The Department of Government Performance is now “actively dismantling” the Education Department plans, and President Donald Trump is expected to mark an executive order that may begin the process of eliminating the Department of Education.
” They are in the building, on the 6th floor, delaying grants and contracts”, Stansbury told the Huffington Post.
In a post on X, DOGE revealed that one of the 89 arrangements it terminated gave one contractor$ 1.5 million to “observe email and administrative businesses” at a message center.
The director of education may be directed to develop a strategy to relocate the department through executive action, according to CNN‘s report last week, and it would also demand that Congress pass the legislation necessary to end the department.
Trump claimed that he wants Linda McMahon, who will have her Senate confirmation hearing on Thursday, to “put herself out of a work.”
To destroy the Department of Education, Congress would have to move legislation with 60 seats. Frederick M. Hess, senior fellow and director of education policy studies for American Enterprise Institute, said that is” not going to materialize”.
Through professional action or a reconciliation bill, which would only need 50 votes in the Senate, a number of programs, contracts, and administrative positions may be defunded, properly downsizing, but not eliminating the department immediately.
What may happen if Trump sacked the Education Department?
The Department of Education’s key functions include developing and implementing plan, providing federal funding to schools, enforcing legal rights, supporting exclusive knowledge, managing student financial aid, performing data collection and analysis, and providing resources for professor development.
Pell grants, Title I, and special education
Pell Grants for low-income students who want to attend college, Title I, which provides funding to school districts serving low-income students, and special education, which provides funding for children with special needs, are the three programs that the Education Department spends the most on.
The government allocated$ 24.5 billion for the Pell Grant in 2024,$ 18.6 billion for Title I, and over$ 15 billion for special education.
Hess noted that the overall impact would be “modest” because “in K-12 education, the federal share of spending is really very small, which is part of what makes all the federal overreach and rules so problematic” . ,
He said that” the feds only kick in about 10 cents on the dollar” overall, and that’s just two cents on the dollar for Title I. So we’re not really talking about significant effects from what might be realistic cuts.
School lunches
Eliminating the Education Department would have little to no impact on summer care or transportation because they are mostly handled by state and local governments with little federal funding, aside from for emergency relief, and would not have an impact on school lunches because the Department of Agriculture manages the National School Lunch Program.
Student aid
Other responsibilities, like student aid, civil rights enforcement through the Office for Civil Rights, and K-12 functions, would likely be moved to other departments.
Neal McCluskey, director of the CATO Institute’s Center for Educational Freedom, said that while student aid could eventually be “phased out”, in the meantime it could be transferred to the Treasury Department. In addition, OCR could be moved to the Department of Justice, and K-12 functions could be moved to the Department of Health and Human Services.
According to McCluskey, the billions spent on Pell Grants, Title I, and special education” could be used for debt reduction.”
What Trump’s former Education secretary is saying
Betsy DeVos, who served as secretary of education under Trump’s first administration, called for the Education Department to be scrapped altogether in an op-ed for The Free Press on Thursday.  ,
I can say conclusively that American students will be better off without having worked for four years as the department’s secretary of education, battling to get the department’s bureaucracy to make even the smallest changes to put the needs of students first.
Hess shared DeVos’s sentiment, telling the Washington Examiner that” I think it’d be fine … The Department of Education is extraordinarily bureaucratic. It creates extraordinary amounts of red tape for the nation’s schools, especially relative to the money it actually provides”.
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He said that under the Obama and Biden administrations, the department became” a political entity frequently engaged in promoting particular ideological nostrums” which he called “massively problematic”. He continued, “make the best case possible for abolishing the department.” The two Democratic presidents. So, yeah, I think downsizing the department, or even abolishing it, is certainly wholly sensible”.
The White House and the Department of Education received comments from The Washington Examiner.
