The Political War Over the Department of Education is Only Beginning
The 74 Million | By Kevin Mahnken | December 3, 2024
Donald Trump has pledged to end the federal government’s role in K–12 schools. To do it, he’ll have to overcome strong public opposition.
Fresh from their November victories, Republican lawmakers and expected appointees to the incoming Trump administration are already working to help the president achieve his campaign promise of abolishing the U.S. Department of Education.
Notable Trump surrogates Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, each promised seats on a proposed commission to eliminate government waste, have publicly endorsed the idea, while Sen. Mike Rounds of South Dakota filed new legislation to initiate a shutdown process before the new Congress was even seated.
Those moves are the first rumblings of a struggle that could last well into Trump’s second term, and possibly beyond. The drive to abolish the department hasn’t been this salient, or plausible, since the Reagan era. Yet any effort to meaningfully reduce Washington’s role in funding and regulating America’s schools would face a swell of resistance, as transformative changes in politics usually do. Several experts agreed that the combination of political and administrative hurdles is likely to prove so intractable that a more incremental approach, possibly focused on slashing the department’s workforce, may prevail instead.
Whatever course the administration adopts will, at least in part, depend upon the outlook of Linda McMahon, the president-elect’s nominee to serve as education secretary. Despite previously serving in the first Trump administration and leading the conservative America First Policy Institute, McMahon’s own views on K–12 schools remain mostly opaque. In a statement announcing her nomination, Trump specified that she would be charged with sending education governance “back to the states.”
David Houston, George Mason University
David Houston, a professor of education at George Mason University, said that Republicans had good reason to be cautious about taking decisive action against an entity whose functions — which largely consist of subsidies to both K–12 and higher education, as well as civil rights enforcement and data collection — are little understood outside the capital.
“People generally don’t have a precise understanding of what exactly the U.S. Department of Education does, but saying you’ll get rid of it reads generically as being anti-education,” he said. “That strikes me as a very heavy albatross to hang around your neck come the midterms.”
Public opinion research appears to support Houston’s skepticism. When the polling organization YouGov administered a survey in July asking voters their views on assorted proposals from the controversial Project 2025 policy document for Trump’s second term, respondents rejected the notion of unwinding the Department of Education by a 63-26 margin; their numbers were much smaller than those who said they would favor a ban on pornography or returning to the use of the gold standard. (In response to its unpopularity, Trump’s campaign pointedly kept Project 2025 at arm’s length.)
Still, perceptions of any government office can be moved. A recent Pew poll showed that the percentage of Americans who viewed the department positively had fallen from 53 percent in 2018 to just 45 percent this summer, with 46 percent holding a negative view; in all, it was tied with the Justice Department as the second-least-popular federal agency polled, behind only the IRS. Meanwhile, a majority of respondents polled by CBS News said they were excited or optimistic about what Trump would do as president.
If any agency is vulnerable to substantial cuts, I’d say it’s the one.
Chris Edwards, Cato Institute
Chris Edwards, Cato Institute
Chris Edwards, a tax and budget analyst at the libertarian Cato Institute who maintains an online directory of plans to shrink virtually every government department and major expenditure, said the Education Department stood out as a particularly viable target.
“It has only been around for 40 years, so people walking around today remember when there wasn’t one,” he said. “The patron saint of the Republican Party, Ronald Reagan, promised to eliminate it years ago. So if any agency is vulnerable to substantial cuts, I’d say it’s the one.”
‘A decline in trust’
In all likelihood, the department will be one of several facing some level of belt-tightening. Musk has said he wants to reduce government spending by $2 trillion annually, a figure that raised eyebrows inside of Washington and out. But regardless of whether his newly created Department of Government Efficiency succeeds in making a real dent in the budget, voters have indicated in recent years that they want to spend less on a smaller portfolio of federal programs.
Martin West, an economist at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, agreed that Pew’s long-running surveys revealed that the Department of Education sat on the “low end of support” among government bureaus. But drops in support over the last half-decade have occurred across the board, affecting even well-liked offices like the U.S. Postal Service and the Centers for Disease Control. The swoon reflects an electorate that has believed for years that the country is on the wrong track, he added.
Martin West, Harvard University
“There’s been a decline in trust in large institutions generally, and I would interpret that change as a broader phenomenon rather than anything specific to education,” said West. “But it does shift the lay of the land.”
It’s impossible to say, however, where the ground will settle — particularly when any ambitious initiative led by Trump will very likely disturb it further.
Political science research has long suggested that the political views of Americans tend to work like a thermostat, moving in the opposite direction of the party in power. Hence, voters became more welcoming of immigration after Trump was first elected in 2016, only to reverse course after he was succeeded by Joe Biden.
Similar patterns play out with respect to education. A study co-authored by Houston found that U.S. presidents tend to polarize public opinion every time they take a highly publicized stand on issues like standardized testing or school vouchers. Though few voters hold strong opinions on such questions, they quickly take cues based on their appraisal of the president; only in cases when the president’s position cut against the traditional views associated with his party — such as Barack Obama’s support for charter schools and teacher merit pay — did his endorsement drive support for a given policy.
If Trump launches a substantive attack on the K–12 bureaucracy, “I would expect Republican support for eliminating the Department of Education to shoot through the roof, and Democratic opposition to do the same,” Houston predicted. “It’s an obviously polarizing dynamic because Trump is laying out a position that has always historically fallen within the Republican camp.”
‘Enough juice’
The idea of abolishing the department already splits voters deeply. According to YouGov’s poll from earlier this year, 53 percent of Republicans were open to the proposal, compared with 28 percent of independents and just 8 percent of Democrats.
The divide would probably open even wider if Republicans in Congress chose the simplest means of abolition and simply voted the agency out of existence. But that course, while direct, is uncertain: It would rely on the Senate majority’s ability to summon 60 votes in favor to overcome a sure Democratic filibuster. Most observers believe that to be an insurmountable obstacle.
By contrast, a more plodding approach could be more achievable, while potentially veering further from the risk of publicity and voter outrage. A combination of legislation — permitted through the reconciliation process, which allows budgetary bills to pass with only 51 votes — and executive action could be used to distribute the department’s various responsibilities and resources to other cabinet offices. A future administration might, for example, see the Department of Justice deciding Title IX claims and the Department of the Interior presiding over schools on American Indian territory.
Cato’s Edwards analogized the opportunity before Trump to the brief period in the 1990s when President Bill Clinton teamed with the GOP to reform welfare. But that dramatic stroke, he argued, came only after the public discourse around cash benefits had played out in both parties. While the Republican Party first vowed to eliminate federal interventions in schools over 40 years ago, its plans have yet to make headway with the broader public.
“It’s doable, but the president has got to make the argument for it,” Edwards said. “Welfare reform happened in 1996 because conservatives and even centrists spent over a decade making a case about why traditional welfare was harmful and in need of reform. Whether Trump is up for doing something like that, we don’t know.”
Kevin Kosar, American Enterprise Institute
Kevin Kosar, a senior fellow at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute who focuses on Congress and the federal bureaucracy, noted that government programs, once introduced, tend to be sticky. Even if big-ticket items like Title I aid for high-poverty schools and IDEA grants for students with special needs are devolved to states, or elsewhere within the federal government, it won’t necessarily diminish the prominence of government in K–12 schooling.
“Go ahead, abolish the Department of Education,” Kosar said. “But if you scatter all of its programs to other departments, you’ve gotten rid of 4,100 people, and you have to hire people in other departments to process those grants and aid applications anyway. So how much juice are you getting from that?”
