Still Standing – Neal McCluskey

If bloated, ineffectual, unconstitutional government is your bête noire, the start of the second Trump administration was a heady time. You were promised $2 trillion in spending cuts, and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) seemed to be running rampant with its chainsaw. One of the administration’s prime targets was the US Department of Education, which over its 45-year existence has been a poster child for ineffectiveness, incompetence, and unconstitutionality. The administration eliminated nearly half of its workforce through voluntary separation deals and layoffs, and Trump issued an executive order for the Secretary of Education “to take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education.” Crucially, though, this was to be done “while ensuring the effective and uninterrupted delivery of services, programs, and benefits.”

Unfortunately, those high-energy days have seemingly ended, at least when it comes to cuts. Musk is gone from DOGE, which by its own reckoning has achieved savings of only around $200 billion, a tenth of the original goal. For the Education Department, while the US Supreme Court preserved its firings, momentum for deeper cuts appears to have waned. That might be because some cuts, such as for research contracts, are caught in litigation. The administration might also believe it has hit the constitutional limit on what it can ax unilaterally. Finally, it seems to a significant degree that Trump wants to control schools from Washington.

The prospects for eliminating the department, at least in the next few years, are poor, and that is largely because we are past what Trump can, or at least will, do himself. The president arguably can refuse to do things he believes are unconstitutional, even if passed by Congress, signed by previous presidents, and upheld by courts, but Trump has not made that case for ending the department that the Constitution gives no authority to exist. Trump likely believes that Congress created it and the programs it runs, and Congress must end them. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon has said that explicitly. Consistent with that, the administration has cut staff and contracts, but not outright ended major programs and offices.

So the ball is in Congress’s court. Unfortunately, there has not been much energy there for ending the department. This could just reflect the fact that Congress’s overwhelming focus, since Trump’s inauguration, has been on the One Big Beautiful Bill. Perhaps efforts to eliminate the department will rev up now that that is in the books.

There are currently several bills in the House and Senate aimed at ending the department, but so far none have gotten a groundswell of support. Two are just messaging: Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie (R) and Sen. Rand Paul (R) have introduced legislation simply saying, “The Department of Education shall terminate on December 31, 2026.” Alas, ending the department is not that simple. Over the years, Congress has tasked the department with running numerous programs, from Pell Grants to 21st Century Community Learning Centers, and given it such responsibilities as investigating allegations of civil rights violations by schools receiving federal funds. Those jobs would not just disappear were the department to end. Congress would either have to terminate them or send them elsewhere.

The other pieces of legislation would do those things. Sen. Mike Rounds (R-SD) produced a bill, the Returning Education to Our States Act, soon after Trump’s election. It would reassign education jobs to other federal departments and agencies, for instance, moving Office for Civil Rights responsibilities to the Department of Justice, while Federal Student Aid would be sent to the Treasury. It would also block-grant some monies. It has two cosponsors. 

In the House, there are a handful of bills, including the States’ Education Reclamation Act of 2025 from Rep. David Rouzer (R-NC) and a bill with no title from Rep. Barry Moore (R-AL). Like Rounds’s bill, these pieces of legislation are typically a mix of block-granting and moving responsibilities to other agencies. So far, Rouzer’s bill has the most cosponsors with 12.

Unfortunately, though many Republicans talk a good game about getting Washington out of education, they rarely act. That status quo remains unchanged. Even while Trump, the party’s undisputed leader, has spoken repeatedly about ending the department, the Senate Appropriations Committee voted 26 to 3 at the end of July to give the department $79 billion in discretionary funds for FY 2026, more than $12 billion higher than what Trump proposed. The committee also voted to keep programs Trump would have eliminated, such as TRIO and English Language Learner initiatives.

The root disincentive to act is likely that Americans are still inclined to think of education as a near-unqualified good. Members of Congress might know that the department is unconstitutional and incompetent, and the programs are ineffective, but when people hear that money is being cut for education, or an entire education department is targeted, they are aghast. They think education is good, so of course we should not cut it. Driving home all the negative impacts of federal “help”—stultifying rules, higher college costs, dangerous centralization—is harder to do than scaring people with the prospect of loss.

That said, the dangers of federal power were more clear in the recent past. What likely drove Trump’s emphasis on ending the department was anger among his supporters over prolonged school closures during the Covid-19 pandemic, and masking and vaxxing requirements when they reopened. Many believed that the country’s behemoth teacher unions—the National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers—had far too much influence in Washington keeping schools closed. Add this to a broader rejection of “expert” authority as Covid guidance whipsawed and the pandemic lingered, and the Education Department made for an attractive target. 

Had the crusade to end the department commenced in 2021, as Covid loomed over everything, public anger might have been sufficient to drive serious congressional action. But when the epidemic petered out, widespread frustration with unresponsive public schools and agencies also abated. 

The best opportunity to eliminate the department may have come even earlier. The No Child Left Behind Act of 2002 (NCLB) gave Washington major power over public schooling. It mandated state standards in math, reading, and science; state standardized tests; and all students making “adequate yearly progress” to full proficiency on state tests by 2014. Schools that failed to make sufficient progress faced a cascade of interventions and punishments. Over time, this generated widespread aggravation over rigid rules and the reduction of education to standardized test scores. 

Resentment of federal intervention rose to a fever pitch after the 2009 Great Recession “stimulus” bill gave the Secretary of Education authority over $4.35 billion, which the Obama Administration used to create the Race to the Top initiative. States competed for shares of the money, including by adopting a specific set of national curricular standards and tests: the Common Core State Standards and attendant, federally selected tests. 

When districts started implementing the Core, which, among many problems, featured infamously convoluted ways to solve basic math problems, a national outcry ensued. Amidst this, the Obama Administration declared that states could get waivers out of NCLB’s 2014 full proficiency deadline, which no state was close to meeting. In exchange, states would, among other things, have to assess teachers using their students’ standardized test scores. This created a rare political confluence: teacher unions joined libertarians and small-government conservatives in opposing hyper-intensive federal micromanagement. The result was that in 2015 Congress replaced NCLB with the Every Student Succeeds Act, which ended the adequate yearly progress “accountability” lynchpin and forbade Washington from mandating adoption of the Common Core. 

The federal government had actually relinquished significant power. It was a rare and wonderful thing, but it also significantly reduced aggravation about federal education intrusion.

Perhaps Trump is trying to engineer such widespread anger again, by using federal funding to pressure schools and colleges to adopt his favored polices, including ending diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, participation of transgender female athletes in girls’ sports, and more. It seems unlikely, however, that Trump is being heavy-handed to poison people against the department. That would be some serious three-dimensional chess, and Trump seems to take pleasure in jawboning elite colleges like Harvard, Columbia, and UCLA, as well as blue states and school districts. This is another reason to think that at least the near-term prospects for ending the department are poor: Trump appears to like federal influence.

The Trump administration has catalyzed a national discussion about eliminating the US Department of Education, and that alone is progress. But the goal will not be reached until the public understands a basic reality: that something sounds good—more education!—does not mean it is good. Maybe Trump’s own, heavy-handed actions will help drive that message home, but not quickly enough to end the department in the next few years.