Rebuttal: Down with the Department of Education

America’s education czars don’t need a Kremlin.

The headquarters of the Department of Education. (Credit: Chris Zubak-Sees)

In seeking to dismantle the Department of Education (ED), the Trump Administration has carried on a conservative fight that dates back to the ED’s creation in 1979. On March 20th, President Trump fired his second administration’s opening volley with Executive Order (EO) 14242, “Improving Education Outcomes by Empowering Parents, States, and Communities.” Testing the limits of presidential power, even under the unitary executive theory he touts, President Trump instructed Education Secretary Linda McMahon “to the maximum extent appropriate and permitted by law, take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education.” In response, McMahon has overseen extensive cuts. 

Inspired by this executive order and its ramifications, Ian Akers ‘27 penned a recent article in defense of the Department of Education. However, this article misses the reality of the Department’s failures. Past unsuccessful attempts by Republican Presidents to suffocate Washington’s educational bureaucracy led the New York Times to dub ED “the department that would not die.” Without congressional support, Akers recognizes, Trump’s efforts are equally far from likely to succeed. Nonetheless, they rightfully target a bloated organization that has overseen the decline of American education outcomes.

Akers correctly notes that ED “is not involved in setting curricula, managing schools, or the setting or educational standards” but instead is devoted primarily to managing educational funding and enforcing rules such as civil rights statutes. Despite hiring thousands of staff related to civil rights and other regulations, however, ED lacks any prosecutorial power. The ED can only withhold federal funds, which only constitute an average of 8.5% of local school budgets. After student aid programs, which were previously administered by a non-cabinet-level agency with significantly less bureaucracy, the lion’s share of ED’s budget funds public schools in hiring administrators to oversee implementations of the dozens of regulations they concoct. ED’s bloated staff, which oversees these regulations, is unnecessary when the Department of Justice already holds prosecutorial power.

Further, much of the problem lies in Akers’s observation itself: ED does very little educating. They may delegate federal funding, but spending per student has little direct correlation with educational outcomes. Meanwhile, federal college loan programs have generated a trillion dollars in student debt while fueling a price bubble inflating tuition costs since ED’s conception. The Pell Grant for low-income students predates ED; abolishing ED would not mean cutting low-income students out of college, but removing bureaucracy from their path there. Programs that Akers understandably lauds, such as the National Center for Education Research and the National Center for Special Education Research, do not require a cabinet-level Department of Education. This was recognized by progressive Democrat Joe Califano, the last Secretary of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) when he strongly opposed turning ED into an independent department. Instead, ED’s programs could be administered by sub-cabinet level agencies, as education policy was previously administered within HEW.

Akers fixates on the Trump admin's goal of returning educational power to the states, but abolishing the ED is more about returning power to families. Project 2025, a visionary policy manifesto from a plethora of Republican experts, outlines how abolishing ED would empower American families to pursue education at non-traditional options such as “faith-based institutions, career schools, and military academies” funded by state and local taxpayers through a system of educational savings accounts. Homeschooling is another alternative that has shown itself capable of producing students consistently outpacing public school graduates across fields. Further, the report outlines the movement of worthy ED programs into the purview of other departments while saving costs on ED bureaucracy. 

Already stagnant, educational outcomes have collapsed since COVID. These outcomes make clear that the strategies we have used, with ED at the helm, have not worked. We cannot afford to abandon our next generation. The time has arrived to put children’s futures into the hands of the most fundamental institution of governance, their families.