Indeed, it’s unlikely that most people are even aware that the Education Department has virtually nothing to do with their local schools. It doesn’t provide funding for the buildings, textbooks, or teacher salaries. Nearly 90% of all K–12 public school spending comes from state and local sources.
What the federal government does is fund some low-income schools and special-education needs, money that can be easily meted out by the Treasury Department. Or, even better, it’s money that can be block-granted to states to administer as they see fit.
And thus far, none of the 80 staffers employed by the Education Department’s public relations office have been able to explain why the agency exists.
There’s no evidence that the Department of Education, whose budget has grown from $13.1 billion ($49.27 billion in today’s dollars) to $200 billion in 2024, has done anything to enhance the fortunes of children over its 42 years of existence. It might be difficult to believe this, but Americans learned how to read and write before 1980. Our biggest strides in literacy, in fact, were probably taken from 1960 to 1980. Test scores haven’t significantly improved since then, nor has the education gap between the rich and poor.
The biggest problem with the Education Department, and why politicians have a duty to dismantle it, is that it’s patently unconstitutional. It should never have existed.
President Ronald Reagan campaigned on closing the Department of Education in 1979, mere months after Congress created the Cabinet-level administration. The 1980 GOP platform proposed that Congress “dismantle” the agency, one of the few tangible alleged achievements of Jimmy Carter’s presidency.
In his first term, Reagan cut back the department’s funding while pushing for its legislative demise. Republicans were unable to overcome a Democratic majority in the House and centrist GOPers. But the president continued to call for dismantling the agency in the 1982 State of the Union address and then again in a 1983 national radio address, saying, “Better education doesn’t mean a bigger Department of Education. In fact, that department should be abolished.”
Though he gave up, Reagan’s central argument still stands. Constitutionality might not sit high on the hierarchy of political concerns in Washington, but “education” isn’t mentioned anywhere in the enumerated powers handed to the federal government. If Congress fails to dismantle it, I’m not sure that Trump shouldn’t shut it down, let some district judge slap him with an injunction, and take the issue to the Supreme Court.
Newt Gingrich’s conservatives also promised to “abolish the Department of Education, end federal meddling in our schools, and promote family choice at all levels of learning.“ By the time George W. Bush won the White House, however, Republicans were peddling the No Child Left Behind Act, undercutting local control by implementing well-intentioned national standards using federal funding as both carrot and stick. Top-down pressure gave locals an excuse to follow Washington’s lead rather than innovate and improve their own systems.
In 2009, the Obama administration continued the tradition, using the Education Department to help implement Common Core, which also aimed to standardize curriculums across the United States.
Though the existence of the Education Department holds the promise of nationalizing education policy, which is the ultimate goal of the Left, Democrats have mostly used the agency to compel social conservatives unilaterally to adopt left-wing cultural values.
In 2011, then-President Barack Obama had the Department of Education send a “guidance letter,” stripping due process rights of high school and college students accused of sexual misconduct — no longer allowing them to question accusers, review accusations, present exculpatory evidence, or call witnesses.
It was also through the Education Department that the Biden administration prohibited schools from barring transgender students from using the bathrooms of their choice but compelled schools to allow boys to participate in girls sports and teachers to use pronouns that corresponded with a student’s chosen “gender identity.”
Democrats don’t need the Education Department for these Title IX projects. They could just as easily weaponize the Justice Department to bully social conservatives.
Then, of course, there are the teachers unions. The National Education Association, the country’s largest union, and the American Federation of Teachers are suing the administration over Trump’s executive order. These public sector unions already funnel taxpayer dollars into political advocacy, helping elect national Democrats who, in turn, protect union monopolies and send billions in Education Department grants to support teacher “development” and other perks. It’s a racket.
These days, the Department of Education’s main concern is managing a massive student loan debt portfolio of $1.6 trillion. Under the Obama administration, the Education Department dramatically expanded the scope and size of the loan program, effectively socializing the industry and elbowing out private lenders.
It’s been a disaster. Over 80% of student loans taken in this country are either given by the government or fully guaranteed by taxpayers. The program might sound helpful in theory, giving every student a chance at higher education. In practice, it has incentivized schools to pump out throngs of debt-ridden, credentialed know-nothings. No sane bank would ever hand thousands of dollars to a young adult pursuing a degree in decolonization studies, theater, or journalism if it weren’t for the Education Department. The federal guarantee policy is a massive moral hazard that induces colleges to ignore the real-world needs of students as they charge astronomical tuition rates.
The Trump administration has already moved responsibility for managing the loans to the Small Business Administration, but it should be working to extricate the government from the business altogether.
In the end, as with many of Trump’s executive orders and actions, it will likely take Congress to act, or it probably won’t matter. Education Secretary Linda McMahon can limit the reach of the Education Department and transfer its responsibilities to other departments. But as soon as a Democrat returns, we will be back to expanding its reach incrementally. Congress made it. Congress should kill it.
Because the Education Department isn’t just useless and unconstitutional — it’s actively harming the country.