The Trump administration announced on Tuesday an aggressive plan to continue dismantling the Education Department, ending the agency’s broad role in supporting academics at elementary and high schools and in expanding access to college.
Those responsibilities, which had been overseen by the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education and the Office of Postsecondary Education, will instead be largely taken over by the Labor Department.
Additional changes include moving 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. The Interior Department will take over the Indian Education Office.
Shifting duties away from the Education Department aligns with President Trump’s goal of eventually closing the agency, a move opposed by teachers’ unions and student rights groups and one that can only be accomplished with an act of Congress.
Less clear was how moving programs to other agencies aligned with Mr. Trump’s reason for closing the Education Department, which he has said was to give states more power in shaping school policies. A senior official at the Education Department said the changes would streamline bureaucracy and direct more money to the classroom.
“Cutting through layers of red tape in Washington is one essential piece of our final mission,” Education Secretary Linda McMahon said in a statement, adding that the changes were an attempt to “refocus education on students, families and schools.”
Several of the changes had been outlined in Project 2025, a right-wing playbook for remaking the federal government. The lead author of the education chapter, Lindsey Burke, is Ms. McMahon’s deputy chief of staff for policy and programs.
But the plan drew immediate blowback from some Republicans, including Representative Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, who said in a statement that the “department’s core offices are not discretionary functions.”
“They are foundational,” Mr. Fitzpatrick said. “They safeguard civil rights, expand opportunity, and ensure that every child, in every community, has the chance to learn, grow and succeed on equal footing.”
Kevin Carey, the vice president for education and work at New America, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington, said the changes were “wasteful, wrong and illegal.”
“Secretary McMahon is creating a bureaucratic Rube Goldberg machine that will waste millions of taxpayer dollars by outsourcing vital programs to other agencies,” Mr. Carey said.
Becky Pringle, the president of the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers’ union, criticized the administration for announcing the changes during American Education Week. (Mr. Trump released a statement on Monday trumpeting his plan to close the department in which he noted the week’s designation, which is intended to celebrate public schools and educators.)
“Not only do they want to starve and steal from our students — they want to rob them of their futures,” Ms. Pringle said.
Representative Tim Walberg of Michigan, the Republican chairman of the House Committee on Education and the Work Force, defended the moves, saying the administration was “making good on its promise to fix the nation’s broken system by right-sizing the Department of Education.”
About 10 cents of every dollar spent on local schools comes from the federal government, according to congressional estimates.
Administration officials have pointed to the recent federal shutdown to justify the moves, noting that schools remained open and students continued to be taught despite nearly all of the Education Department’s staff having been furloughed.
The department has posted several social media memes making such a point. In an X 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?”
Liz Huston, a White House spokeswoman, said the administration was committed to shrinking the agency “while still ensuring efficient delivery of funds and essential programs.”
“The Democrat shutdown made one thing unmistakably clear: Students and teachers don’t need Washington bureaucrats micromanaging their classrooms,” Ms. Huston said.
The Office of Elementary and Secondary Education oversees about $28 billion in grant funding that will be administered by the Labor Department, according to administration officials. About $3 billion in grants for the Office of Postsecondary Education were also affected.
The elementary and secondary office includes about three dozen programs that provide funding for low-income schools. While statutory oversight for those programs will remain with the Education Department, the agency is effectively contracting with the Labor Department to administer nearly all of the grants.
The postsecondary office grants to be moved include TRIO, which supports programs that are designed to support low-income and first-generation college students and students with disabilities. Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, asked Ms. McMahon about TRIO programs during a confirmation hearing earlier this year, saying they were a high priority for her.
“How do we maintain the administration and oversight of these programs if we abolish or substantially reorganize the Department of Education?” Ms. Collins asked.
Ms. McMahon responded by saying she was “not looking to defund or reduce any of those amounts” spent on those programs.
Republicans in charge of the House and Senate in Washington have signaled little enthusiasm for voting on a bill to close the department, which was created by an act of Congress in 1979.
Mr. Trump has also 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.
Mr. Trump had previously targeted the Small Business Administration as a landing spot for the nation’s $1.6 trillion student loan portfolio.
Ms. McMahon has also spoken publicly about the possibility of shifting programs for disabled students to the health department and responsibilities for civil rights enforcement in schools to the Justice Department.
Michael C. Bender is a Times correspondent in Washington.
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