/ 2
Why the Department of Education Must Be Abolished
By Carole Hornsby Haynes March 17, 2025
As President Trump promised, the dismantling of the Department of Education has begun. The workforce has been cut in half: from around 4,133 workers when Trump took office in January to about 2183 as a part of its “final mission.”
National Education Association President Becky Pringle is “spitting mad mad about this!” During her melt down she wailed that Trump and Musk are taking a wrecking ball to public schools and the future of 50 million students “to pay for tax handouts for billionaires."
Pringle predicts a looming crisis with soaring classroom sizes, shutting down job training programs, sky-high college costs, cutting programs for students with disabilities, and gutting civil rights protections. She failed to mention that the U.S. spends the third most in the world for K-12 while American students rank 31st in achievement.
Pringle’s public tirade is merely cover for the real issue: teachers unions are paralyzed with fear as they see the end of their iron grip over education that has enriched and empowered them.
Over the course of our history, the federal government has had a minor role in education. That changed in 1964 with the passage of the Civil Rights Act, followed by the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (ESEA) and the Higher Education Act ot 1965 (HEA) – part of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty. From that point on, government spending grew exponentially. Congress has added layer upon layer of new laws and programs purportedly federal “solutions” to all kinds of education problems including the Rehabilitation Act (1973) and Individual with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA-1975), Institute for Education Sciences (2002).
To fulfill a campaign promise made by Jimmy Carter to the National Education Association for their endorsement, Congress passed the Department of Education Organization Act of 1979 which split education from the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare and created anindependentdepartment. Theoretically the independent department would house most of the federal education programs under one roof. Quite the opposite occurred.
Today the DOE functions as the political arm and money tree of teachers unions, the higher education lobby and their allies.
By actively pushing politics into all levels of education from kindergarten to the university, the DOE totally controls education in the nation, DeVos explained during a panel discussion. Trump characterizes the department as a hotbed of left-wing ideologies.
What does the Department of Education do?
A review of the website of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) reveals the vast range of control over education – and beyond – control which the DOE has steadily and systematically seized. The following list is only some of the areas of American life that are now under the DOE’s control:education policy for K-12 schools that receive federal funding; Title IX rules; colleges and universities that receive federal funding; student loans; FAFSA, the highly confusing mechanism that allows students to access federal loans; Pell Grants; funding for special needs students; competitive grantmaking including 21st Century Community Learning Centers for after-school programs, school improvement, educators’ professional development, and state agency programs for education of migrant students; NAEP; and distribution of about 10% of K-12 public school funding.
This centralized control through the Department of Education costs taxpayers $268 billion in fiscal year 2024 – along with another $80 billion, plus or minus, for their “discretionary spending.” The spending and regulations of this department, along with that of other departments, brings nearly total government control over a once free people.
What does the Department of Education not do?
The agency has absolutely no reason to exist except as a pay-off to teachers unions, according to former DOE Secretary Betsy DeVos, who also calls for the department’s demise.
Shutting down the DOE cannot harm schools or students because the agency has absolutely nothing to do with student learning. DeVos explains that the agency “does not employ any teachers in a single classroom. It doesn’t set academic standards or curriculum. It isn’t even the primary funder of education—quite the opposite. In most states, the federal government represents less than 10 percent of K–12 public education funding.”
DeVos further explains the DOE is no more than a middle man that “shuffles money around; adds unnecessary requirements and political agendas via its grants; and then passes the buck when it comes time to assess if any of that adds value. The funds appropriated by Congress go to the bureaucrats who add strings and red tape then take their cut and pass it on to state education agencies. At the state level there is a “shadow” DOE with more than 48,000 employees whose main job is to report back to Washington. Many states add more strings and/or take a cut and send the rest to the district offices. There a bloated administrative staff manages the added requirements and distributes whatever is left to the local schools.
Purportedly one of the purposes for the creation of the DOE was to close the learning gap by promoting equal access to education. This has been an abysmal failure. After throwing more than $1 trillion of tax dollars down the rat hole, student achievement in math and reading has continued to slide downward as evidenced by the latest scores of the National Assessment for Education Progress (NAEP) – the Nation’s Report Card. The learning gap between the highest and lowest performers has widened rather than narrowing. Scores of the lowest performing eighth-grade readers are at their lowest in recorded history.
Hailed as the gold standard for tracking student progress in reading, math, and science, the Congressionally mandated NAEP is administered by the National Center for Education Statistics within the Department of Education. Despite claims that shutting down the DOE will negatively impact the NAEP, the original test was administered in 1969, 10 years prior to the creation of the DOE, by an independent nonprofit research institute.
The federal government has no place in administering the NAEP. This should be moved to a private entity without any federal involvement.
A major function of the DOE is the federal student loan program.Under the Obama administration, the federal government seized control over student lending. Instead of banks underwriting student loans, the federal government would lend directly to students. Theoretically, cutting out the middleman would save money. The results have been quite the opposite.
The program has been a disaster, failing those it is supposed to help and creating enormous taxpayer expense. The balance of student loans has exploded to $1.7 trillion with 92.4% of all student loan debt being federal and held by more than 43 million students.
With the availability of federal student loans, colleges raised their fees, student debt skyrocketed, and loan defaults became commonplace. With lenient underwriting, many are allowed to over borrow and often by students and families unable to repay the loan. Some federal loans allow unlimited borrowing. Virtually anyone can get a loan, even those who do not need taxpayer assistance.
The federal government has no place in the financing of student’s college education.This is for the private market.
Can the Department of Education be abolished through an executive order?
Some believe the DOE can be shut down with an executive order. That is highly unlikely since it was created by Congress and must repealed by Congress. Unwinding the department is a highly complicated endeavor because of the vast entanglement of laws passed over the decades and the interdependency. Simply moving programs around to other departments is not the solution – either short term or long term.
Moving programs does not cut spending. Moving programs does not decrease the size of the federal government. Moving programs does not reduce government control over the daily lives of Americans. If a program is defunded today, will it be funded again in the next adminisration?
The only solution is to totally eliminate the department and leave education as well as student loans to the states as laid out in the Constitution. Since Ronald Reagan, presidents have been trying to abolish the intricately webbed agency. It is highly unlikely that Trump will have the legislative votes to shut down the agency during his term.
As the public becomes aware of the extraordinary amount of federal spending for leftwing ideology in public schools along with the myriad of problems this has created, Democrats and even Trump-aligned education conservatives who are using the department for their own agenda may be only too glad to dump the unconstitutional monster.
The public is weary of the thousands of laws and broken promises of more government programs to improve efficiency and reduce spending.Since it has become obvious that we cannot leave this urgent matter to politicians, the American people must take control of the issue and call and write their elected officials to demand an end to the DOE.