Trump Probably Can't Abolish Department Of Education, Shhhh, Nobody Tell The Idiot

Usual creeps in Congress want to help.

Photo by CDC on Unsplash

Donald Trump is likely to issue an executive order within a few days aimed at shutting down the federal Department of Education, a target of Republican wet dreams off and on since the department was created by Congress in 1979. Since the Education Department is a Cabinet-level department created by Congress, it can’t legally be eliminated without congressional action, and for once, even Trump seems to know this, according to insiders who spoke to the Washington Post (gift link). Instead of outright abolishing the department, the anonymous insiders said, the draft executive order instructs the department to start winding itself down while Congress does the heavy lifting of murdering it.

But even there, there’s no certainty about what exactly Trump intends to do, or try to do. Many of the Education Department’s roles are specifically assigned to it, like providing Title I funding to schools that serve low-income students, funding special education programs, ensuring that schools don’t discriminate, and, at the post-secondary level, administering federal student aid like Pell Grants and student loan programs.

Project 2025 calls for spinning off most of those functions to other agencies, but even doing that would require Congress to pass legislation. Or it would, if Trump follows the law, and he might just decide that’s too haaaard. He might simply order it and see how far federal courts would let him get.

Oh, also, Trump promised while campaigning that he would get rid of all the “radicals, zealots and Marxists” supposedly running rampant in the department, and that he would return “all education, and education work and needs back to the states.” There aren’t any actual Marxists anywhere in government, and control of what gets taught in public schools is already entirely up to states, so we suppose Trump can check that off his list and declare Mission Accomplished. As for the rest, we won’t know what the executive order will contain until it drops, beyond Trump’s wish for the department to do all it can to ensmallen itself.

Already, WaPo reports, President Elon Musk has sent a team of 20 Flying Monkeys into the department, “looking to cut spending and staff,” according to unnamed insiders and documentation Post reporters have seen.

At least some DOGE staffers have gained access to multiple sensitive internal systems, the people said, including a financial aid dataset that contains the personal information for millions of students enrolled in the federal student aid program.

Golly, that doesn’t terrify those of us who had our loans forgiven at all! Joe Biden, you may remember, wiped loan balances out in part or whole for 1.4 million Americans, to the tune of $56.6 billion. But don’t worry. It’s not like Elon would start naming some of us on Twitter and demanding Trump claw back the debt that was written down, that’s mere idle speculation on our part! (The remainder of this post was filed from an unspecified secure location.)

Also, the Wall Street Journal reports that unnamed insiders say Trump’s executive order will “shut down all functions of the agency that aren’t written explicitly into statute or move certain functions to other departments,” as well as calling on Congress to find a way to abolish and part out the department’s statutory functions.

If Trump and congressional Republicans go with the Project 2025 plans — and they’re all lazy, so of course they will — Title I, which provides extra funding to K-12 schools with high-poverty students, would be shifted over to the Department of Health and Human Services, which would also take over funding special education under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act (IDEA). Republicans love letting states do anything they want — which is how federal “welfare” money ended up funding a volleyball stadium in Mississippi — so the Title I and Special Education funding would be given to states in no-strings-attached block grants. In the current fiscal year, that would amount to $18.4 billion for Title I and $15.5 billion for special ed, but Project 2025 doesn’t specify that current funding levels be maintained, so why would Trump or Congress?

Keep in mind that we aren’t just talking about the severely disabled students that Donald Trump thinks should be made fun of (or worse), either. As part of IDEA, established in 1975, students with disabilities are guaranteed the right to a “free, appropriate public education that is tailored to their individual needs,” a phrase I had to memorize back when I was an education major in college. That also covers students with a wide range of learning disabilities, like ADHD, dyslexia, and executive function problems, who are eligible to get additional services and accommodations.

Schools must work with staff and parents to create individualized education programs (IEPs) for qualifying students, a service that millions of families — from both political parties — rely on. As Education Week reports, around 7.5 million students are protected by IDEA, or roughly 15 percent of the students attending K-12 schools in the country. That $15.5 billion in supplemental funding for schools is also pretty damned important to families, who would have to pay more for their children to get services if it’s cut.

The sort-of-good news is that neither Project 2025 nor Trump’s people have proposed eliminating IEPs or repealing IDEA, although the call for converting IDEA funding to block grants is plenty worrying enough. Worse, Trump’s purge of federal support for protections against discrimination would likely attempt to eliminate enforcement of IDEA’s guarantee of equal access to education for students with disabilities.

But those protections are a matter of law, which is where there’s some hope, because parents groups, school districts, and teachers unions are already gearing up to sue to protect federal education funding in general, and IDEA funding and protections in particular. A massive reworking of special education funding would also run up against states that have their own laws guaranteeing protections for students, most of which are based in existing federal law, so state AGs would also be likely to sue as well.

Weirdly, Trump’s goal of eliminating the Education Department may also conflict with some of his own promises to remake education in the US, like his demand for more “patriotic education,” which could be difficult to enact with no Education Department. Last week, Trump’s Education Department ordered an investigation into five colleges and universities where students protested Israel’s war in Gaza, seeking to punish any schools that allegedly didn’t clamp down on antisemitism. That could still be done if Education’s civil rights office were transferred to the Justice Department, but that too would require Congress to make the transfer happen.

And a final wrinkle: Trump and his far-right supporters want to enact “school choice” at a national level, which would siphon funds away from public schools to private (often religious) schools. Private schools are far more free to discriminate against kids with disabilities, so obviously that’s a plus to Bible-believing Christian nationalists. But any significant cuts to federal education funding would mean less taxpayer money for the grifty segregation academies, so we can see how they might object. And there again, you’ll have a lot of angry parents complaining if the “choice” programs start hurting their own kids’ schools, and members of Congress don’t like that.

Then there’s the plain logistics of passing any huge remaking of education through such an evenly divided Congress. When Republicans last tried to eliminate the Education Department in 2023, 60 House Republicans joined all the Democrats in killing the bill. There’s almost certainly more unity under Trump, but it would only take a few nervous Republicans in swing districts to chicken out, possibly joined by one or three whose own families have kids in IEPs. And in the Senate, it’s extremely unlikely seven Democrats would vote to break a filibuster. Maaaybe Republicans might choose to eliminate the legislative filibuster to kill the Education Department, but it seems a stretch.

Reconciliation would be one way to get by a filibuster, but including gutting Education in the great big bill to extend the 2017 tax cuts might face the same problems in the House as a stand-alone bill. It might be even harder if it looked like such a provision could endanger the entire tax bill, too.

Good thing public education has lots of very motivated allies who like their kids’ schools, and they’re a far bigger part of the population than the rightwing crazies who are determined to destroy public education. As ever, it’s going to take a lot of people getting on Congress’s ass — especially from constituents of Republicans in swing districts — to save the Education Department.

OPEN THREAD.

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[NBC News / WaPo (gift link) / NPR / WSJ / CAP / AP / New York]

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