Now that Donald Trump has been elected our next president, conversations about what his first days in office will look like has begun. One of Trump’s promises during his campaign was his intent to abolish the Department of Education, a goal supported by many of the Republican party candidates for the 2024 Presidential election.
Trump has long criticized the Department’s role in promoting racial equality and protecting the rights of transgender students. With math scores hitting an all-time low in 2023, as well as science and reading performance dropping, Trump believes the DOE is not fulfilling its purpose.
“One other thing I’ll be doing very early in the administration is closing up the Department of Education in Washington D.C., and sending all education and education work and needs to be back to the state,” Trump said. “We want them [the states] to run the education of our children because they’ll do a much better job of it.”
Because the DOE is in charge of regulating federal student loans—the Department’s supporters worry about what could happen to the $130 billion in student loans the department issues each year. GOP proposals suggest that the Treasury Department should take over student loans from the DOE, but many wonder how this would affect current and incoming college students from receiving aid.
“You could very well end up in a system where college access is blocked off for students who have financial needs, and that really would reverse the progress that’s been made over the past decade to create a system that had more open pathways into higher education for anybody who wants them,” education program director at Third Way Michelle Dimino said. “For students, the FAFSA snafu would look quaint compared to what would happen if we dissolved the Education Department.”
While public education is predominantly funded and regulated by local and state authorities, the federal government still sets certain policies such as ensuring equal access to education and creating the Head Start Program, which supports children’s success in school. The DOE also oversees Title I funding, which helps educate children from low-income families. If Trump successfully closes the DOE, funding for these programs could be run by other federal agencies.
“I don’t think that schools would suddenly lose money,” Director of Edunomics Lab, a research center focused on education finance policy Marguerite Roza said. “The Title I program has proven to be relatively popular on both sides of the aisle.”
With all this being said, closing the DOE is not something Trump can do on his own—even with the Republican party winning the Senate and currently maintaining a majority in the House at 212-218. This act also requires the support of 60 senators for approval, which will be difficult as the Senate currently consists of 53 Republicans and 45 Democrats. The likelihood of the act passing is low.
Although Republicans have targeted the DOE since its creation as a cabinet-level department in 1979 because of the power it gives the federal government in educational decisions, their efforts have remained unsuccessful. Most Republicans opposed the DOE because it allows the federal government to have a larger role in education than a minor one. Just last year, the House struck down an amendment to the parents’ rights bill which would have abolished the department. The vote ended with 161 yeses and 265 noes, 60 of which were from Republican representatives.
“The Department of Education was created through legislation,” Cato Institute Education Analyst Neil McCluskey said. “Legislation comes through Congress. If you want to take the Department of Education apart, you have to do that through legislation. I think that what is said in the campaigns and what is actually done has to be two different things often, because, in campaigns, politicians say a lot of things that make it seem like it’s easy to do what they want to do.”
