Trump Admin’s Quiet Plan To Dismantle The Education Department From The Inside

The Trump administration is preparing to hollow out the Education Department by shipping many of its most important offices to other federal agencies—an unprecedented work-around that effectively dismantles a department Congress has refused to kill.

Behind the scenes, aides are mapping out a plan to move multiple Education Department offices—possibly as many as six—into other federal departments, according to people briefed on the effort. That’s happening even though Congress has ignored President Trump’s request, via a March executive order, to formally abolish the department created in 1979 to guarantee equal access to educational opportunity and coordinate federal education programs.

Education Secretary Linda McMahon has openly admitted that only Congress can legally eliminate the department, but she’s vowed to do “everything in her power” to take it apart from within. Targets on the chopping block include the Office for Civil Rights, which investigates discrimination in schools; the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services, which oversees the $15 billion Individuals with Disabilities Education Act; Indian Education; the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education, which runs K-12 grants; and the Office of Postsecondary Education. Federal law says these programs must live inside the Education Department, so the administration is pushing a workaround in which other agencies would “run” the programs under contract while Education keeps them on paper.

The administration has already tested this strategy by shifting career, technical and adult education grants to the Labor Department, while claiming Education still sets policy and oversees the money. McMahon is now pitching similar “collaborations” for other functions, arguing that the recent government shutdown showed her department is basically expendable: “Students kept going to class. Teachers continued to get paid. There were no disruptions in sports seasons or bus routes,” she wrote, adding, “The shutdown proved an argument that conservatives have been making for 45 years: The U.S. Department of Education is mostly a pass-through for funds that are best managed by the states.”

Supporters of the department say that’s exactly the problem: a lot of what the agency does isn’t supposed to show up in bus schedules or game days, it’s about enforcing civil rights, protecting students with disabilities, directing money to the kids who’d be easiest to ignore and keeping those priorities high on the federal agenda. They also note that federal law explicitly places these responsibilities inside the department, and that quietly outsourcing them to other agencies via contract is less “reform” and more a legal sidestep around Congress.

So on paper, the Education Department may still exist; in practice, it risks becoming a hollow brand, with its most consequential powers scattered across the bureaucracy and run by agencies whose primary mission isn’t education. If you want to dismantle a Cabinet department without the political pain of actually voting to eliminate it, this is exactly how you’d do it—slowly, quietly, and under the cover of “efficiency” and “collaboration.”

Source: WaPo

Editor: Of course the lesson they took from a shutdown wasn’t “maybe we should fund government competently” but “hey, here’s our excuse to gut civil-rights enforcement and special ed by spreadsheet.” If this were really about states “managing funds better,” they wouldn’t need legal gymnastics and shadow contracts—they’d make the case in the sunlight and see if Congress actually buys it.