The Trump administration is expected to announce on Tuesday an aggressive plan to continue dismantling the Education Department, ending the agency’s role in supporting academics at elementary and high schools and in expanding access to college.
Those responsibilities will instead be taken over by the Labor Department, according to three people briefed on the plans.
The changes also will include moving the Office of Indian Education to the Labor Department; shifting a child care grant program for college students and foreign medical school accreditation to the Health and Human Services Department; and transferring Fulbright programs and international education grants to the State Department.
Education Department officials shared details of the plans Tuesday morning with some state education officials and members of Congress, the people said. A public announcement is scheduled for later today.
Administration officials pointed to the recent federal shutdown to justify the moves, according to the people who had been briefed, saying that schools remained open and students continued to be taught despite nearly all of the Education Department’s staff having been furloughed.
The department made a similar argument in recent days with social media memes. In a post last week, the department announced that federal workers were returning to the office, adding, “But let’s be honest: did you really miss us at all?”
President Trump has vowed to close the Education Department, but the agency cannot be eliminated without an act of Congress, which created the department in 1979.
But Mr. Trump has shown little interest in collaborating with Congress in his bid to reshape the federal government, and his administration has continued to seek ways to diminish the Education Department.
“We’re going to shut it down, and shut it down as quickly as possible,” Mr. Trump said in March after signing an executive order that directed Education Secretary Linda McMahon to start razing the department.
Ms. McMahon’s first act after joining Mr. Trump’s cabinet this year was to instruct the department’s staff to prepare for its “final mission” of shuttering the agency. The following week, Ms. McMahon fired 1,315 of those workers.
The layoffs decimated the department’s Office for Civil Rights, which was created to enforce Congress’s promise of equal educational opportunity for all students, and eliminated the agency’s research arm dedicated to tracking U.S. student achievement, which for many students is at three-decade lows.
In July, after the Supreme Court cleared the way for mass layoffs at the department, the administration moved adult education, family literacy programs and career and technical education to the Labor Department.
Michael C. Bender is a Times correspondent in Washington.
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