I’ve been getting a surprising number of stressed-out emails from college students and teachers asking about what’ll happen to them if President-elect Donald Trump shuts down the U.S. Department of Education. They want to know what’ll happen to their Pell Grants, their schools, or their retirement benefits. The level of concern is remarkable for a 44-year-old Republican promise to close a big, distant federal bureaucracy. Given such reactions, it’s worth explaining what’s going on with Trump’s promise to abolish the department—and why a lot of the breathless coverage may be missing the forest for the trees.
First, yes, Sen. Mike Rounds of South Dakota has already filed a bill to disassemble the department, and Trump, as in 2016, has said he’d abolish it. But the department isn’t going to be abolished. How do I know? Because it takes a law to dismantle the department, and that requires 60 votes in the Senate (in order to break a Democratic filibuster). There are only 53 Republican senators—and at least two of whom, Sens. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine, are no sure thing on this score.
Even if the razor-thin Republican House majority passes a bill and every GOP senator votes for it, Senate Republicans can’t get enough Democrats to get to 60. So, the department isn’t getting abolished. It’s just math. (Those Democrats who denounced retiring Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona for preserving the filibuster in 2021 but suddenly see its merits are, hopefully, feeling a little abashed about now.)
Second, because the talk of “abolishing” the department tends to be more metaphorical than concrete, it’s yielded a lot of ambiguity and confusion. For instance, Rounds’s bill “abolishes” the department by sending its component parts over to other cabinet agencies like Treasury and Health and Human Services. Is that abolition? Technically, I guess, since the department would no longer have a webpage.
But, unless Congress specifically moved to slash or eliminate the department’s programs and funding streams, they’d still be there. This means that “abolishing the department” wouldn’t necessarily amount to change that anyone outside of Washington would notice. Indeed, since many federal employees who handle various programs would move with them, it’s not even clear how many of the Department of Education’s 4,000 employees would lose their jobs.
Third, I’m not suggesting the argument about abolishing the department is a “debate about nothing.” It’s symbolically important with implications for the size of the federal footprint. At the same time, the actual federal role in education depends far more on whether Republicans are inclined to downsize or eliminate major federal education programs than on whether those programs are housed in a “Department of Education.”
And, despite some of the turbo-charged rhetoric about the department, Republicans have shown little appetite for cutting or reshaping major federal education programs like Title I, special education, Pell Grants, or student loans. Last year, when given the chance to vote on converting Title I into a voucher program, barely half of House Republicans voted to do so. (The proposal lost 113-311.) And that didn’t even require any spending cuts. Republicans have historically shown little desire to reduce spending for low-income students or those with special needs, and that seems even more likely to hold after a Trump victory marked by broad support among working-class voters and parents.
And keep in mind that the federal role in education long predated the creation of the department in 1979—see, for instance, the Morrill Land-Grant Act of 1862, the Smith-Hughes Vocational Education Act of 1917, the National Defense Education Act of 1958, and the Higher Education and Elementary and Secondary Education Acts of 1965. With or without a department, then, there will be fights over Washington’s role in education.
So, ED isn’t going anywhere. That said, I certainly think it’d be just fine if the department were dismantled. After all, it makes sense for many of ED’s functions to be run out of other agencies. For instance, the federal student-loan portfolio is essentially a mega-bank. It’d make more sense to have it overseen by officials at Treasury who work closely with financial institutions and oversee federal revenue collection. And moving ED’s office for civil rights over to the Department of Justice could provide more in the way of appropriate supervision.
