The U.S. Department of Education is under fire. President Donald Trump has made the federal agency a central target in his intensifying war on education. Through a recent executive order, the president has instructed Secretary Linda McMahon to map out a detailed plan to dismantle the agency that she is responsible for. The order instructs her to “the maximum extent appropriate and permitted by law, take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education and return authority over education to the States and local communities.”
McMahon has already begun reducing the workforce from 4,133 people to 2,183. Although only Congress has the legal authority to abolish the agency, Trump will likely use every tool that he has to render the department powerless until congressional Republicans have the votes to finish the job.
Established in 1979, the Department of Education is certainly not the most powerful federal agency in the country. Compared to the Defense Department or Homeland Security, it remains a relatively minor player at the table. Yet the Department of Education provides many essential services for students, teachers, and their surrounding communities.
The department manages more than $1.6 trillion in federal student loans. It handles sizable financial support programs, including Pell grants (financial aid for low-income undergraduate students) and work-study programs. College loans constitute the bulk of what the agency does on a daily basis, but it also distributes federal funding for K-12 education. Through Title 1 of the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act, the education secretary allocates supplemental assistance to elementary and secondary schools that educate children who are raised in families with incomes that fall below a specific threshold.
Federal workers also oversee special education programs and English-acquisition classes. The education secretary likewise provides grants to states and local jurisdictions through the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. Finally, in addition to collecting educational data, the Department of Education is responsible for enforcing Title VI and Title IX of the Civil Rights Act of 1964—policies that combat discrimination in schools receiving federal funds.
Should Trump succeed, he would strike a major blow to millions of American families who depend on this agency to supplement the efforts of states and localities to ensure that students receive the best educational experience possible.
Debates over a federal department handling education are very old. Congress created the first iteration of the agency, which President Andrew Johnson signed into law in 1867.
Besides attempting to fulfill the ideas of the common school reform movement of the late Antebellum period, supporting a federal body to help provide free schools that would nurture citizenship, the Reconstruction-era Department of Education was also intended to be a mechanism to guarantee schooling for Black Americans who had formerly been enslaved.
Opponents attacked the department—which only hired four people—as dangerous. An already meager department was demoted by being turned into a subcabinet bureau within the Department of Interior in 1868; two years later, the head of the operation, Henry Barnard, resigned in frustration.
Though education remained under the jurisdiction of states and localities, the federal presence grew larger throughout the 20th century. For instance, the GI Bill of Rights, a law passed in 1944, paid returning World War II veterans to attend college. With bipartisan support from then-President Dwight Eisenhower and the Democratic Congress, the federal government poured millions of dollars into higher education by passing the National Defense Education Act in 1958, a move made largely in response to the Soviets launching Sputnik the prior year. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 required schools receiving government funds to desegregate, so regional opposition gradually diminished.
Most importantly, as part of his “Great Society” programs, former President Lyndon Johnson worked with the Democratic Congress to pass the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, which established a number of new federal programs to support schools. Johnson figured out how to overcome the opposition of Northern urban Catholics—who had strongly opposed any federal funding that did not include support for parochial schools—by focusing on the income of the students’ families.
President Jimmy Carter, the former governor of Georgia, built the modern Department of Education. Initially, Carter had been ambivalent about the idea. As a Democrat who had promised to streamline government and reform government bodies that had become too disconnected from the people they were meant to serve, creating a new bureaucracy was not at the top of his agenda.
The teachers’ unions, noted Carter biographer Jonathan Alter, were also split. The American Federation of Teachers opposed the creation of a separate department. The union worried that expanding the federal government’s power over how local schools did their business could result in dangerous, politically motivated interventions. The president’s ambivalence, Alter notes in his book His Very Best, was evident from how little time he spent lobbying for the measure.
However, the National Education Association, which supported Carter in his 1976 presidential campaign, ultimately endorsed the proposal and wanted to remove educational responsibilities from what was then the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. The final legislation watered down the original plan from 1978, which would have placed the Head Start program (now the purview of the Department of Health and Human Services) and school lunch programs (administered under the Department of Agriculture), as well as Native American education (conducted by the Department of Interior), under the Department of Education umbrella.
Upon signing the legislation in 1979, Carter proclaimed: “Education is our most important national investment. … The time has passed when the Federal Government can afford to give second-level, part-time attention to its responsibilities in American education.”
The Department of Education officially opened its doors on May 4, 1980. Secretary Shirley Hufstedler, a graduate of Stanford Law School, launched operations with a one-week “Salute to Learning.”
Ronald Reagan, the Republican nominee who ran against Carter in his quest for reelection in 1980, was not happy. On the day that the department started operations, Reagan announced: “At 11:01 a.m. Eastern Standard Time on Sunday, President Jimmy Carter’s new bureaucratic boondoggle was born: the Department of Education.” Reagan continued to lash out against Carter’s creation on the campaign trail, which he used to symbolize the existential dangers of centralization and bureaucratic bloat. The “crazy quilt of wasteful programs,” the Republican Party’s official 1980 presidential platform document argued, should have no role in Washington.
Politically, there were a number of reasons Republicans focused on this issue. Going after the Department of Education was part of the broader attack on centralized government. Furthermore, a significant source of support for the Department of Education came from teachers’ unions, who leaned heavily Democratic. Even unions that earlier opposed the creation of the department now defended keeping it in place. As a result of their support, Republicans perceived that targeting the department was to target the unions. Finally, the Department of Education was associated by many with anti-discrimination and affirmative action programs which conservatives have traditionally rallied against. Since 1964, federal funds have been used as leverage to ensure that southern schools comply with desegregation.
During his 1982 State of the Union Address, Reagan called on Congress to dismantle the agency. But Reagan’s call to action did not work. Democrats, who still controlled the House of Representatives, refused to budge. Republicans on Capitol Hill were also not especially eager to move forward with Reagan’s idea, even if they liked the sound of the rhetoric.
Education Secretary Terrel Bell, who had been a teacher and school administrator, worked hard to defend federal programs despite being ostracized within the cabinet. In 1983, the National Commission on Excellence in Education, which Bell had formed, released a widely publicized study, A Nation at Risk, warning that the United States was falling behind other countries in student achievement: “The educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people.”
Amid the Cold War, this was unacceptable. One of Reagan’s political aides even acknowledged that the report was changing the conversation. With the reelection campaign around the corner, Reagan downplayed the issue, which polls showed as divisive. When Gallup then reported that confidence in public schools moved upward in 1983 and 1984, the administration saw little incentive to pursue the goal.
Instead, Reagan shifted his focus to incremental reforms backed by Republicans, such as school choice programs, which allowed families to use government money to finance educational alternatives including private and magnet schools. Reagan also weakened the agency from within by steadily reducing the budget and stripping away regulations that previous administrations had put in place. Several programs, including money that aided districts to desegregate, were merged into block grants.
Block grants were an integral part of Reagan’s policy of “New Federalism.” Under the program, Congress started to distribute money to states and localities that had the ability to decide how to spend the funds rather than having to follow specifications imposed by restrictive grants. But Republicans did not cut the budget for education by $10 billion, as they originally hoped to do. In fact, it stood roughly at the same amount toward the end of 1982 ($14.7 billion) as when he started ($14.9 billion).
Nonetheless, federal involvement in education, as the historian Gareth Davies writes in his book See Government Grow, continued to expand through the 1980s with significant bipartisan support. Still, the department would remain a target of many Republican political attacks in the decades to come. After becoming speaker of the House in 1995, Rep. Newt Gingrich proclaimed: “I do not believe we need a federal department of homework checkers.”
Republican Presidents George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush took a notably different turn. The senior Bush, who was comfortable working across partisan lines, promoted national education standards through the Department of Education that would establish tougher, though voluntary, measures of accountability on school standards. He also worked on school choice.
The younger Bush took a very different approach again when he pushed for the No Child Left Behind Act in 2002. Working with liberal Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy, the final legislation vastly expanded the federal government’s role in education. Under the program, receiving federal funds would require schools to implement and do well with accountability tests.
Adding to the challenge for its opponents, the work of the Department of Education, as historian Jonathan Zimmerman writes in “Uncle Sam at the Blackboard,” has benefited not only disadvantaged communities but also middle-class Americans, though the source of the benefits is intentionally not always apparent—or is so “woven into the fabric our schools” that citizens forget who is paying for the bills.
Though Title 1 has focused on poor districts, Zimmerman’s research indicated that every congressional district in the United States has received some funding under the formula. Girls and women of all economic backgrounds, moreover, have been the beneficiaries of gender equity measures such as Title IX, legislation Congress enacted in 1972 that prohibited schools from discriminating on the basis of sex.
The attacks on education returned in full force with the Tea Party movement in 2011. Now, as with so much of the conservative agenda, Trump is attempting to use aggressive presidential power to force through changes that conservatives have never been able to achieve.
The president is deploying executive orders, threats and intimidation, and the bully pulpit in an effort to finally close the doors of the Department of Education. His arguments are very much grounded in similar rhetoric that Reagan used during the 1980s, though he has updated the issues to include criticism about the protection of LGBTQ+ rights as well as the COVID-19 pandemic shutdowns.
The question today is whether the Department of Education is more vulnerable in 2025 than it was in 1982 and whether Trump, too, will encounter similar kinds of resistance that Reagan encountered—not from left-wing activists taking to the streets, but from parents, students, and concerned civic leaders who see what draconian cuts mean in real life. When programs end and funds run dry, the possibility of getting rid of the government has often seemed much less appealing, even in the reddest of states, than it sounded as a presidential talking point. This was clear when Senator John McCain voted thumbs down to repealing the Affordable Care Act in 2017.
After the devastating impact of the COVID-19 school closures, which resulted in many children being left behind in their educations, many families won’t be happy to see the programs that they depend on end at this fraught moment. In fact, recent polls have shown that a majority of the public does not support eliminating the Department of Education.
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