Abolishing the Dept of Education
what might it mean?
We will ultimately eliminate the federal Department of Education (Trump)
I don't know what Trump means by that and am not sure Trump does, but there is a range of things it might mean:
Remove the secretary from the cabinet, relabel things a bit, leaving the power and flow of money essentially the same.
Abolish the department, transferring everything it does to other parts of the federal government.
Abolish the department, converting all expenditures into grants to state departments of education and removing all federal control over how the money is spent.
Abolish the department and all its programs and expenditures.
Abolish the department, converting all its expenditures into a federal voucher program, with the money going to whatever form of education the parents prefer, including a public school if they choose to send their child there.
1 and 2 are not significant changes. 3 eliminate federal control over K-12 schooling. 4 is the approach that best fits a strict reading of the constitution, since schooling is not among the enumerated powers. It also saves almost 250 billion from the federal budget.
5 is the most interesting one. There are about fifty million school age kids and the 2024 budget of the department was 238 billion dollars, so if you convert the whole budget to a K-12 voucher it's almost five thousand dollars per child. That is about half what public schools cost but enough to provide an education in less expensive ways.
Of the 238 billion only about forty-eight billion currently goes to K-12, about twenty billion of which is for special ed, so this would divert large amounts from higher schooling to K-12. Trump and his supporters are unhappy about current colleges. College graduates, according to the exit polls, went for Harris 55% to 42% for non-graduates, so Trump might be happy to stop subsidizing them. On the other hand, what he is unhappy with is not the existence of colleges but what they teach, and federal money is one way of changing that.
"You tell me whar a man gits his corn pone, en I'll tell you what his 'pinions is." (Mark Twain, Corn-pone Opinions.")
Two hundred billion is a lot of corn-pone.
The same problem exists for K-12 schooling. Trump, in a 2023 video, promised a long list of improvements in the schools, ending the list with:
And one other thing I’ll be doing very early in the administration is closing up the Department of Education in Washington DC and sending all education, education work and needs back to the states.
Once the federal government is no longer funding K-12 schooling it has no leverage over how it is delivered. The closest he can come to consistency in the contents of that video is to claim that once the states have control over education that will do all of the good things he has promised — including states controlled by the other party.
That quote implies either 3 or 4 above. But in the same video Trump also says:
We will respect the right of parents to control the education of their children
And
We will give all parents the right to choose another school for their children if they want, called school choice.
Which sounds like a voucher program. The text on a Trump page with Trump’s speech on iy expands on that:
President Trump supports universal school choice so that parents can send their children to the public, private, or religious school that best suits their needs, their goals, and their values.
Since none of alternatives 1-4 gives Trump the ability to offer that to “all parents” that is an argument for alternative 5, which does. To make the amount of money at least arguably adequate it would have to include the money currently spent on college and university education, which raises the issue of Trump’s policies for higher schooling.
Higher Schooling
That subject was discussed in a more recent video, by Trump as president-elect, mainly about reclaiming “our once-great educational institutions from the radical left.” The chief mechanism he proposes there is control over the accrediting process.
The “accreditors” that Trump refers to “firing” in that video are not government employees but private organizations. The government first got involved in the accreditation process with the GI Bill, limiting eligibility to students enrolled in an institution on the list of federally recognized accredited institutions published by the U.S. Commissioner of Education. Currently the Secretary of Education provides a list of accreding agencies approved of by the federal government. Presumably what Trump is proposing is to remove the existing agencies from the list, making schools accredited only by them ineligible for federal money, and replace them with new agencies or old ones with revised standards.
There are two different reasons for an institution to want to be accredited by a federally approved agency. One is to be eligible for federal money. That only matters if the federal government continues to hand money out, as it would in alternatives 1 and 2 but not in the others, unless the transfer of authority to the states is limited to K-12 schooling, as Trump may intend.
The other reason is to attract students. That will only work for a student, or parents, sufficiently aligned with Trump to prefer endorsement by agencies he approves of to endorsement by the existing agencies.
Steelmanning Trump’s Promises
My guess is that Trump’s policies in both the 2023 and 2024 videos are chosen for rhetorical effectiveness not internal consistency, but it is worth at least trying to steelman them. The best way I can see to make the K-12 promises consistent is to assume that Trump is making them not as president but as the leader of the Republican party — or possibly the Maga movement. Seen in that way, what he proposes is to turn all K-12 educational authority over to the states and then have the state governments act to fulfill the rest of what he promised in 2023. His promises don’t apply to state governments run by Democrats.
His main approaches to fighting the culture war in, or with, colleges and universities are control of accreditation and having the Department of Justice take legal action against schools that engage in affirmative action of various sorts. The first depends on the federal government continuing to subsidize the schools — but Trump does not seem to have ever committed himself to not doing so. The second depends on how the courts interpret existing antidiscrimination law. In Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard the Supreme Court ruled against affirmative action in admissions but the ruling depended on the fact that the universities received federal money, making their policy a violation of the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment. The question of whether a university that did not take government money and followed similar policies would be in violation of the Civil Rights Act was not raised and so not ruled on.1
Project 2025 On The Department of Education
Project 2025 has not been endorsed by Trump but it provides an account of the views of the conservative movement that supported him, a much more detailed account than one can get from Trump’s own statements. Chapter 11, on education, starts:
Federal education policy should be limited and, ultimately, the federal Department of Education should be eliminated.
And goes on to more detailed recommentations including my alternative 3:
To the extent that federal taxpayer dollars are used to fund education programs, those funds should be block-granted to states without strings, eliminating the need for many federal and state bureaucrats. Eventually, policymaking and funding should take place at the state and local level, closest to the affected families.
Other parts of the chapter suggest something along the lines of my alternative 2:
Reduce the number of programs managed by OESE, and transfer some remaining programs to other federal agencies.
Transfer Title I, Part A, which provides federal funding for lower-income school districts, to the Department of Health and Human Services, specifically the Administration for Children and Families.
Similar suggestions are offered for a variety of other programs now under the Department of Education.
Past posts, sorted by topic
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We have explained that discrimination that violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment committed by an institution that accepts federal funds also constitutes a violation of Title VI. Gratz v. Bollinger, 539 U.S. 244, 276, n. 23 (2003). Although Justice Gorsuch questions that proposition, no party asks us to reconsider it. We accordingly evaluate Harvard’s admissions program under the standards of the Equal Protection Clause itself. (footnote to the majority opinion)
The most effective way to fix the universities is to eliminate all federal student loan guarantees. That would immediately defund all the grievance studies departments. No private lender in their right mind would lend a student money towards such a degree.
Another measure might continue the guarantees, but make them dischargeable in bankruptcy, with the university on the hook ahead of the federal government.
Perhaps we will get really lucky and the Department of Education will be eliminated lock stock and barrel along with all the federal money going anywhere through it. Doing so might be a huge inroad to returning the USA to federalism instead of the ham-fisted central government we have today, which began on steroids in 1913.