I’ve been getting a surprising number of stressed-out emails from college students and teachers asking about what’ll happen to them if President-elect Donald Trump shuts down the U.S. Department of Education. They want to know what’ll happen to their Pell Grants, their schools, or their retirement benefits. The level of concern is remarkable for a 44-year-old Republican promise to close a big, distant federal bureaucracy. Given such reactions, it’s worth explaining what’s going on with Trump’s promise to abolish the department—and why a lot of the breathless coverage may be missing the forest for the trees.
First, yes, Sen. Mike Rounds of South Dakota has already filed a bill to disassemble the department, and Trump, as in 2016, has said he’d abolish it. But the department isn’t going to be abolished. How do I know? Because it takes a law to dismantle the department, and that requires 60 votes in the Senate (in order to break a Democratic filibuster). There are only 53 Republican senators—and at least two of whom, Sens. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine, are no sure thing on this score.
Even if the razor-thin Republican House majority passes a bill and every GOP senator votes for it, Senate Republicans can’t get enough Democrats to get to 60. So, the department isn’t getting abolished. It’s just math. (Those Democrats who denounced retiring Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona for preserving the filibuster in 2021 but suddenly see its merits are, hopefully, feeling a little abashed about now.)
Second, because the talk of “abolishing” the department tends to be more metaphorical than concrete, it’s yielded a lot of ambiguity and confusion. For instance, Rounds’ bill “abolishes” the department by sending its component parts over to other Cabinet agencies like Treasury and Health and Human Services. Is that abolition? Technically, I guess, since the department would no longer have a webpage.
But, unless Congress specifically moved to slash or eliminate the department’s programs and funding streams, they’d still be there. This means that “abolishing the department” wouldn’t necessarily amount to change that anyone outside of Washington would notice. Indeed, since many federal employees who handle various programs would move with them, it’s not even clear how many of the Department of Education’s 4,000 employees would lose their jobs.
Third, I’m not suggesting the argument about abolishing the department is a “debate about nothing.” It’s symbolically important with implications for the size of the federal footprint. At the same time, the actual federal role in education depends far more on whether Republicans are inclined to downsize or eliminate major federal education programs than on whether those programs are housed in a “Department of Education.”
And, despite some of the turbo-charged rhetoric about the department, Republicans have shown little appetite for cutting or reshaping major federal education programs like Title I, special education, Pell Grants, or student loans. Last year, when given the chance to vote on converting Title I into a voucher program, barely half of House Republicans voted to do so. (The proposal lost 113-311.) And that didn’t even require any spending cuts. Republicans have historically shown little desire to reduce spending for low-income students or those with special needs, and that seems even more likely to hold after a Trump victory marked by broad support among working-class voters and parents.
And keep in mind that the federal role in education long predated the creation of the department in 1979—see, for instance, the Morrill Land-Grant Act of 1862, the Smith-Hughes Vocational Education Act of 1917, the National Defense Education Act of 1958, and the Higher Education and Elementary and Secondary Education Acts of 1965. With or without a department, then, there will be fights over Washington’s role in education.
So, ED isn’t going anywhere. That said, I certainly think it’d be just fine if the department were dismantled. After all, it makes sense for many of ED’s functions to be run out of other agencies. For instance, the federal student-loan portfolio is essentially a mega-bank. It’d make more sense to have it overseen by officials at Treasury who work closely with financial institutions and oversee federal revenue collection. And moving ED’s office for civil rights over to the Department of Justice could provide more in the way of appropriate supervision.
Meanwhile, from a governmental-efficiency perspective, the department’s 4,000-person staff includes no working educators but more than 1,000 GS-15 managers, each of whom earns more than $160,000 if they work in Washington. Streamlining the nonprogram staff seems eminently sensible.
But, since I fully expect the department to still be with us in four years, the big story is that a lot of the frenzied speculation about its fate is occluding the bigger issues that await. To wit:
Many of the real changes in the federal role will be a product of executive actions to reduce red tape, reshape program requirements, reorient key offices, or move select units to other agencies. And the clues to how that will shake out will depend heavily on who’s chosen to fill key roles and what the transition team puts forward. All of this has gotten precious little attention, as have intra-Republican debates about who gets key roles and what gets prioritized.
We’re also likely to see something truly novel in 2025: a Republican Department of Education exploiting its executive authority just as the Obama and Biden departments did. Years of battles over school closures, school choice, gender, social-emotional learning, critical race theory, and diversity, equity, and inclusion have birthed a web of right-leaning education groups that now offer a playbook of policies and a deep bench of potential Trump appointees eager to leverage civil rights law and federal oversight in pursuit of Republican ends.
Finally, we’re likely to see a historic expansion of federal support for school choice. There’s a procedure called budget reconciliation that can be used for tax and spending packages, and it requires only a bare majority in the Senate to pass such bills—meaning the GOP won’t need those Democratic votes. (This is how Biden passed the “Inflation Reduction Act.”) There’ll be a big reconciliation bill next year to extend the expiring 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, and it’s probably going to include a tax credit based on the Educational Choice for Children Act. It may not get much notice because it’ll feel technical, but it will amount to a huge victory for school choice.
So, what do I tell my earnest, nervous correspondents? I tell them the department isn’t likely to go away and that, even if it did, it wouldn’t really affect them. That said, there are big changes afoot that haven’t yet garnered the attention they deserve—and which, as a result, may wind up catching a lot of educators, advocates, and onlookers by surprise.
