President Donald Trump signed his long-anticipated Department of Education executive order (EO) on Thursday, March 20. It doesn’t close the department – that requires an act of Congress – but it does direct Education Secretary Linda McMahon to “take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education and return education authority to the States, while continuing to ensure the effective and uninterrupted delivery of services, programs, and benefits on which Americans rely.”
In other words, don’t break the law, but shut things down as much as possible without disrupting services and without the necessary congressional support. If this sounds like a tall order, that’s because it is. The department and much of its funding were established by Congress, meaning it’ll take the legislative branch to end it. So, is there anything the Trump administration can do?
The Cost of Education
As the president points out in the EO, the Department of Education doesn’t actually educate students. Yet it does have more than 4,000 employees with a net cost of $218.4 billion in fiscal 2024, which is nearly 4% of federal outlays, according to Pew Research Center.
It also manages federal student aid, like the Pell Grant and student loans, enforces civil rights laws and access for students with disabilities, and doles out teacher grants. The president, however, promised that student aid and civil rights protections would continue uninterrupted – even if they were eventually handled by another agency.
So, what’s the point in cutting the department if its primary functions will continue anyway – and must, as they’re mandated by Congress? Taking out the middleman, so to speak, trims costs. Eliminating the agency would also end the regulatory role it plays in education through funding policy. According to the department’s website, it “establishes policy for, administers and coordinates most federal assistance to education. It assists the president in executing his education policies for the nation and implementing laws enacted by Congress.”
In simpler terms: While the Education Department doesn’t directly mandate what happens at schools, it does control where the money goes and how that money is used.
An Impressive Lack of Accomplishments
Since it first got to work in May of 1980, what has the Department of Education accomplished in almost half a century of existence? As it turns out, very little of value. As Liberty Nation News reported last August, the average test scores for American students don’t look much better now than they did before the department was founded. An examination of the numbers shows that “the line looks fairly flat when viewing average reading scores from 1971 to 2022. There are ups and downs, but the later score – 215 – isn’t significantly higher than the earlier one: 208. Mathematics doesn’t look much better, ranging from 219 to 234 in the same span.”
Composite scores for the ACT and SAT from then to now look relatively flat as well. “While American students don’t seem to be getting much smarter or dumber, regardless of what test you track, the US certainly is falling behind internationally,” LN explained. “While we once led the world in the quality of education, that hasn’t been the case in many years. According to the 2022 test data from the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), the US comes in 34th out of 80 countries tracked.”
What the department has accomplished, however, is a massive increase in the cost of education per student. “Comparing the 1970 scores to those today, reading scores rose by 1% and math scores rose by 1.8%,” explained a 2023 story in the Washington Examiner. “To put that in context, since 1971, inflation-adjusted educational funding per student has risen by more than 245%.”
Now let’s look at the Pell Grants that the left seems so afraid will dry up if the Education Department gets disbanded. College Board Research reports that the average cost of tuition for attending an in-state public school as an undergraduate in 2024 was $11,610. In 1970, two years before the Pell Grant was established, the average tuition was $585 – or about $3,700 in today’s dollars.
“Free money” grants and federally guaranteed student loans made a college education “available” to everyone … but only by using the tax-funded programs. The equivalent of $3,700 a year is no small sum for a single teen or 20-something working an entry-level job – but it was doable. Most college students today are only there because the government (that is, everyone in America with a job) is picking up the tab.
So What Can Be Done?
Though there’s a lot the president can’t do without congressional backing, he’s far from powerless. The Department of Education announced last week that it intended to lay off more than 1,300 employees. There have already been 63 probationary workers culled and 572 who accepted the DOGE buyouts. Combined, that accounts for about half of the department’s staff.
Furthermore, the Trump administration has cut about $600 million in federal grants awarded to teacher-training programs. The president can’t officially disband the department, but he can leave it with a skeleton crew and very little in funds. And while a complete dissolution may be the dream, defunding it, moving its primary functions to other agencies, and breaking any power it holds over the states may be, practically speaking, good enough.
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