The Department of Education May Be Gone, Finally

News came out last week that the Trump administration is stepping up efforts to dismantle the Department of Education. We’ve already seen a large number of staff reductions in the department, which the Supreme Court authorized last summer, and Trump moved to end DEI programming within days of his inauguration. This next move aims to finish the job, mainly by farming out the department’s mandated activities such as the federal student loan program to other departments in the executive branch and to the states.

We’ll see. The initiative strikes some as a common-sense move to lower costs and end wasteful programs such as a $75 million payout made in the last days of the Biden term to eligible nonprofit organizations to increase “educator diversity” in America. But the Trump ambition is a massive one and has no historical precedent. It was Ronald Reagan who said, “Government programs, once launched, never disappear. Actually, a government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we’ll ever see on this earth!” And William F. Buckley once observed (if I recall correctly) that the only way to kill a government program is to convince the groups who benefit from it that, ultimately, those benefits do more harm than good, which is not an easy persuasion when the good is immediate and the harm delayed (as in the case, for example, of welfare dependency). 

Added to those resistances is the fact that when a program begins and grows, a network forms around it and constitutes a new and often powerful interest group in America. If the program reaches sufficient size—that is, if it manages enough funding—the network has the status of a professional industry. In the case of the Department of Education, the constituents include consultants, researchers in schools of education, grant writers, lobbyists, the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association, and various NGOs, not to mention actual education providers ranging from states and districts to curriculum creators and testing companies. None of those parties want to end the income stream that has flowed for many years.     

This latter fact, however, may enable the plan to work this time, finally, after so many years of Republicans calling for the abolition of the department. The method here is to eliminate some elements and personnel and programs, keep some programs within the department (for now), but move other units into other departments (Labor and Interior are mentioned) where they can be administered as they always have. This reorganization will cut significantly into the specific education bureaucracy and end the monolithic left-wing bias that reigns there. 

At the same time, and most importantly, much of the education-earmarked money will continue to be delivered in one way or another, though through other offices. As the Associated Press reports: “Education officials say the moves won’t affect the money Congress gives states, schools and colleges.” Those ongoing recipients will not be inclined to complain and to protest. Yes, the DEI industry is incensed over the administration’s assaults, but President Trump ran against the ideology and won. Besides, the general public isn’t as wedded to the DEI system as the media would have us believe. A poll earlier this year conducted by The Economist and YouGov found that 45 percent of Americans favor terminating DEI programs, while 40 percent opposed the move. And we could add another rationale that has popular appeal, namely, the performance metric: Every time in recent years the department has issued national test scores in reading, math, and other subjects, the public wonders if the department has done its job (see here for the recent NAEP scores in reading for twelfth-graders).

So, the chances of a near-total elimination of this nearly fifty-year-old bureaucracy may be pretty good. But one thing must be spared: the National Center for Education Statistics. The reason, for me, is that NCES is a primary source of data on college enrollments, graduation, demographics, fields of study, and so forth. As such, NCES has provided critics of trends in higher education with solid empirical evidence that gainsays the contentions of education defenders that all is well on campus, “nothing to see here.” The administration should be told to preserve the center. It is a best friend of reformers.