President-elect Donald Trump has pledged to abolish the Department of Education.
On the campaign trail, he repeatedly pointed to the agency as a symbol of federal overreach into the everyday lives of American families.
“I say it all the time, I’m dying to get back to do this. We will ultimately eliminate the federal Department of Education,” he said in September during a rally in Wisconsin.
“We will drain the government education swamp and stop the abuse of your taxpayer dollars to indoctrinate America’s youth with all sorts of things that you don’t want to have our youth hearing,” Trump said.
In 1979, then-President Jimmy Carter, a Democrat from Georgia, signed legislation making the Department of Education a Cabinet-level agency – fulfilling a campaign pledge he made to one of the country’s largest teachers’ unions, the National Education Association.
Previously, federal education programs were housed in other agencies. Trump has not said exactly how he would want to shut the department down – which would require an act of Congress – or what would happen to federally funded education programs if he did.
Here’s what the Department of Education does and how eliminating it could play out:
Funneling money to states and schools
Some of the Department of Education’s biggest jobs are to administer federal funding appropriated by Congress to K-12 schools and manage the federal student loan and financial aid programs.
Two of the biggest funding programs for K-12 schools are the Title I program, which is meant to help educate children from low-income families, and the IDEA program, which provides schools with money to help meet the needs of children with disabilities.
These programs help fulfill the department’s congressionally declared purpose of “ensuring access to equal educational opportunity for every individual.”
Together, these programs provide K-12 schools with about $28 billion a year. But federal funding typically accounts for roughly just 10% of all school funding because the rest comes from state and local taxes. That said, schools received additional federal funding over the past four years to help them recover from the Covid-19 pandemic.
The Department of Education also distributes about $30 billion a year to low-income college students via the Pell grant program and manages the $1.6 trillion student loan portfolio.
Conducting oversight and making regulations
The Department of Education also has an oversight role and engages in federal rulemaking.
Its Office of Civil Rights, for example, is tasked with investigating alleged discrimination complaints at colleges and K-12 schools, which increased significantly after the Hamas terrorist attack on Israel last October.
The department can also create federal regulations. Some of the agency’s rules have recently touched on issues at play in the culture wars that seeped into local politics during the Covid-19 pandemic.
President Joe Biden’s Department of Education strengthened protections for transgender students, and the agency is also involved in crafting the administration’s student loan forgiveness regulations. But both of those rules are currently tied up in court.
Separately, the first Trump administration rescinded Obama-era guidance that was meant to ensure minority students were not unfairly disciplined in schools.
But states and local school boards still hold power that can’t be superseded by the department. During the pandemic, for example, the Department of Education could not require schools to close or remain open for in-person learning. In fact, despite a threat from then-President Trump, the executive branch could not unilaterally cut federal funding for schools that did not reopen in fall 2020.
Federal money comes with strings attached
The federal money that schools receive through programs like Title I and IDEA comes with strings attached. Schools get the money contingent on meeting certain conditions and reporting requirements.
“For those of us concerned about the red tape the Department of Education creates, how we address those rules and conditions is the bigger question,” said Frederick Hess, a senior fellow and director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute.
“Abolishing the department is little more than a shorthand,” he said.
One way to address the bureaucratic red tape is to deliver federal funds through what is called a “block grant,” which comes with fewer requirements.
Ending the department may not eliminate federal education funding
Federal funding programs for K-12 schools that help support the education of students from low-income families and children with disabilities predated the creation of the Department of Education.
It’s possible some of these funding programs could be moved to other federal agencies if the Department of Education was abolished.
“I don’t think that schools would suddenly lose money,” said Marguerite Roza, director of the Edunomics Lab, a research center focused on education finance policy at Georgetown University.
The Title I program, for example, “has proven to be relatively popular on both sides of the aisle,” Roza said.
When presidents have proposed cuts to the Department of Education’s budget in the past, Congress has resisted and appropriated more funding than what the president asked for about 71% of the time, according to an analysis from the Brookings Institution.
Even when the first Trump administration proposed cutting the department’s budget, the Republican-controlled Congress ultimately increased funding.
Congress is unlikely to approve a full agency shutdown
It’s worth noting that shutting down a federal agency would require an act of Congress.
Calls to abolish the Department of Education or merge it with another federal agency are not new. Then-President Ronald Reagan, a Republican, called for eliminating the agency just one year after it started operating in 1980 – but backed off when there appeared to be little support in Congress.
During Trump’s first term as president, his administration proposed merging the Education and Labor departments into one federal agency. Even though Republicans controlled both the Senate and House of Representatives at the time, the proposal did not go anywhere.
Come January, Republicans are hoping to seize unified control in Washington; they will have the majority in the Senate but the balance of power in the House of Representatives is still undecided. Two new Republican members of the Senate – Bernie Moreno, who defeated Sherrod Brown in Ohio, and Tim Sheehy, who defeated Jon Tester in Montana – have embraced the idea.
But even if the GOP takes the House, it remains unclear if there will be enough support for abolishing the department in Congress this time around.
This story has been updated with additional information.
