and area studies.
And instead of the Education Department’s office for civil rights, the Justice Department’s civil rights division would take and investigate complaints alleging violations of section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, which deals with accommodations for students with disabilities; Title IX, which protects students from sex discrimination and harassment; and Title VI, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race.
The department’s research and statistics-gathering functions would move to the Department of the Treasury.
One of the Education Department’s most significant roles is its tracking of data, said Nathan Favero, a professor of public administration and policy at American University.
“Even many people who are skeptical of federal government spending on K-12 education, they often point to data collected by the Department of Education to make that case,” Favero said.
One of the Education Department’s largest charges—overseeing student loans for the country’s millions of college students and graduates—would also move to the Treasury Department.
Missing from the initial bill text is a mention of Title I funds—the federal government’s largest annual funding stream for K-12 education—which are distributed to districts with larger populations of children from low-income families. The bill doesn’t specifically mention smaller department funding streams, either, such as Title II, which funds teacher training and recruitment initiatives, and Title III, which funds services for English learners.
The bill, however, would send block grants to the states that they could use for “any purpose” related to early childhood, elementary, or secondary education. Under the measure, allocations would be driven by the number of students enrolled in each state’s public, private, and home schools without consideration to other factors such as how many children live in poverty or have other specific needs.
“The idea is that, even if a state has a large percentage of people who are opting out of public schools, they’re still going to get the same number of federal dollars going to that state, and the state decides how to allocate that,” Favero said. “They’re trying to set it up that way so states can funnel some of that money to private schools, to home schools.”
A spokesperson for Rounds on Monday did not immediately answer an inquiry seeking more details.
“It’s going to be very costly and very complicated, and it’s not clear that even the people who favor this are going to think benefits justify the cost and aggravation,” Feuer said.
And even if lawmakers maintain most Education Department functions, they still might not be as effective as they are under the same roof, Favero said.
“Right now when we have the Department of Education, we have an entire agency where the leadership is thinking 100 percent about education, because that’s their whole mandate,” he said. “Whereas if they slice and dice this up and it goes to different agencies … now education is just going to be a very small part of the portfolio that that organization does, and I don’t think their leadership is going to have the same attentiveness to steer new initiatives.”
There’s a long history of trying to abolish the department
Trump has repeatedly pledged to do away with the department, from his first term in the White House to the campaign trail in his most recent run for office. In naming his education secretary appointment, he charged Linda McMahon with sending “Education BACK TO THE STATES.”
Rounds said in a statement that he has worked for years to remove the department. He criticized the agency’s roughly $80 billion budget, and took aim at federal dollars going to states and schools “in exchange for adopting the one-size-fits-all standards put forth by the Department"—a frequent Republican criticism when public funds come with conditions attached.
“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,” he said.
In terms of redistributing agency functions across the federal government, Rounds’ plan follows many of the suggestions included in Project 2025, a Heritage Foundation initiative involving a number of Trump allies and former Trump aides to prepare for a conservative president. Project 2025 echoed many of the suggestions in a 1981 memo authored by then-President Ronald Reagan’s education secretary, just one year after the agency formed.
While the practical aspect of passing such an initiative through Congress shouldn’t be overlooked, Feuer said, the move symbolically sends a message, too. There should be greater federal interest in public education coming out of the pandemic, as schools battle persistent learning gaps, chronic absenteeism, and students’ beleaguered mental wellness, he said.
“To think that the rebound from COVID is not a national interest at a high-enough level to warrant continued federal involvement is just a travesty,” he said. “If anything, this is a time when we need more and more support for the idea that public education is a national interest.”
Since it was first created in a 1979 bill, there have been efforts to abolish the department, particularly by Republicans, though the department did see opposition from both parties at first, said Feuer. Reagan came the closest to nixing the agency, but the initiative ultimately fizzled.
“In the past, the idea has failed in large part because it really does go against the popular will,” Feuer said.
