The potential savings are far from earthshaking. We don’t have good numbers, but back-of-the-envelope I’d put the savings in salary and benefits at something like $400 million. That’s terrific, but it’s also less than 1 percent of what Washington spends each year on education. Generally speaking, for good or ill, the cuts aren’t as big a deal as the dramatic headlines and pronouncements might make them seem. Even with fewer staff, all the rules and regulations (the proverbial “red tape”) will still be there. All the programs (like Title I, IDEA, and Pell) will still be there. Fewer staff will be sending press releases and writing rules, but it’s not clear how much this matters or why it’s a bad thing. As my EdNext colleague Mike Petrilli aptly put it, “I don’t anticipate these staff cuts will make much of a difference in the real world of schools and classrooms. I suspect it will be hard to notice much of a difference.”
Okay, now we get to the trickier stuff.
The case for these cuts assumes they’ve been made to address redundancy, waste, inefficiency, and unnecessary activity. The problem is there’s no way to assess that, because it’s not clear which positions have been eliminated or why they were selected. Observers have to rely on phone calls, leaked union accounts, and Beltway word-of-mouth to determine what’s been cut or to speculate how the department will carry out congressionally mandated activities.
Now, it’s easy for me to imagine a scenario where streamlining, automation, elbow grease, and healthy prioritization make for a more efficient and less intrusive department. But this shouldn’t be about what some think tank yahoo can imagine. It’s the job of the officials at ED to make that case, and they haven’t yet done so. Thus, while I’m unimpressed by the “sky-is-falling!” hysteria from the education blob, it’s wholly fair to ask how these cuts align with the administration’s pledges to fix the broken student-lending system, combat campus antisemitism, enforce its Title IX executive order, or ensure the smooth administration of the National Assessment of Educational Progress. I’m disinclined to take government officials’ words on faith, whatever their party. I want to see the particulars. That information should be readily available, but it’s not.
For instance, with nearly half of ED’s positions reportedly eliminated, I also have it from a trusted source that the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education lost only about 20 percent of its staff—and that all those positions were either internal operations or dedicated to Covid relief funds. I have it on similarly good authority that 90 percent of the staff at the Institute for Education Sciences were cut—including pretty much all the staff who are operationally responsible for NAEP (even as the staff who support the National Assessment Government Board’s management of NAEP were retained). If this is all correct, why were the OESE cuts so modest? Why were the IES cuts so severe? What criteria were used to decide where the axe fell more heavily? It’s not clear.
If we were talking about a Fortune 500 company, those wielding the axe would be answerable only to their shareholders. Public agencies, however, are called upon to operate with less opacity, especially when it comes to dramatic moves of this kind. The president and his team are charged with leading the executive branch, but they’re stewards with a four-year tenure—not owner-operators of a private venture. I made this critique time and again about the Obama-Biden approach to education, and the same holds here. The administration should provide a clear accounting of the staff positions being reduced, the savings created, the responsibilities ended or delegated, and how operations mandated by Congress will be handled.
Reducing staff within the strictures of civil service rules in maddening. I get it. The executive branch isn’t free to decide which individual staff to keep, based on performance or skill set. Rather, an agency can only eliminate whole units or “subcomponents.” This is a ridiculous way to shrink an organization. But it’s also the only permissible way. The result is either that staff never gets cut or that the cutting will be pretty coarse. Fair enough. Given those limits, though, it’s important to make the case that cuts were as thoughtful as possible. Absent that, the clumsiness baked into the civil service regulations will be seen as the clumsiness of those wielding the knife.
