President Donald Trump might not be able to fulfill his oft-repeated campaign promise to obliterate the U.S. Department of Education.
But there is plenty the incoming administration can do to kneecap the main federal agency responsible for K-12 schools, both critics and supporters of scaling back the department say.
When Trump and his allies say they want to get rid of the Education Department, they’re really talking about the underlying principle of “shifting control and power away from the federal bureaucracy, back to local schools and back to families,” said Jim Blew, who served as an assistant secretary in the department during Trump’s first term. “You don’t need to abolish the Department of Education” to do that.
But whittling down the agency—by reducing its staff, offering less guidance to states and districts, or slashing its budget—would make it a lot less effective at ensuring taxpayer dollars are spent effectively and in service of vulnerable children, said Arne Duncan, who served as secretary of education under President Barack Obama.
Long-time federal employees who serve no matter who the president is “just made me better every day. They were so thoughtful,” Duncan said. “People can critique or disagree with any policy move we made. But I don’t think anyone has ever been able to say we did anything that lacked integrity, or that we ever misspent a nickel of taxpayer money. A huge amount of credit goes to the career staff for making sure we did things equitably and fairly and transparently.”
Getting rid of the Education Department has been on the GOP wish list since the agency opened more than four decades ago. But it has never happened in part because it requires congressional action.
Republicans are set to control both chambers of Congress come January. There’s already at least one piece of legislation aimed at deep-sixing the Education Department.
But that bill—or a similar measure—would need 60 votes in the Senate to overcome procedural hurdles. Republicans will only hold 53 seats seats in the chamber next year—and not all GOP lawmakers are convinced the department needs to go.
Though Trump campaigned on abolishing the Education Department before his first term, he rarely talked about that pledge once he took office, beyond a quickly forgotten 2018 proposal to combine the agency with the labor department.
Trump, however, has made slashing the federal bureaucracy a signature priority of his second term. He appointed a pair of big-name billionaires—Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy—to head up a new “Department of Government Efficiency,” or DOGE, charged with overseeing a massive reduction of the federal workforce and budget.
DOGE is seeking to hack some $2 trillion in spending, according to its social media account. And Ramaswamy has suggested cutting as much as 75 percent of the federal workforce.
“We expect mass reductions. We expect certain agencies to be deleted outright. We expect mass reductions in force in federal agencies that are bloated,” Ramaswamy said on Fox News last month, in response to a direct question about abolishing the Education Department.
A reduction in force at the Education Department could involve reclassifying federal workers
Accomplishing those goals without congressional approval may require upending how the federal workforce has operated for decades.
Federal workers generally fall into two camps. Most staffers are career employees, who are chosen based on merit principles and serve under presidents of all political stripes. It is difficult to remove those employees, in part because of protections aimed at retaining institutional knowledge and expertise and keeping the federal workforce as apolitical as possible.
Most agencies also employ a smaller number of political appointees—including the Cabinet heads, like the education secretary—chosen by the administration in power. These employees are easier to let go and are expected to resign prior to the inauguration of a new president.
At the end of his first term, Trump signed an executive order that would have allowed his administration to turn any career role that includes a policy advising component into a political position. That would have removed many career staffers’ job protections, allowing them to be terminated more easily and replaced with a staffer of the Trump team’s choosing—or not replaced at all.
President Joe Biden quickly rescinded that executive order when he took office in 2021. But the incoming Trump administration is expected to reinstate it, and to use it a major tool for slashing and potentially politicizing the federal workforce.
The legality of such a move is an open question. But just the threat of it might spur employees to retire early or pursue work outside the federal government, said Rachel Perera, a fellow in governance studies at the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution, a think tank.
Even if Trump doesn’t pursue an executive order aimed at mass role reclassifications and removals, his team could crack down on telework, shift employees’ job responsibilities from programs they’ve spent years developing expertise in, or make key decisions without involving career employees.
Such moves—which don’t require congressional approval—would make “a job at the U.S. Department of Education not a very fun one, not a place where people feel good going to every day,” said Anne Hyslop, who served in the agency during the Obama administration and is now the director of policy development at All4Ed, an equity-focused research and advocacy organization.
What’s more, some of the policies Trump has proposed—such as attempting to take federal funding from school districts that embrace diversity, equity, and inclusion—may be at odds with some federal employees’ personal values, Perera added.
“I think you’re going to see people leave voluntarily, especially if they’re being directed to carry out policies that they don’t agree with, or they are questioning the legality of,” Perera said.
For his part, Blew, who spoke highly of most of the department’s career staff, isn’t advocating for mass removal of federal workers, which he expects would be “a battle.”
Taking a “minimalist” approach, rather than an “expansive” one, to policy implementation would accomplish similar goals, he said.
“There’s a natural tendency in bureaucracies for people to create work for themselves. And so, if you eliminate the stuff that you’re asking your department to do, you can scale back your staff,” Blew said. “You can simply streamline the charge of the department and then have people realize, ‘well, I’d better go get another job’” potentially at another federal agency with a broader mandate, Blew said.
(Career employees often get hiring preference for roles in other parts of the federal government.)
Education Department staffing declined during Trump’s first term
During Trump’s first term, his education secretary, Betsy DeVos, worked to convey the message that the department’s power was on the wane.
For instance, in the fall of 2017, DeVos scrapped hundreds of guidance documents, many of which were out of date or pertained to laws no longer on the books.
She also sought to combine offices within the agency. For example, she merged the office of innovation and improvement into the office of elementary and secondary education. And she shifted the privacy office to the office of the chief information officer.
Trump’s first term saw an overall staffing decline. The department had 4,150 full-time equivalent employees in federal fiscal year 2016, which began on Oct. 1, 2015, the year before Trump was elected. Staffing levels dipped as low as 3,582 in fiscal year 2019, which started Oct. 1, 2018, a 13.7 percent decrease from three years earlier, according to the Biden adminisration’s budget proposal
By the end of the Biden administration, that trend had reversed. The agency estimated it would have 4,450 full-time equivalent employees in fiscal year 2025, which began Oct. 1 of this year, according to the budget document.
Overall job satisfaction at Education Department also plummeted during Trump’s tenure.
The Department of Education ranked dead last among 27 mid-size federal agencies when it cames to employee job satisfaction in 2018, according to the Partnership for Public Service, a nonprofit that ranks the “best places to work” in the federal government. Employees’ overall “engagement” score went from 59.7 on a 100-point scale in 2017—the year Trump took office—to 47.3 in 2018, based primarily on employee surveys.
Workers’ job satisfaction appears to have brightened under Biden. Last year, the education department had the 19th-highest morale among workers at mid-size agencies, according to the same survey. And the agency’s overall engagement score ticked up to 68.8.
A slimmed-down department has consequences for states
Those staffing declines—and potentially the morale dip—resonated far beyond the beltway.
Some state officials charged with administering major federal programs such as Title I grants for disadvantaged students and state grants for special education under the Individuals with Disabilities Act reported sluggish responses to questions and a lack of clear direction from the federal government.
Trump’s education team “didn’t really pay a lot of attention to the nuts-and-bolts technical assistance,” said Chris Reykdal, Washington state’s elected superintendent of public instruction, who took office in 2017. “We got that back under the Biden administration, lots of communication from multiple parts” of the Education Department.
While Reykdal appreciates an emphasis on state flexibility, he also prizes the department’s role in helping state agencies think through how federal programs can best serve poor students and those in special education.
When it comes to how “we should protect kids or to lift them up or support them … we want lots of technical guidance on that,” said Reykdal, whose position is non-partisan but who previously served as Democrat in Washington’s state legislature. “We want to do it right. We want to do it with fidelity. We want to know the best practices around the country and [access] any technical resources they have.”
Reykdal worries that under “Trump 2.0,” the federal government will roll back civil rights protections for vulnerable students. Though he believes Washington state’s own laws and regulations can provide similar support, he’s concerned that won’t be the case across the country.
Kirsten Baesler, North Dakota’s superintendent of public instruction, described her experience during Trump’s first term very differently.
Baesler, who was elected to her nonpartisan post in 2012, recalled the Obama years as a “real struggle,” during which the department used waivers and competitive grants to champion policies that she didn’t think were workable for her largely rural state.
The Trump administration’s focus on local and state control was a welcome change, said Baesler, who did not receive the North Dakota Republican Party’s endorsement for her successful reelection campaign this year, but has gotten its backing in past election cycles.
Baesler said she had no trouble getting responses to her queries. In fact, she spoke frequently with DeVos herself, she said, not just members of her team.
The overall message was: “The expectations were high,” she said. “The ‘how you were gonna get it done’ was really on our shoulders.’”
