The Trump administration is on track for sweeping changes to public education within the first 100 days of its second term but legal challenges await.
President Donald Trump has yet to issue an executive order to eliminate the Department of Education or work with Congress to do it, but the process of dismantling the smallest Cabinet-level agency is well underway.
Already half of the staff has been cut, along with $1 billion in contracts related to the department’s Education Sciences agency and diversity, equity, and inclusion training. Department offices outside of Washington will eventually be closed to save additional money over time.
Trump has also withheld federal education aid from universities that ignored his executive order banning campus diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and anti-Semitic policies. He warned states that the same could happen to K–12 school districts that continue to push progressive ideologies or allow boys to compete in girls’ sports.
Layoffs and Contract Cuts
About 2,000 of the agency’s 4,133 employees have been laid off or voluntarily resigned, the Department of Education confirmed on March 11.
A Department of Education senior official told The Epoch Times on March 14 that the agency’s redundancies and inefficiencies included six separate strategic communications functions, office managers for teams of only five employees, and multiple support teams for information technology, human resources, and administrative support services that should have been consolidated into one central office per function.
The department had also announced that college finance, Title I funding for low-income K–12 students, special education coverage, and civil rights investigations related to learning institutions would not be affected by the cuts.
The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) announced last month that 89 multi-year contracts totaling $900 million for the Institute for Education Sciences will be cut.
Heather Peske, president of the National Council on Teacher Quality, said the staff reduction measures are drastic and counterproductive to improving the performance of K–12 schools.
“Without a federal backstop, states are likely to weaken or abandon commitments to maintaining high standards for student learning and accountability for student outcomes,” she said in an email to The Epoch Times.
Peske said cuts to the federal agency’s research arm hinder states and K–12 districts from developing a plan to improve the quality of instruction and student outcomes based on test score trends and patterns of improvements or decline by grade level.
“It is imperative that the federal government protect and ensure transparency on student outcomes, access to research and data on what works and what does not in schools, equitable funding, and maintaining all students’ civil rights,” she said.
Title I and Special Education Funding
During a number of congressional hearings before and after Education Secretary Linda McMahon’s nomination, Democrats said the agency is needed to assure continued funding for low-income student populations and the special education programs and protections guaranteed to students under federal law.
Republicans maintained that there is no plan to eliminate those funding streams. They said billions of dollars could be saved by removing one level of bureaucracy and relocating those functions to Health and Human Services or providing it directly to states through block grants.
Student Loans, Pell Grants, and Higher Education Funding
Borrowers who had enrolled in President Joe Biden’s Saving on a Valuable Education Program (SAVE) will remain in a state of forbearance where interest will not accrue for the remainder of this year as the agency establishes a new plan for student loans to replace the prior administration’s student loan forgiveness policies.
Lawmakers on both of the aisles are discussing changes to federal loans to limit the amount borrowed according to the desired academic program in an effort to mitigate long-term student debt. There’s also interest in expanding Pell grants for low-income students to short-term vocational certificate programs.
What’s Next?
McMahon previously said she‘ll continue working with DOGE to reduce the federal education bureaucracy and return more money to the state and local level, where decisions about curriculum, standards, and staffing should be made anyway.
By contrast, the allocations for Department of Education programs that would be more difficult to cut due to constitutional implications—aid for tribal schools, learning facilities on tax-exempt military bases, veteran higher education preparation programs, and two Washington, D.C. universities for which the federal government has exclusive jurisdiction (Howard and Gallaudet)—total $2.4 billion.
“Eliminating the U.S. Department of Education and all that it does would produce major savings,” writes Neal McCluskey, director of Cato’s Center for Educational Freedom. “But so would eliminating much of what it does short of full termination, especially if we keep only what is constitutional.”
Regardless of what has been cut or what else could be cut, continued lawsuits and complaints are expected.
Teacher unions have also vowed to challenge the agency cuts every step of the way.
