The Department of Education May Be Gone, Finally

News came out last week that the Trump administration is stepping up efforts to dismantle the Department of Education. We’ve already seen a large number of staff reductions in the department, which the Supreme Court authorized last summer, and Trump moved to end DEI programming within days of his inauguration. This next move aims to finish the job, mainly by farming out the department’s mandated activities such as the federal student loan program to other departments in the executive branch and to the states.

We’ll see. The initiative strikes some as a common-sense move to lower costs and end wasteful programs such as a $75 million payout made in the last days of the Biden term to eligible nonprofit organizations to increase “educator diversity” in America. But the Trump ambition is a massive one and has no historical precedent. It was Ronald Reagan who said, “Government programs, once launched, never disappear. Actually, a government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we’ll ever see on this earth!” And William F. Buckley once observed (if I recall correctly) that the only way to kill a government program is to convince the groups who benefit from it that, ultimately, those benefits do more harm than good, which is not an easy persuasion when the good is immediate and the harm delayed (as in the case, for example, of welfare dependency). 

Added to those resistances is the fact that when a program begins and grows, a network forms around it and constitutes a new and often powerful interest group in America. If the program reaches sufficient size—that is, if it manages enough funding—the network has the status of a professional industry. In the case of the Department of Education, the constituents include consultants, researchers in schools of education, grant writers, lobbyists, the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association, and various NGOs, not to mention actual education providers ranging from states and districts to curriculum creators and testing companies. None of those parties want to end the income stream that has flowed for many years.