Trump to Order Education Department Closed
In October 1979, Congress passed and President Jimmy Carter signed into law the Department of Education, consolidating several offices that had been spread throughout the federal government, most notably the old Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. (A new Department of Health and Human Services took the rest of that mission.) Pretty much ever since, Republican presidential candidates have paid lip service to ending it, arguing that education was a function for state and local governments.
It appears that President Trump is about to try to make good on the promise.
WSJ (“Draft of Trump Executive Order Aims to Eliminate Education Department“):
President Trump is expected to issue an executive order as soon as Thursday aimed at abolishing the Education Department, according to people briefed on the matter.
A draft of the order, viewed by The Wall Street Journal, directs Education Secretary Linda McMahon to “take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Education Department” based on “the maximum extent appropriate and permitted by law.”
The order has been in the works since Trump’s transition. In early February, the Journal reported that administration officials were considering such a move.
“The experiment of controlling American education through Federal programs and dollars—and the unaccountable bureaucrats those programs and dollars support—has failed our children, our teachers, and our families,” the draft order reads. The draft viewed by the Journal was labeled as “pre-decisional,” suggesting it could change.
The White House didn’t respond to a request for comment.
McMahon referred to the coming moves in an email to staff Monday night, soon after she was confirmed by the Senate, saying she would “send education back to the states.” She said Trump and the American voters had “tasked us with accomplishing the elimination of the bureaucratic bloat here at the Education Department—a momentous final mission—quickly and responsibly.”
The phrase “the maximum extent appropriate and permitted by law” raises two obvious questions.
Fully unwinding the department would require a filibuster-proof, 60-vote majority in the Senate, legal experts have said. The major programs it administers—including money for students with disabilities and student loans—are codified in law and have significant political constituencies. The draft order doesn’t mention Congress.
“It’s hard to think of functions” of the department that aren’t statutorily required “in large part because most are, or are in service of those functions,” said Julia Martin, an education lawyer at the Bruman Group.
McMahon, during her confirmation hearing, said Trump wasn’t intending to cut federal programs but to make them more efficient. She said Congress would need to go along with scrapping the department.
The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, a conservative blueprint for a GOP administration, has laid out a detailed road map for closing the agency, which included placing the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights in the Justice Department and the student-loan portfolio in the Treasury Department. It calls for phasing out a longstanding funding stream for schools based on how many low-income students they serve.
The Trump administration has already taken a series of steps to weaken the agency. It laid off probationary employees and offered others buyouts. It paused some of its civil rights enforcement work and canceled many grants and contracts related to research and teacher quality.
The administration has also used the agency’s civil-rights arm to attempt to root out antisemitism on university campuses, accommodations for transgender students, and diversity, equity and inclusion programs.
Some of those measures are clearly within the realm of presidential powers; others, likely not—at least as we’ve understood for the last 248 years.
As to “appropriate,” it’s certainly a debatable question. Public schools from K-PhD are mostly run by states and localities but there are all manner of Federal laws that they’re required to follow, not to mention all manner of Federal grants, loans, subsidies, and the like. Somebody has to administer all of that. And the bang for the buck seems reasonable in that regard:
With around 4,500 employees as of last year, the department is the smallest cabinet-level agency.
Further, the politics of this are questionable. Many commenters have noted that Trump has gone after programs and policies—foreign aid, trans girls and women in girls’ and women’s sports, and the like—that are largely unpopular.
Polls show most Americans are skeptical of eliminating the department, and Democrats have rallied in opposition to the idea.
Judging by their track record thus far, Congress is unlikely to do anything in the short term. So, we’ll test this, too, in the courts.
Repeating because this is critical. The DoEdu is the one that’s administering all of those grants, loans, and subsidies–if it goes away, there’s no infrastructure to disburse those monies and school districts will suffer in ALL States.
This is a prime example of “not understanding what the department does.”
BTW, this is another example of Trump attempting to make good on a campaign promise–so yes, his supporters “voted” for this.
Of the things about all of this that are highly frustrating is the fact that the above claim is not true.
The notion that the DOE controls education centrally is just false.
And trust me, Alabama’s educational woes (to pick but one example) are not the result of federal dollars. Moreover, should that funding cease to exist it will materially worsen education in the state and further degrade an already anemic education system.
The point of throwing the baby out with the bathwater is never having to bathe the baby again.
The core issue is simple:
The President cannot, under the Constitution, unilaterally cripple or destroy an agency of the US government.
I’m not sure why this isn’t the mantra that people repeat, since it’s what’s happening every day. It’s only happening because the Republican majorities in Congress have achieved Supreme Soviet levels of subservience, and the courts are too slow to respond.
This makes sense because MAGA depends on a supply of uneducated rubes to perpetuate the cult. The least educated states are all blood-red. Alabama, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Nevada, Arkansas, Mississippi, Louisiana, W. Virginia. All hotbeds of MAGA fervor. And it will only get worse.
To add: The legality of this will be likely be decided by a only a slim majority in the Supreme Court, probably 5-4, not 9-0, like it should.
@Matt Bernius:
No.
They know what it does and they don’t like it.
From the P2025 document:
[I replaced bullet points in the original with -]
I recommend reading the whole chapter.
@Kingdaddy:
The president doesn’t have that power. The dictator does. The dictator has the power to do whatever he wants unless someone stops him. No one seems inclined to do so.
I just want him to do this legally. Every i dotted, every t crossed. No one will complain about it taking a year, just do it right.
@Steven L. Taylor:
I get regular emails from the SSA, Medicare, VA, and DoD concerning various issues. They have noticeably gone from basic necessary factual information sheets to out and out propaganda extolling the Dear Leader for his brilliance. And the volume has dramatically increased as well.
@Kathy:
I think closing the Department of Education is an epic own goal. How are you going to establish a lasting dictatorial state without some indoctrination? Who’s going to indoctrinate the kiddos if “the experiment of controlling American education through Federal programs and dollars” is simply abandoned? The states? Other departments?
Much better to simply rename the department by Trumpian declaration – like the Gulf. They can call it the Department of Truth and they can get straight to controlling American education through Federal programs and dollars but do it the right way – where we teach the children that forced childbirth is freedom, wealth inequity is God’s will, a great America dominates friend & foe abroad alike, and Trump is our lord.
@Kurtz: Short Project 2025:
– All public funds for education should be funneled to private schools.
– Veneer of culture war crap for eye appeal.
Thanks for the link. I just saved it to my files. All 922 pages, brevity has never been characteristic of conservative writing. Obfuscation seems to require a cloud of words.
@Fortune:
He can’t do it legally. He doesn’t have the support in Congress that would require.
Next inane comment…
Not to worry though. I’m sure that Congress will step up and assert its prerogatives and power under the Constitution. /s.
Now we know why Trump brayed that the US was 4oth out of 40 nations in educational achievement testing. Of course the lapdog media “forgot” to ask which test he was referring to. Had one of them asked, we would have learned that once again, this was a stat that came directly from Trump’s ass.
@gVOR10:
I didn’t bold it, but the implicit notion that economic activity is the only purpose of education is predictable.
And short-sighted in terms of economic activity.
Not mentioned specifically but the Republican goal is to greatly reduce Title 1 funds (currently around $18B which goes to low income schools. Combined with the forthcoming Medicaid funding cuts, we can anticipate child poverty (and indeed, general poverty) to increase. And let’s not forget that this is all to extend tax cuts to the top 1%.
@Fortune:
Why? What do you have against the DoEdu–or rather the services it offers/functions it peforms?
@Matt Bernius: For one thing I want the federal government out of the student loan business, which has been driving the rising cost of college.
@Fortune:
I had no idea your next inane comment would come so quickly.
At the risk of encouraging a poisonous toad…please explain the exact mechanisms that causes rising college costs to be driven by federal student loan programs? Be specific. Provide data from reputable sources.
Just like he killed Obamacare via executive order in his first term.
–Oct 26, 2017
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/16/trump-says-there-is-no-such-thing-as-obamacare-anymore.html
A characteristically dumb move, from the most inept admin in US history.
Making America less educated will not lower the cost of eggs, groceries, housing or healthcare. Nor will gutting the Dept. of Ed. restore the jobs the failing Trump economy is swiftly shedding, due to MAGA’s and Musk’s reckless incompetence and sloppy chaos, domestically and internationally.
@Matt Bernius: It’s very frustrating that so many babies are being thrown out with so much bath water because the babies are caught up in the ridiculous culture wars of the right.
I hope MAGA enjoys not having the government services they’re used to. But they can rest (in peace?) easy knowing there won’t be men in women’s sports or any of that CRT stuff.
I mean, if he had really wanted to, Trump could have turned off the spigot like he did (illegally) with USAID. But he didn’t. Instead we have orders and memos and announcements.
That doesn’t mean I know what’s going to happen. I am just observing differences.
@Daryl: The topic has been studied and debated for decades. The first two articles that come up are from Federal Reserve banks. You’re the toad, look them up yourself. I replied to Matt Bernius because I think he cares about issues, but this one comment is more than enough for you.
The likes of Plato, Albert Einstein, Adam Smith, and George Washington all extolled the virtues of education… but MAGA minds disagree… so they are determined to dumb down current and future generations of Americans. Our last great Republican President, Dwight D. Eisenhower, set about the greatest undertaking of educational improvement and attainment known to any nation on earth and it succeeded in transforming America into the heights of unprecedented achievements in science, technology, and the arts, which improved the conditions of her people and others across the globe. Today’s Republicans should be ashamed of their actions to undermine education.
It’s always amusing that a certain someone doesn’t bother to check their own sources.
From the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond (https://www.richmondfed.org/publications/research/economic_brief/2022/eb_22-32):
**************************************************************************************
Conclusion
Is Bennett’s 1987 famous assertion about high passthrough rates of student loan expansions to higher tuition correct? Our model indicates that the answer depends on the time period. Back in 1987, it appears that he was correct, because a significant fraction of students were borrowing constrained and thus primed to be responsive to any expansion in their ability to borrow.
However, after the creation of unsubsidized loans largely satiated borrowing needs, the response of tuition to further increases in borrowing limits temporarily evaporated for about eight years. As tuition grew over time for a host of other reasons (which we document in our analysis), credit constraints started to bind again, causing passthrough rates to increase. The last big loan expansion in our sample, which occurred in 2008, again effectively eliminated credit constraints and brought the passthrough rate back to zero.
In sum, was Bennett right? Sometimes yes, and sometimes no. There is no such thing as a fixed single passthrough rate. Rather, the passthrough rate is time-varying, which helps reconcile the wide range of empirical estimates from the literature and begs for further investigation into the time-varying nature of passthrough rates.
Grey Gordon is a senior economist in the Research Department at the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond. Aaron Hedlund is an associate professor in the Economics Department of the University of Missouri-Columbia.
************************************************************************************
Unsurprisingly, the Cato Institute finds that most definitely Fortunes declaration is 100% true, case closed, no further discussion needed.
@Scott F.:
I figure they’ll do it on the cheap on social media and felon youth rallies.
@Fortune:
In other words, you know that you’re wrong.
As someone who has built hundreds of millions of dollars in University construction I can tell you that federal loan programs may have an incremental effect, at various times, as Assad K. pointed out.
But Administrative costs and the construction and maintenance of amenities meant to attract spoiled students are the biggest drivers.
Stay in your pond, Toad.
@Kurtz: Thank you for this bit from P2025
Do as I say, not as I do?
@Daryl: There’s an assumption that things will cost what the market will bear, and that pumping more money into a system will simply raise prices, especially when financial decisions are being made by children who have been fed a story that the only way into the middle class is a college degree.
I don’t think that’s a crazy thought, although I don’t know how much it actually impacts education.
According to a quick Google search of dubious quality and results, the average cost of public school (k-12) is about $18k. And the average tuition at a private college is $35k (I picked private to reduce the effects of government subsidies on college, to try to get an approximation of cost)
So, why does it cost twice as much to educate someone one year older?
Now, my numbers are very, very fuzzy. So fuzzy. (Text book costs not included, class sizes in college can be huge, college doesn’t have special ed students to the same level, etc) And with this type of back of the envelope sanity check, being off by a factor of two would not be surprising. (I was surprised the grade school number was so high, but it’s incredibly variable state by state.)
But, a college freshman’s English class shouldn’t be that much more expensive than a high school senior’s. They’re kind of the same thing. Both schools need administration. Both have sports.
The biggest difference I see is that college is a product for people who can afford the $38k tuition, mostly through loans.
What are some of the factors I’m missing? What snippets of information do I need to be asking better questions?
ETA: This is also why I don’t trust the DOGE boys — software engineers are often making broad inferences and guesses with partial information to begin to define a problem. Junior engineers don’t know how wrong they are. Also, they’re Nazis. The DOGE boys, not junior engineers. Although some of them too, but not as many.
@Gustopher:
Perceived value, among other factors. A high school degree is to Hyundai as a college degree is to a Porsche. Both cars will get you from point A to point B, yes, but the market has made a Porsche a luxury item. A Porsche adds to your social status, it makes people turns their heads, there’s perceived worth far beyond mere utility.
Similarly, a degree from Yale is going to do more for its possesser than a degree from Erasmus High. So the degree from Yale is going to cost more.
There’s other such variables beyond student loans.
I’m not sure how useful it is to speak in terms of college writ large, and student loans writ large, when there are sub-categories of each that interact with each other in different ways. Community colleges, private universities, public universities, elite private (or public) universities, etc. each interact with federal loans, state loans, private loans, etc. at various levels and to various degrees. There’s no clear cut causal path from ubiquitous loans to increased tuition, nor from tuition increases to easier access to loans.
It is, as with most things, complicated.
Here is what the federal govt. thought about it in 2014 (Overview of the Relationship between Federal Student Aid and Increases in College Prices):
@Gustopher: Thank you.
One way to understand Trump is that his brain is frozen in pre-1973 America or like I like to say World Book Encyclopedia America where the printed charts showed the superiority of America in total goods production, the America Empire was at it apogee (Panama Canal) and the Dept. of Education and the EPA didn’t exist. The one worry at the time was the USSR which explains his current rapprochement to Russia as way to keep the peace (think Nixon and China).
Reducing a complex market to a single input is the opposite of what an economist does; an ideologue trained as an economist does that.
@Gustopher:
I think it’s because comparing private college to aggregate (?) K-12 makes it an apples-to-oranges comparison, though I do give you props for trying to avoid skewing the numbers.
And it may well be that apples-to-oranges is the only comparison available, but I’m retired now and don’t do any of the epistemological heavy lifting anymore.
ETA: “But, a college freshman’s English class shouldn’t be that much more expensive than a high school senior’s.” And from experience, I can attest that in many cases, it’s not more expensive. It may even be less expensive on average given the number of adjuncts and graduate assistants colleges hire. (A study commissioned by the NEA local at my school demonstrated that I was getting paid approximately 10% of what a full-time teacher was making for teaching English 101. At my school, there were 35 adjuncts compared to 12 full-time staff.)
A skeleton staff will remain at the Dept to carry out the vitally important federal constitutional responsibility of keeping willies out of the girls’ change rooms.
@Ken_L: So they’re banning Trump and Gaetz from girls’ change rooms?
@DK: At least that’s good news.
@Fortune: I can at least see a potential mechanism for cheap money allowing colleges to increase tuition, although I’m not convinced it is the primary driver. Be that as it may, how much do you expect tuition to drop with the government out of the loan guarantee business? I ask because I have heard lots of plausible explanations for what good a number of these DOGE driven changes will make, and I think we should treat them as experiments. If we make a change, and it does not result in the predicted result, that should be an important data point for future decisions, don’t you think? But if we don’t make predictions, it becomes easy to recycle the same justifications
I see lots of Very Serious discussions about whether the $18 billion we spend on the education of poor children is money we can afford, or whether it’s the best use of tax dollars.
What I rarely see is the real reason behind cutting serious education – that is to create a caste of uneducated, compliant, stupid people.
Uneducated people are desperate. They don’t understand the big world, so they live in a very small world. They don’t pay attention to Washington DC. They do whatever their boss tells them to do. They may complain about the pay or working conditions, but only to their friends – they don’t want to endanger their crappy job. They certainly don’t unionize.
For our billionaire rulers, the Middle Class is a considerable waste of money that they could keep for themselves. They envision a future U.S. with a few dozen billionaires, a few hundred multi-millionaires (still needing a few doctors and scientists here and there), and hundreds of millions of poor, blue-collar workers cleaning their toilets and rotating the tires on their Swasticars.
@Tony W: Billionaires aren’t even really humans, I read they’re lizards. Gray lizards, not the green lizards that are more like aliens.
@Fortune:
Thanks for the response to that question.