By Laura Meckler, The Washington Post (c) 2024
Closing the Education Department is a central plank in former president Donald Trump’s schools agenda. Inside the Republican Party, he’s not alone.
GOP candidates in some of the most competitive Senate and House races have proposed shuttering the agency, in some cases following Trump’s lead. Project 2025, the conservative blueprint for a future Republican administration, lays out a detailed plan for how to go about ending it. And former Trump education secretary Betsy DeVos has said she would come back for a second term if the mission was closing her former department.
Together, the pledges raise the question of whether Congress, if controlled by Republicans, and the White House, if controlled by Trump, would act on a promise that’s been floated off and on for decades.
On the campaign trail, a range of Republican candidates are voicing support, in sometimes dramatic terms.
In Wisconsin, Republican Senate candidate Eric Hovde this month called the agency “one of the worse monstrosities that’s ever been created.”
“If I get to the U.S. Senate, one thing I’m going to say is, ‘Hey, there’s a spot to save a lot of money and do America a lot better – closing that thing for good,’” he said in an interview with a conservative podcast. The comment was met with enthusiastic applause from the audience.
In Ohio, Republican Bernie Moreno, who is running for Senate in one of the hottest races, has said repeatedly that he wants to abolish the agency. “We’re going to get rid of some of these agencies that don’t make any sense, like the Department of Education and just move that money to the states,” he said last week in a radio interview.
And in Montana, Republican Senate challenger Tim Sheehy says he wants to do away with the agency by “throwing it in the trash can,” the Daily Montanan reported. “We have a Department of Education, which I don’t think we need anymore,” Sheehy said. “It should go away.”
Sheehy then pointed to decades-old civil rights legislation that bars federally funded schools from discriminating on the basis of race – rules that are enforced by the Education Department. He said this work is no longer needed so the agency can close.
“We formed that department so little Black girls could go to school down South, and we could have integrated schooling. We don’t need that anymore,” he said.
Today, the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights still investigates allegations of discrimination on the basis of race, as well as sex and other factors. It has also said sex discrimination includes discrimination based on gender identity, stirring opposition from conservatives.
Education is the responsibility of state and local governments but the federal agency plays a role. In addition to enforcing civil rights laws, the department administers federal grant programs, including the $18.4 billion Title I program that provides supplemental funding to high-poverty K-12 schools. It runs achievement tests dubbed the Nation’s Report Card and collects statistics on enrollment, crime in school, staffing and other topics. And it oversees the $1.6 trillion federal student loan program.
Closing the agency would require congressional action, people in both parties agree, and likely require a supermajority of 60 votes in the Senate as long as filibuster rules remain in place. Politically, this would be difficult if not impossible, with opposition from Democrats and likely some Republicans. A 2023 vote in the House to abolish the department, considered as an amendment to a parents’ rights bill, failed. It garnered 161 yes votes, but 60 Republicans joined every Democrat in voting no.
Sen. Patty Murray (D-Washington), chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, said in a statement that these proposals represent a real threat, particularly if Republicans take control of the Senate and keep the House.
“Trump wants to literally abolish the Department of Education,” she said. “This may seem like a wildly outlandish proposal but many Republicans are deadly serious about this, and, if ever enacted, it would unleash absolute chaos in the daily lives of millions of families.”
Project 2025, the conservative governing blueprint published by the Heritage Foundation, lays out a plan forhow it could be done. It suggests farming out programs to other departments – moving civil rights enforcement to the Justice Department, for instance, and the student loan program into a new government corporation, which would work with the Treasury Department to administer the program. Other programs would move to the Department of Health and Human Services under this vision.
A survey by the Pew Research Center in July shows the partisan divide in views of the agency. Sixty-four percent of Democrats said they have a favorable opinion of the Education Department, compared to just 26 percent of Republicans.
Criticism of the Education Department’s existence runs along two tracks. Some say it’s an example of an unnecessary and bloated bureaucracy. Reagan McCarthy, a spokeswoman for Moreno, who is challenging Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown in Ohio, said Moreno’s primary goal is driving power away from Washington. “He believes that we should work to give as much power over our kids’education to parents and teachers, not federal bureaucrats,” she said.
Other critiques are part ofthe ongoing culture war debate. They point to the department’s work under Democrats to promote racial equity and protect rights of transgender students, much of it through enforcement of civil rights law. The agency, for instance, has said that sex discrimination includes discrimination based on gender identity.
“Saying, ‘I’m going to abolish the department’ is a blow against the bureaucrats, a blow against the woke agenda,” said Frederick M. Hess, director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. “That’s generally what they’re trying to communicate and what the audience is hearing.”
In Wisconsin, Hovde cited this concern in a conversation with podcaster Ben Shapiro last month.
“They’re trying to push gender ideology, which is just nuts,” Hovde said. “They’re trying to social engineer your children. So I am just so fundamentally opposed at this.”
Abolishing the Education Department has been an off-and-on Republican goal since it was created in 1979 by splitting what was then the Health, Education and Welfare Department into two departments: Health and Human Services and Education. The move fulfilled a campaign promise President Jimmy Carter made to the National Education Association.
In his 1980 presidential campaign, Ronald Reagan pushed to reverse course. Instead, in 1983, the landmark report “A Nation at Risk” was issued, spotlighting the failings of the education system and redoubling federal interest in improving it.
But the idea of closing the department never fully went away.
Running for president in 2016, Trump advocated reducing the footprint of the department, and as president, he proposed budgets that significantly cut federal education spending. But he made no effort to eliminate the department and Congress did not go along with his request for huge cuts.
“That was more of an aspiration and there was not real focus given to how that could actually be accomplished,” DeVos told the Detroit News last month. “The president had other priorities.”
Other conservatives argue that closing the agency is both politically impossible and ideologically unwise. A better plan, says Max Eden of the conservative Manhattan Institute, is to use the department to enforce a conservative view of hot-button issues.
Rather than bar schools from discrimination based on gender identity, he says,the agency could punish schools that allow transgender girls and women to participate on women’s sports teams. It could go after schools that implement certain diversity, equity and inclusion strategies, he said.
In an essay for the Washington Examiner, Eden called this “de-escalation through escalation.”
“If you can’t get the Republican votes to shut down the department,” he wrote, “make the Democrats resent it so much they want to shut it down, too.”
But for now, Democrats see this as a winning issue for their side.
“Republicans have completely embraced the Project 2025 agenda and the far-right’s unhinged crusade to defund public schools,” said Viet Shelton, spokesperson for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which works to elect Democrats to the House. “Voters will resoundingly reject Republican attacks on their families and communities and elect a Democratic majority that invests in teachers, schools and students.”
And with the election less than two weeks away, some Republicans may be rethinking their positions.
Republican Nick Begich, running in Alaska, was asked in January if he could name two or three federal agencies that he would favor disbanding and defunding, and replied the Department of Education was “right at the top of the list.”
“The role of the federal government in funding education is dubious at best,” he said. “Prior to Jimmy Carter, we didn’t have a Department of Education and we managed to educate folks just fine.”
But asked this week if this was still Begich’s position, his spokesman said he was “advocating for reform and accountability within the department.”