Fresh off their victories in November, Republican lawmakers and expected appointees in the new Trump administration are already working to help the president fulfill his campaign promise: abolish the U.S. Department of Education.
Notable Trump surrogates Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, who each promised seats on a proposed commission to eliminate government waste, have publicly endorsed the idea, while South Dakota Senator Mike Rounds filed new legislation to trigger a shutdown process before the new Congress even sat. .
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These moves are the first rumblings of a battle that could continue well into Trump’s second term, and possibly beyond. The push to abolish the department has not been this prominent or plausible since the Reagan era. Still, any attempt to meaningfully reduce Washington’s role in financing and regulating America’s schools would be met with a wave of resistance, as transformative changes in politics tend to do. Several experts agreed that the combination of political and administrative hurdles is likely to prove so intractable that a more incremental approach, possibly aimed at downsizing the department’s workforce, could prevail instead.
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Whatever course the administration chooses will depend, at least in part, on the vision of Linda McMahon, the president-elect’s nominee for Secretary of Education. 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 largely opaque. In a statement announcing her nomination, Trump specified that she would be charged with returning the education board “to the United States.”
David Houston, George Mason University
David Houston, an education professor at George Mason University, said Republicans had good reason to be cautious about taking decisive action against an entity whose functions — which largely consist of subsidies to both primary and secondary education 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 get rid of it generally amounts to being anti-education,” he said. “That seems like a very heavy albatross to hang around your neck during midterm exams.”
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Public opinion research appears to support Houston’s skepticism. When polling organization YouGov conducted a survey in July asking voters for their opinions on several proposals in Trump’s controversial Project 2025 policy document for his second term, respondents rejected the idea of seizing the Department of Education by a margin of 63 to 26. to dissolve; their numbers were much smaller than those who said they would support a ban on pornography or a return to the use of the gold standard. (In response to its unpopularity, the Trump campaign pointedly kept Project 2025 at bay.)
Still, perceptions of any government office can be changed. A recent Pew survey found that the percentage of Americans who viewed the department favorably had fallen from 53 percent in 2018 to just 45 percent this summer, with 46 percent having a negative opinion; Overall, it tied with the Justice Department, the second least popular federal agency, behind only the IRS. Meanwhile, a majority of respondents surveyed by CBS News said they were excited or optimistic about what Trump would do as president.
If there is one institution that is vulnerable to substantial cuts, it is me.
Chris Edwards, Cato Institute
Chris Edwards, a tax and budget analyst at the libertarian Cato Institute, which maintains an online registry of plans to cut virtually every ministry and major spending, said the Department of Education was a particularly viable target.
“It’s 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 years ago to eliminate this party. So if there is one agency that is vulnerable to substantial cuts, it is me.”
‘A decline in trust’
In all likelihood, the department will be one of many to experience some degree of belt-tightening. Musk has said he wants to cut government spending by $2 trillion annually, a figure that is raising eyebrows both inside and outside Washington. 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 showed the Department of Education at the “low end” of support among government agencies. But over the past five years there has been a decline in support across the board, affecting even high-profile offices like the US 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 has been a decline in trust in large institutions in general, and I would interpret that change as a broader phenomenon and not something specific to education,” West said. “But it does change the nature of the country.”
However, it is impossible to say where the ground will settle – especially when an ambitious initiative led by Trump is very likely to disrupt it further.
Political science research has long suggested that Americans’ political views tend to act like a thermostat, moving in the opposite direction of the party in power. That’s why voters were more supportive of immigration after Trump was first elected in 2016, only to change course after he was succeeded by Joe Biden.
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Similar patterns play out in education. A study co-authored by Houston shows that U.S. presidents tend to polarize public opinion whenever they take a high-profile position on issues like standardized testing or school vouchers. Although few voters have strong opinions on such issues, they are quick to take cues based on their assessment of the president; only in cases where the president’s position ran counter to traditional views associated with his party—such as Barack Obama’s support for charter schools and teacher pay—did his support galvanize support for a particular policy.
If Trump were to launch a substantive attack on the K-12 bureaucracy, “I expect Republican support for eliminating the Department of Education to shoot through the roof, and the Democratic opposition to do the same,” he predicted. Houston. “It’s clearly a polarizing dynamic because Trump is articulating a position that historically has always been within the Republican camp.”
The idea of abolishing the department is already causing great division among voters. According to YouGov’s poll from earlier this year, 53 percent of Republicans were open to the proposal, compared to 28 percent of independents and just 8 percent of Democrats.
The gap would likely widen if Republicans in Congress chose the easiest way to abolish it and simply voted out the agency. But that course, while direct, is uncertain: it would depend on the ability of the Senate majority to muster 60 votes in favor to overcome a certain Democratic filibuster. Most observers believe this is an insurmountable obstacle.
In contrast, a more onerous approach may be more feasible, while potentially deviating further from the risk of publicity and voter outrage. A combination of legislation – made possible by the reconciliation process, which allows budget laws to be passed with as few as 51 votes – and executive action could be used to distribute the department’s various responsibilities and resources among other cabinets. For example, a future administration could ensure that the Justice Department decides Title IX claims and that the Interior Department presides over schools on American Indian soil.
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Cato’s Edwards analogized the pre-Trump opportunity to the brief period in the 1990s when President Bill Clinton worked with the Republican Party to reform Social Security. But that dramatic blow, he argued, came only after the public debate over benefits had played out in both parties. While the Republican Party first promised to eliminate federal interventions in schools more than forty years ago, its plans have yet to gain traction among the broader public.
Kevin Kosar, American Enterprise Institute
“It’s doable, but the president has to make a case for it,” Edwards said. “Welfare reform took place in 1996 because conservatives and even centrists spent more than a decade arguing why the traditional welfare state was harmful and in need of reform. We don’t know whether Trump is willing to do something like that.”
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, are often sticky. Even if expensive items like Title I aid for high-poverty schools and IDEA grants for students with special needs are transferred to states or elsewhere within the federal government, this will not necessarily reduce government prominence in K-12 education. reduce. .
“Go ahead, abolish the Department of Education,” Kosar said. “But if you spread all its programs across other departments, you lose 4,100 people, and you still have to hire people from other departments to process those grants and aid applications. So how much juice do you get from that?
