While campaigning, President-elect Donald Trump repeatedly threatened to dismantle the US Department of Education (DOE), on the basis that the federal education apparatus is “indoctrinating young people with inappropriate racial, sexual, and political material.”
“One thing I’ll be doing very early in the administration is closing up the Department of Education in Washington, DC, and sending all education and education work it needs back to the states,” Trump said in a 2023 video outlining his education policy goals. “We want them to run the education of our children because they’ll do a much better job of it. You can’t do worse.”
Closing the department wouldn’t be easy for Trump, but it isn’t impossible — and even if the DOE remains open, there are certainly ways Trump could radically change education in the United States. Here’s what’s possible.
Can Trump actually close the DOE?
Technically, yes.
However, “It would take an act of Congress to take it out,” Don Kettl, professor emeritus and former dean of the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland, told Vox. “It would take an act of Congress to radically restructure it. And so the question is whether or not there’d be appetite on the Hill for abolishing the department.”
That’s not such an easy prospect, even though the Republicans look set to take narrow control of the Senate and the House. That’s because abolishing the department “would require 60 votes unless the Republicans abolish the filibuster,” Jal Mehta, professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, told Vox.
Without the filibuster rule, legislation would need a simple majority to pass, but senators have been hesitant to get rid of it in recent years. With the filibuster in place, Republicans would need some Democratic senators to join their efforts to kill the department. The likelihood of Democratic senators supporting such a move is almost nonexistent.
That means the push to unwind the department is probably largely symbolic. And that is the best-case scenario, Jon Valant, director of the Brookings Institution’s Brown Center on Education Policy, told Vox. According to Valant, dismantling it would simultaneously damage the US education system while also failing to accomplish Trump’s stated goals.
Closing the department “would wreak havoc across the country,” Valant said. “It would cause terrible pain. It would cause terrible pain in parts of the country represented by congressional Republicans too.”
Much of that pain would likely fall on the country’s most vulnerable students: poor students, students in rural areas, and students with disabilities. That’s because the department’s civil rights powers help it to support state education systems in providing specialized resources to those students.
Furthermore, much of what Trump and MAGA activists claim the agency is responsible for — like teaching critical race theory and LGBTQ “ideology” — isn’t actually the purview of the DOE; things like curriculum and teacher choice are already the domain of state departments of education. And only about 10 percent of federal public education funding flows to state boards of education, according to Valant. The rest comes primarily from tax sources, so states and local school districts are already controlling much of the funding structure of their specific public education systems.
“I find it a little bewildering that the US Department of Education has become such a lightning rod here, in part because I don’t know how many people have any idea what the department actually does,” Valant said.
Even without literally shutting the doors to the federal agency, there could be ways a Trump administration could hollow the DOE and do significant damage, Valant and Kettl said.
The administration could require the agency to cut the roles of agency employees, particularly those who ideologically disagree with the administration. It could also appoint officials with limited (or no) education expertise, hampering the department’s day-to-day work.
Trump officials could also attempt changes to the department’s higher education practices. The department is one of several state and nongovernmental institutions involved in college accreditation, for example — and House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-LA) has threatened to weaponize the accreditation process against universities he believes to be too “woke.”
Finally, Trump could use the department’s leadership role to affect policy indirectly: “There’s power that comes from just communicating to states what you would like to see” being taught in schools, Valant said. “And there are a lot of state leaders around the country who seem ready to follow that lead.”
Trump’s plans for the department will become clearer once the administration nominates an education secretary. Once that person is confirmed, Kettl said, “They’re just gonna be off to the races on the issue again.”
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