What’s New
After weeks of speculation, the White House issued an executive order Thursday calling for the closure of the U.S. Department of Education. The move, according to the Trump administration, will return “power over education to families instead of bureaucracies.”
The order is meant to fulfill a key campaign promise made by President Trump, who has also called for returning more authority over education to state and local officials. (Most decisions about how schools and colleges are run already happen outside of the federal government.)
This is political theater, not serious public policy. To dismantle any cabinet-level federal agency requires congressional approval.
Over the past two months, the president has repeatedly flexed his authority in seeking to punish colleges for allegedly failing to combat antisemitism on campus and allowing transgender athletes to compete in intercollegiate sports.
The secretary of education, Linda McMahon, has previously acknowledged that the department cannot be abolished without an act of Congress, since it was created by a 1979 law. But the administration has already cut the agency’s work force by nearly 50 percent, raising questions about whether it can still accomplish core functions required by law.
In a Thursday news release hailing the order as “historic,” McMahon pledged that the department could continue its work while lowering bureaucratic requirements and giving states more responsibility.
“We’re going to follow the law and eliminate the bureaucracy responsibly by working with Congress and state leaders to ensure a lawful and orderly transition,” she said.
The Details
Trump’s order calls on McMahon to “take all necessary steps” to “facilitate” closing the department without eliminating most of its core functions. The education secretary should continue “to ensure the effective and uninterrupted delivery of services, programs, and benefits on which Americans rely,” the order states.
Those programs include distributing more than $100 billion in student financial aid through Pell Grants and loans, as well as seeking to ensure that students’ civil rights are protected while they pursue their college education.
The president, however, has depicted the department both as a hindrance to academic success and a vehicle for enforcing partisan and progressive ideology.
A fact sheet provided by the White House said the department has spent more than $3 trillion without improving student achievement, and burdens states and educational institutions with regulations and paperwork that keep educators from helping students.
In particular, the order seeks to eliminate any programs that promote diversity, equity and inclusion — which the White House condemns as “race-based discrimination” — or protect transgender rights.
The Backdrop
Eliminating the department has been a goal of Republican politicians since it was created nearly 50 years ago under President Jimmy Carter.
In a separate news release sent before Trump signed the order, the White House cited statements from several Republican governors supporting a shutdown of the department.
“Abolishing the department would usher in a new era of American educational excellence,” Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida wrote in an opinion piece for The Wall Street Journal, calling for federal support for education to come in the form of block grants to provide more flexibility and less oversight.
In his column, DeSantis notes that states already “implement their curriculum and operate their education programs.”
The Stakes
The order comes a little more than a week after McMahon announced that the department was laying off some 1,300 staff members; another 600 employees had already decided to leave the department. Now about half of the agency’s work force is left to carry out most of the same responsibilities.
The cuts were deepest in the offices that oversee federal student aid and civil-rights protections — two of the department’s functions that are spelled out in law. Nearly all of the staff that oversee the department’s extensive data-collection and reporting programs were also laid off.
The administration has also announced that it will focus its civil-rights enforcement on allegations of antisemitism, potentially leaving thousands of cases involving sex discrimination and accessibility for disabled students in limbo.
Numerous advocacy groups that oppose Trump’s order have warned that the lack of staff in those areas could lead to severe consequences for both individual students as well as colleges.
“Significant harm already has been done to students and taxpayers by the Trump administration’s arbitrary and misguided steps to hollow out the department,” said Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education and a former undersecretary of education under President Obama, in a statement.
“This is political theater, not serious public policy. To dismantle any cabinet-level federal agency requires congressional approval,” Mitchell wrote, “and we urge lawmakers to reject misleading rhetoric in favor of what is in the best interests of students and their families.”
