Why Trump’s effort to dismantle the Education Department matters very little and also quite a lot

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The Trump administration’s latest actions to dismantle the Department of Education can be hard to make sense of.

On the one hand, this is a milestone moment in conservatives’ long-running campaign to gut the agency. On the other hand, the administration has promised that most of the underlying programs will be protected.

There is very little reason to think that moving various programs to other agencies will matter much for schools. Running the same programs, just out of a different department, is unlikely to affect the typical student.

“If that’s all they’re doing, they’re not going to save any money, they’re not going to change any policy,” says Shep Melnick, a political scientist at Boston College. “It’s hard to see what the point of all that is.”

Yet there’s a reason this has gotten such attention. The Trump administration’s commitment to dismantling the Education Department matters both for what it represents and for the legal and political battles that will soon follow.

Here’s how to understand how we got here and what the latest actions do and don’t mean.

It is often said that Republican presidents have been trying to eliminate the Education Department ever since it was created in 1979. This is not quite right. Ronald Reagan quickly gave up on this amid national concern about declining standards in schools. George W. Bush dramatically expanded the federal role with No Child Left Behind. In his first term, Trump made a feeble and failed effort to merge the Education and Labor departments.

The second Trump administration has been different, surprising even many veteran education observers. Knowing that congressional approval is all but impossible, Trump officials have moved to decimate the agency from within.

This reflects the Education Department’s role as a potent representative of conservative anger at public schools and universities for embracing various liberal ideas. That the Trump administration has pushed so hard on this speaks to the depth of the backlash and the increased importance of education as a political issue to conservatives.

“It's a perfect moment for Trump to walk in and say, ‘This doesn't work; Linda, shut it down,’” says David Cleary, a former Republican congressional staffer focused on education policy.

The Trump administration has repeatedly said that the programs being moved out of the department will continue without interruption. That’s different from Project 2025, the conservative blueprint, which seeks not only to eliminate the Education Department but much of its funding. By maintaining these programs, the administration is avoiding more intense political blowback that would come from budget cuts to schools.

What is less clear is the Trump administration’s longer-term ambitions. Its budget proposal to Congress seeks to slash billions in federal dollars for education. Officials also temporarily froze many of those same funds earlier this year.

If these programs do remain intact, though, what exactly is the purpose of moving them elsewhere? Officials have said this would streamline administration. Running K-12 programs out of the Department of Labor “will create a cohesive, unified strategy for talent development to build the workforce for the Golden Age of America,” says an administration document.

Many observers, though, say splitting up the programs would complicate oversight by involving more departments. “Moving programs from one department to another does not actually eliminate the federal bureaucracy and it may make the system harder for students, teachers, and families to navigate,” said former Republican Education Secretary Margaret Spellings in a statement.

Trump administration officials have touted these moves as a way to “return education to the states.”

But federal power comes from programs and money, not from the name of the agency. Even before the Education Department existed, critics regularly decried the federal government for allegedly meddling in local school affairs. (The feds took a particularly aggressive approach in the late 1960s in pressuring Southern school systems to integrate, using new federal money for schools as leverage.)

For its part, the Trump administration has been wielding federal authority over schools, even as it’s sought to close the department. For instance, officials have strongly pushed schools and states to drop certain race-based equity programming and accommodations for transgender students. There is no indication Trump wants to back down from these disputes.

An administration budget document from earlier this year notes that “maintaining a base set of federal funds means they can also be withdrawn from states and districts who flout parental rights.” This is true even when such funds live under a different department.

The administration is testing whether it can go around Congress to decimate an agency that Congress created. Education Secretary Linda McMahon had promised in her confirmation hearing to go through Congress. Democrats have decried this move as illegal.

“It’s certainly a legal gray area,” says Julia Martin, an education lawyer at the Bruman Group.  She expects this development to feed into existing lawsuits that claim Trump has gutted the department without legal authority.

Yet Trump has racked up a remarkable string of wins before the U.S Supreme Court. The justices previously set aside a lower-court ruling that halted deep staffing cuts at the Education Department.

Now, the administration is taking another major step by outsourcing many of the department’s functions. If the courts bless this move, it would be another sign of deference to Trump and may embolden the administration to push the envelope even further.

Still, according to numerous public polls, closing the Education Department is not popular with voters. It’s surprising, then, that the administration has pushed forward on it with such intensity. Doing so paints a large political target on an issue, education, in which Republicans have lost ground with voters.

A number of Republicans have already praised the department’s dismantling but a handful have voiced misgivings. The question now becomes whether some congressional Republicans fight Trump’s effort to eliminate the department, whether either party crafts a compelling political message around it, and how voters respond to all this.

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