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While the federal government has spent money on education and developed education policies since the 19th century, the U.S. Department of Education didn’t become a stand-alone agency until 1980 when, courtesy of President Jimmy Carter, it split off from the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare.
Carter advocated for creating the department to fulfill a campaign promise to the National Education Association. Congress passed the Department of Education Organization Act in 1979. In response, the NEA subsequently issued its first-ever endorsement in a presidential contest.
Just what is the function of the DOE?
As former U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos explains, it doesn’t run a single school, employ any teachers in a single classroom, or set academic standards or curriculum. “It isn’t even the primary funder of education—quite the opposite. In most states, the federal government represents less than 10% of K–12 public education funding.”
DeVos adds that the department does shuffle money around, adds unnecessary requirements and political agendas via its grants, and then passes the buck when it comes time to assess whether any of that adds value. “In other words, the Department of Education is functionally a middleman. And, like most middlemen, it doesn’t add value. It merely adds cost and complexity.”
In 2024, the DOE employed over 4,000 people whose salaries and benefits came to $2.7 billion, and the department’s total budget for the year was $79 billion.
One of the purported reasons the DOE was brought into existence was to lower achievement gaps. But after spending over $1 trillion since its inception, it has done no such thing. The results from the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) reading and math tests, given to 4th and 8th graders, were announced in January and showed that 4th graders continued to lose ground, with reading scores slightly lower, on average, than in 2022 and much lower than in 2019.
Teacher union leaders are in a massive snit over the possibility of the DOE’s dissolution. Reacting to Donald Trump’s attempt to get rid of it, National Education Association President Becky Pringle released a statement on Feb 3, in which she maintained that his “latest extreme action will hurt our students and public schools.”
American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten said on CNN on Feb. 4, “The move is not legal. There are lots of things about the Department of Education that are in statute,” she claimed, referring to funds that go out from the department to low-income families, students with disabilities, English as a Second Language learners, and to work-study programs.
Weingarten continued, “You’re talking about millions of kids. And what that department really does is it makes sure that the money goes out and it’s not stolen. It is used for the intended purposes. Those are the most important functions of the Department of Education.”
Yet in November, the same union boss acknowledged, “My members don’t really care whether they have a bureaucracy at the Department of Education or not.”
It’s worth noting that teacher union godfather Albert Shanker was opposed to the DOE’s creation, saying, “We thought it should stay within HEW (Department of Health, Education, and Welfare) because it’s the whole child.”
Many also hail NAEP as a vital program run by the DOE, and indeed, the test is an essential tool. What DOE proponents don’t acknowledge is that NAEP has existed since 1969, over a decade before the DOE came into being. The early tests were held under the auspices of the Research Triangle Institute, an independent nonprofit research institute.
In any event, the shake-up is in motion. The Trump administration’s DOE is canceling more than $100 million in grants to fund diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) training as part of the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE) commitment to end wasteful spending.
Most recently, DOGE also announced the termination of 89 DOE contracts totaling $881 million.
Interestingly, instead of ditching the department in its entirety, many conservatives want to dismantle it by assigning its responsibilities to other departments. For example, Christopher Rufo, Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, suggests that the DOE could spin off all college student loans and grants into an independent financial entity.
Ronald Kimberling, Research Fellow at the Independent Institute, suggests transferring the Federal Student Aid (FSA) office from the DOE to the Treasury and merging the Pell Grant program and the $910 billion Federal Supplemental Educational Opportunity Grant program into the American Opportunity Credit tax benefit administered by the IRS.
On Feb.8, the National Association of Scholars issued a new report, “Waste Land—The Education Department’s Profligacy, Mediocrity, and Radicalism,” which proposes reforming the DOE in the short term, splitting off some functions to other federal agencies, and setting the stage for its eventual abolition.
While shifting DOE mandates to other government entities may yield a few benefits, I believe the DOE and all its myriad functions should be eliminated. Big government education bureaucracies don’t do much for children or taxpayers. Our country needs more subsidiarity, a principle that stipulates matters should be handled by the smallest and least centralized competent authority. As such, we should not simply merge the DOE with other departments, but rather eradicate it and all its unconstitutional programs.
One scholar who agrees with this approach is Neal McCluskey, director of Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Freedom, who asserts, “Congress should phase out federal funding for K-12 education and end all related regulations. Policymakers need to recognize that federal aid is ultimately funded by the taxpayers who live in the 50 states and thus provides no ‘free lunch.’ Indeed, the states just get money back with strings attached while losing billions of dollars from wasteful bureaucracy. There is no compelling policy reason or constitutional authority for the federal government to be involved in K-12 education. In the long run, America’s schools would be better off without it.”
That said, eliminating the useless and costly department won’t be easy; it will require Congressional approval. As Rick Hess, director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, wrote in November, “Even with a narrow House majority, they’d get no Democratic votes, and insiders laugh at the idea they could even keep enough Republicans on board. (It’s safe to say they’d lose at least Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins.) Unless Republicans nuke the filibuster, they’ll need 60 votes in the Senate, where they’ll have 53 seats. Plus, there’s a contingent of Trump-aligned education conservatives who’d much rather use the department to promote their vision the same way the Obama or Biden teams did. There may be efforts to trim or move parts of the department, but anything more seems unlikely.”
Unlikely, perhaps, but that needs to be the goal. Write to your elected officials ASAP—especially if you live in a purple state—and urge them to eliminate this useless, taxpayer-funded boondoggle and return education policy decisions and financing back to the states where they belong.
Larry Sand, a retired 28-year classroom teacher, is the president of the non-profit California Teachers Empowerment Network – a non-partisan, non-political group dedicated to providing teachers and the general public with reliable and balanced information about professional affiliations and positions on educational issues.
