On Thursday morning, the U.S. Senate’s Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions is scheduled to hear from U.S. President Donald Trump’s nominee for education secretary, Linda MacMahon. Given the Trump administration’s stated goal of shutting down the U.S. Department of Education, this hearing offers a logical forum on how best to do that in a way that actually helps America’s failing education system.
Nationwide, test scores released last month showed a discouraging decline in how fourth and eighth graders performed in math, reading, and science. These results highlight serious concerns that America’s schools have not yet re-bounded from the forced shutdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic. They also show that the long-term decline in student performance, especially in Maine, can’t be entirely attributed to school closures.
Regardless of our current trajectory of failure, the large community of Americans who work in public school administration or for teachers’ unions will likely shriek and wail over the idea of eliminating the Education Department. However, the idea of shuttering the federal Department of Education goes all the way back to its inception almost 45 years ago.
(RELATED: Shocking Chart Shows the Alarming — and Expensive — Failure of Maine’s Public Schools)
As President Trump’s last education secretary, Betsy DeVos, pointed out recently, the U.S. bureaucracy bearing the name “Education,” which she once led, doesn’t actually run a single school in America. Instead, it simply moves money. Since towns and states across the country fund the vast majority of elementary and secondary education, DoE funding, in the main, doesn’t even address the heart of the issue of America’s schools. Instead, it’s a tool for presidential administrations — and, to a lesser extent, Congress — to influence education using a series of carrots and sticks, but mostly carrots.
In reality, DoE’s major focus is actually higher education student loan debt. $1.7 trillion of it, in fact, and $70 billion of DoE’s 2024 budget was directed by the Biden administration to fund its constitutionally challenged debt forgiveness program. One former DoE official who agrees that department ought to be shut down recently argued that the smartest way of doing this would be to transfer this debt-management obligation to the Treasury Department. The late U.S. Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), who himself was an education secretary in the George H.W. Bush administration, proposed a plan to allow for IRS withholding, removing DoE from the equation altogether.
Parents of children with special needs appreciate another key role the federal education department plays in funding special education. For the 7.5 million students in this category, overall spending can add up to as much as a fifth of many schools’ budgets. Estimates range from $40-50 billion annually, and perhaps more. Setting aside the perverse incentive this creates for money-hungry school administrators to funnel kids into special ed programs, there’s an easy way to handle these function without DoE.
Because ADHD, autism, and other health disorders drive much of the need for special education, wouldn’t it make more sense to view this as a health issue? If so, funding could be channeled instead through the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The money could then follow the student through a model similar to school choice.
Over the past week, the recently-formed Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE) and its chief Elon Musk have dominated headlines with their focus on shutting down USAID, the foreign aid agency. Foreign policy geek that I am (and in full disclosure, I used to manage democracy projects abroad that were funded by USAID), this is more than a source of curiosity for me. But unlike foreign aid, how we educate our children is fundamentally important to almost everything else. So how we shut down the federal Department of Education really matters.
Between now and Thursday, there will be ample opportunity to offer Linda McMahon, and whoever is helping her prepare her testimony, some good ideas.
