Washington
CNN
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During his campaign, former President Donald Trump portrayed the Department of Education as a symbol of the federal government’s excessive interference with the daily lives of American families.
President Trump has said multiple times that he would shut down the agency if he returned to the White House.
“As I’ve always said, and I’m dying to do this, we’re going to finally abolish the federal Department of Education,” he said at a rally in Wisconsin earlier this month.
“We’re going to clean up the government education quagmire and stop taxpayer dollars being misused to brainwash the youth of America into everything we don’t want them to hear,” Trump said.
Vice President Kamala Harris, his rival in the 2024 election, has criticized the former president over the idea.
“We’re not going to let him abolish the Department of Education, which funds our public schools,” Harris said during her speech at the Democratic National Convention in August.
In 1979, President Jimmy Carter, Democrat of Georgia, signed a bill that made the Department of Education a Cabinet-level agency, fulfilling a campaign promise to the National Education Association, one of the nation’s largest teachers unions.
Until now, federal education programs have been overseen by other agencies. Trump would need a congressional bill to shut down the department, but he has not said exactly how he wants to shut it down or what would happen to federally funded education programs if he did.
Here is what the Department of Education does and what the consequences of abolishing it would be.
Putting money into states and schools
One of the Department of Education’s largest responsibilities is to administer federal funds allocated by Congress to elementary and secondary schools and to administer federal student loan and financial aid programs.
Two of the largest funding programs for K-12 schools are the Title I program, which is intended to support the education of children from low-income families, and the IDEA program, which provides funding to schools to meet the needs of children with disabilities.
These programs help achieve the Department’s congressionally declared objective of “ensuring access to equal educational opportunities for all individuals.”
Combined, these programs provide about $28 billion a year to K-12 schools. But federal funding typically accounts for only about 10% of total school funding, with the rest coming from state and local taxes. That said, schools have 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 through the Pell Grant program and manages a $1.6 trillion student loan portfolio.
Supervision and Regulatory Enforcement
The Department of Education also plays an oversight role and is involved in writing federal regulations.
For example, the agency’s Civil Rights Division is tasked with investigating allegations of discrimination in colleges and universities and primary and secondary schools, which have seen a significant increase in such allegations since Hamas’ terrorist attacks on Israel last October.
The department can also write federal regulations, and some of its rules have recently touched on issues in the culture wars that have permeated local politics during the COVID-19 pandemic.
President Joe Biden’s Department of Education has strengthened protections for transgender students, and the department is also helping craft the administration’s student loan forgiveness rules, though both rules are currently being challenged in court.
Separately, the Trump administration rescinded Obama-era guidelines aimed at ensuring minority students are not unfairly punished in schools.
But state and local school boards still retain powers that the Department of Education cannot override. For example, during the pandemic, the Department of Education could not mandate that schools close or continue in-person classes. In fact, the administration could not unilaterally cut federal funding to schools that did not reopen in the fall of 2020, despite threats from President Trump at the time.
The federal funding that schools receive through programs such as Title I and IDEA comes with strings attached: schools receive funding contingent on meeting certain conditions and reporting requirements.
“For those of us concerned about the red tape that the Department of Education is creating, the bigger question is how to address these rules and requirements,” said Frederick Hess, senior fellow and director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute.
“The abolition of the ministry is merely a measure of expediency,” he said.
One way to deal with bureaucratic red tape is to provide federal funding through what are called “block grants,” which have fewer requirements.
Federal funding programs for K-12 schools that support the education of low-income students and children with disabilities predate the creation of the Department of Education.
If the Department of Education were abolished, some of these funding programs could be transferred to other federal agencies.
“I don’t think schools are suddenly going to lose funding,” said Margaret Rosa, director of the Edunomics Lab, a research center at Georgetown University that focuses on education finance policy.
For example, Title I programs have “proven to be relatively popular across both parties,” Roza said.
When presidents have proposed cuts to the Department of Education’s budget in the past, Congress has resisted them about 71% of the time, allocating more funding than the president requested, according to a Brookings Institution analysis.
Despite the Trump administration proposing cuts to the agency’s budget, the Republican-controlled Congress ultimately increased it.
It’s worth noting that shutting down a federal agency requires an act of Congress.
Calls to abolish the Department of Education or merge it with another federal agency are not new: President Ronald Reagan, a Republican, called for abolishing it just one year after it was created in 1980, but then backed down when he saw little support in Congress for the idea.
During the Trump presidency, the administration proposed merging the Departments of Education and Labor into one federal agency, a proposal that never came to fruition, even though Republicans controlled both the House and Senate at the time.
