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President Trump campaigned on abolishing the federal education department. Still, even many conservatives were skeptical last year that it would happen.
Now, a flurry of activity from the Trump administration and his political allies has made a major reduction in the department’s work and influence, if not its outright dissolution, appear more likely.
Recent actions by Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service offer a preview for how Trump could try to hamstring the agency. Whether Congress or the courts will restrain the administration from what many experts view as an illegal power grab remains an open question.
At stake is the extent to which things like student rights, school accountability, and academic achievement can or should be federal issues as well as state ones. Major programs such as Title I spending for high-poverty schools and Individuals with Disabilities Education Act funding could remain intact even without a federal education department. Or they could get hit amid broader budget cuts and Trump’s push to fund private school vouchers.
Numerous political and legal hurdles remain in Trump’s way. Simply put, it would take an act of Congress not just to eliminate the department but even to significantly reduce its role and function. Much of the Education Department’s work is federally mandated, such as civil rights enforcement and oversight of career and technical education.
The programs the president could simply do away with represent “a comparatively short list,” said Jonathan Butcher, a senior research fellow in education policy at the conservative Heritage Foundation, which authored Project 2025.
Still, the Trump administration’s ongoing assault on the federal bureaucracy — including freezing billions in spending and shuttering two congressionally authorized agencies — raises major questions about checks and balances.
“What I am seeing right now is nothing short of a constitutional coup,” said William Resh, an associate professor of public policy and management at the University of Southern California.
How Trump could shrink the department without Congress
The Wall Street Journal first reported on the general outlines of a draft executive order to abolish or significantly scale back the department in early February.
But conservatives — including Trump — have talked about getting rid of the U.S. Department of Education since it began in 1979. Project 2025, a playbook for the second Trump administration, offered a roadmap to achieve that.
It called for moving key functions to other agencies: civil rights enforcement to the Justice Department, student loans to the Treasury Department, and research to the Census Bureau. Title I — worth over $18 billion this fiscal year — should be phased out, and IDEA funding should be turned into block grants for the states to administer, the plan says.
Trump’s order reportedly would call for the Education Department to present a plan to Congress for its own dissolution. Most observers believe there aren’t enough votes for that even among Republicans.
The next step would be for the Department to significantly reduce its own staff and budget, eliminate programs that aren’t legislatively mandated, and send key functions to other departments.
The proposal acknowledges that Congress has a role to play, and the administration cannot unilaterally get rid of a cabinet-level department created by Congress.
Butcher, who said he had not seen the draft order, said there could be other approaches. Trump could seek an opinion from the Department of Justice that most federal education law is not enforceable because the U.S. Constitution doesn’t name education as a government function.
The order could also direct the department to research whether certain programs are effective. Those programs found lacking could be struck from Trump’s future budget proposals.
Congress often ignores or downplays the importance of presidential budget blueprints. But the fact that these proposals would require congressional approval doesn’t make them “a fool’s errand,” Butcher said.
“The way that politics work, the president says what his priorities are, and the members of Congress who support his aims will work in the same direction,” he said.
Trump, DOGE alter federal staffing and funding
In contrast to his first administration, Trump has used executive orders and sudden spending cuts to push rapid and sometimes confusing changes.
Already, the Education Department has scrubbed references to diversity, equity, and inclusion from its website and placed dozens of employees on leave. It also ordered an end to programs that support transgender youth, a move that could affect school-based mental health services and homeless student services.
Some of these changes are within a president’s authority and others are not, experts said. That’s especially the case when it comes to not spending money that Congress appropriated.
The White House rescinded a late January budget memo ordering a freeze on nearly all federal grants after public outcry and legal resistance. But the department continues to suspend grants that run afoul of executive orders opposing DEI initiatives and transgender rights. States and non-profit organizations report that many contractors still can’t access federal funds.
The department was an early target of the U.S. DOGE Service, the cost-cutting team headed by billionaire Elon Musk that helped shutter USAID and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, both independent agencies authorized by Congress. DOGE drove the decision to abruptly cancel scores of research contracts and teacher training grants collectively worth nearly $1 billion.
Resh said it’s “unprecedented and problematic” how much power the president has given the unvetted group of young engineers who make up DOGE.
On Tuesday, Trump issued a new executive order directing every department to come up with plans to drastically reduce its workforce in cooperation with an assigned DOGE team lead.
These actions give a sense of how Trump could limit the department without dismantling it or even issuing an executive order to start that process. So far the Republican-led Congress has not asserted its budget authority to rein in Musk or Trump.
“Certainly it is possible to render the department inert,” said Donald Sherman, executive director and general counsel for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. “You demoralize the staff so much that everyone who can retire does so, you make it so nobody in their right mind would want to go work there, and you completely change the mission of the organization.”
The department: Crucial student support or failed bureaucracy?
Arne Duncan, who served as education secretary under President Barack Obama, said the Department of Education serves three main purposes: fighting for all students to have the same opportunities, pushing for higher standards, and providing opportunities for schools to innovate so that others can learn from them.
“For all the many, many challenges we have in education, they are being solved somewhere,” he said. “One of my great joys was traveling the country and seeing those examples. But we don’t scale.”
Public schools in America are run by state and local governments, which make curriculum, pay, and hiring decisions. Federal money is a small share of total K-12 spending at roughly 10%, but it plays an outsized role in high-poverty communities — urban and rural — and helps offset the costs of educating students with greater needs. Schools also benefit from programs outside the Education Department, such as the Medicaid and the National School Lunch Program, which is run by the Agriculture Department.
Federal money also comes with rules and conditions that steer states and school districts to adopt that administration’s preferred policies, whether that was teacher evaluation under Obama, an equity focus under Biden, or opposition to diversity and inclusion under Trump.
But the department also protects students’ educational rights, said Blair Wriston, senior manager of government affairs for EdTrust, a group that advocates for students of color and those from low-income families. In practice, that means the federal accountability system requires states to identify low-performing schools for interventions. Its Office for Civil Rights investigates complaints and pushes school districts to do better by their students.
Yet other agencies wouldn’t have the same expertise to do that student- and school-focused work, especially if they’re also being hollowed out, Wriston said.
Conservatives see an entrenched bureaucracy that hasn’t moved the needle on student performance, especially in the pandemic’s wake.
“The Department of Education doesn’t teach anyone,” Butcher, of the Heritage Foundation, said. “But if their goal was to not make things worse, they haven’t achieved that.”
And Betsy DeVos, education secretary in the first Trump administration, wrote in a recent op-ed that all the department does is move money around and “has almost nothing to do with actually educating anyone.”
Efforts to get rid of the department can’t be viewed in isolation, given the Trump administration’s backing for vouchers, Wriston said.
“From our vantage point, this is going to dismantle public education,” he said. “It’s going to leave our most disadvantaged students in the dark. It’s scary, to be honest.”
Lawsuits, public pushback may change Trump’s approach
Trump named Linda McMahon, a former wrestling executive who also headed the Small Business Administration during his first term, to lead the Education Department. He said her job is to put herself out of a job.
Her confirmation hearing, scheduled for Thursday, likely will be a referendum on the future of the department.
But the courts and public opinion will also play a role. Dozens of lawsuits have been filed to block Trump administration actions, including efforts to restore lost grant funding and keep DOGE out of sensitive student financial aid data. More are expected. Federal judges have issued at least 10 injunctions so far — and already found the Trump administration in violation of at least one of them, as many groups still struggle to access promised federal funding.
Already, the administration has shown it’s sensitive to public opinion, such as when it rescinded the funding freeze memo, said Sherman, the ethics watchdog, whose organization is also suing the government to block the firing of federal workers.
Sweeping education cuts could be felt just as much by red states as blue states, Resh pointed out. Meanwhile, he said, Congress can’t sit on the sidelines forever. The government is only funded through March. That could force Congress to confront Trump’s spending decisions or provide an avenue to legitimize them.
“The majority party is abdicating their constitutional responsibility to keep the executive branch in check,” he said. “They can [choose to] not exercise their oversight powers. They can hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil. But eventually they have to appropriate.”
Erica Meltzer is Chalkbeat’s national editor based in Colorado. Contact Erica at emeltzer@chalkbeat.org.
