Trump Administration 2.0 will have trouble staffing up, given Trump’s conduct and his split with the GOP establishment. Observers keep noting that Trump burned through White House staff at a frenzied pace last time and has alienated so many with his conduct after losing in 2020. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, for instance, resigned after January 6. And, of course, Trump has cut the traditional GOP establishment out of the loop this time in a way he didn’t in 2016, when Mike Pence was his VP and the President-elect leaned heavily on establishment Republicans like Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell. This time, it’s going to take them a while to find staff, get them confirmed, and get rolling, isn’t it?
Verdict: OVERREACTION. In fact, the opposite is probably closer to the truth. In 2016, nobody really expected Trump to win. His education transition was pretty haphazard. There was a sense among many Republicans that working for a Trump Department of Education was a huge career risk, because it would hurt their prospects with many education employers and with most of the traditional GOP. The bench was thin after eight years out of power, there wasn’t much of a GOP-friendly education ecosystem, nor was there much of a playbook. It took the Republicans a long time to get the Department of Education staffed up and for the agenda to take shape. Plus, a razor-thin Senate majority made confirmation a dogfight. (Readers may remember that DeVos required a second confirmation vote after GOP defections on the first go-round.)
Things are very different this time. The GOP has been remade in Trump’s image. He just claimed the biggest Republican victory since 2004. The education transition operation looks to be running smoothly, and there’s no longer the “Trump hesitation” that was so evident in 2016. Meanwhile, over the past five years, raging battles over school closures, school choice, CRT, SEL, DEI, gender, loan forgiveness, Title IX, and campus antisemitism have led to the emergence of a growing web of right-leaning education groups. There’s a pipeline of savvy potential appointees and a thick playbook of possible policies and executive actions. The 53-seat Senate majority should make confirmations much easier, so it’s a good bet the administration will rapidly install key appointees and hit the ground running.
College presidents should be nervous that their lives are about to get a lot more stressful. It’s been a brutal stretch for college presidents. Concerns about declining enrollment and trust have been joined by public disgust with campus disorder and antisemitism over the past year. One bad House hearing was enough to end the tenure of two Ivy League presidents. Now, the stressors in the halls of academe are about to go to a whole new level. The vice president-elect has termed universities “the enemy.” Trump has promised to dismantle DEI, address antisemitism, bust up the accreditation cartel, and boost the tax on college endowments. It’s going to be a long four years for college presidents.
Verdict: NOT AN OVERREACTION. We’re likely about to see something we’ve never seen before: a Republican Department of Education aggressively and unapologetically exploiting every last bit of its executive authority, just like the department during the Obama or Biden administrations (think “gainful employment” or college loan forgiveness). In the Obama years, Russlynn Ali and Catherine Lhamon used investigations to force colleges to adopt preferred policies, and then they used those settlements to issue guidance that produced sweeping changes in how colleges approached Title IX—leading to the campus kangaroo courts that trampled due process protections and yielded hundreds of court reversals.
Well, there are potential Trump appointees itching to bring that same approach to higher education. They look at the bullying and harassment of Jewish students last year and see a massive failure to protect civil rights. They look at college admissions practices and strongly suspect that some selective colleges are disregarding the Supreme Court’s 2023 Students v. Harvard ruling that race-based admissions are unconstitutional. They see research universities that have endorsed ideological orthodoxies and suspect they’re collecting vast sums in federal funds while violating assurances regarding the protection of free inquiry. They’ve seen evidence that some colleges have collected large sums from foreign nations and then failed to report it in accord with federal statute. College presidents at deep-pocketed, high-profile institutions may want to have their attorneys and lobbyists on speed dial. I should add that community college leaders and, especially, those at nontraditional entities stymied by the accreditation cartel may have a far more pleasant experience.
School choice has been on a winning streak, so we’re going to see some kind of major federal school choice bill. During the first Trump administration, Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos was a passionate crusader for choice but couldn’t point to many big wins on the ground. Since 2020, though, the dynamics have fundamentally changed. The pandemic eroded trust in traditional school districts, fed an appetite for options, and introduced millions to new school models. In the past three years, choice advocates have been on a historic run in the states.
Verdict: NOT AN OVERREACTION. That said, it matters how one defines “major federal school choice bill.” Republicans won’t have 60 votes for choice in the Senate, so, again, assuming they don’t nuke the filibuster, they’d need to pass anything through reconciliation (which requires only a bare majority). But it’s not at all clear that the GOP could get 50 votes in the Senate or 218 Republicans in the House to vote for a stand-alone bill, even if Trump leaned in. (Keep in mind that the House vote on voucherizing Title I last year, and it failed, 113–311.) And choice referenda just went down in (deep red) Kentucky, (deep red) Nebraska, and (purple) Colorado. While it’s a mistake to make too much of these results (given big union dollars, some not-great language, and off-key messaging), those losses should not be dismissed—and will be reasonably read by some electeds as evidence that rural America has mixed feelings on choice.
