The Trump administration is reportedly preparing to dismantle the Department of Education, a longtime dream of Republicans wanting to return education policy-making to the states.
At the same time, President Trump has issued a series of directives essentially asking the federal government to remain heavily involved in education by promoting “patriotic” learning in K-12 schools and ridding college campuses of DEI and antisemitism.
Some in the education world see a contradiction. “It seems like he’s saying, ‘We’re going to use the federal government to advance a particular curriculum,' which seems to be at odds with the idea that education is something that is not federal, that is state and local,” said Neal McCluskey, director of the libertarian Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Freedom.
Trump is simultaneously pursuing both tracks.
Earlier this month, the Education Department put dozens of staffers on paid leave because their work purportedly ran afoul of Trump’s anti-DEI executive order. Meanwhile, the Department of Government Efficiency, the cost-cutting initiative led by Elon Musk, combed through the Education Department’s data, seeking more jobs to eliminate. Trump’s planned executive order aims to shrink or dissolve the Education Department, according to two people with knowledge of the plan. Trump told reporters this month that he wants to “let the states run schools,” and wants his nominee for education secretary Linda McMahon to “put herself out of a job.”
At the same time, though, Trump has ordered the Education Department to carry out elements of his agenda. His executive order on Jan. 29 directed the education secretary to help the administration root out antisemitism on college campuses. Trump also ordered the department to set up a 1776 Commission to “promote patriotic education,” according to another executive order, titled “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling.”
“I don’t know that there is a clear message from the Trump administration,” McCluskey said. “Either they intend to get the federal government out, or they intend to use the federal government to advance their own ideas of what should be taught and what policies schools should have. This tension might exist for the whole administration.”
Although congressional action would be required to abolish the Department of Education, a White House spokesperson said in a statement to The Boston Globe that Trump “plans to fulfill a campaign promise by reevaluating the [department’s] future.” (The Wall Street Journal first reported on the planned executive order.)
In 1979, during the Jimmy Carter administration, Congress turned the federal Office of Education into a Cabinet-level department tasked with collecting data on US education and distributing federal aid to schools, states, and students. Since then, the department’s headcount has approximately doubled, to 4,300 employees, and its annual budget has grown to $60 billion. It is the smallest of the 15 Cabinet-level departments.
Among its responsibilities, the Department of Education administers the student loans and federal financial aid that colleges rely on for revenue, distributes federal grants to K-12 schools with low-income students, funds special education programs, collects data, and enforces federal antidiscrimination laws.
Since the department’s creation, conservatives have advocated for abolishing it and returning all control of education to states and municipalities. Campaigning for the presidency in 1980, Ronald Reagan called it “President Jimmy Carter’s new bureaucratic boondoggle.” In 1996, the Republican National Committee vowed to abolish it. In 2016, multiple Republican candidates echoed that promise. But the talk never turned into policy.
Trump and his allies have said the department promotes indoctrination of young people into progressive ideology and wastes government dollars on DEI programs, while also failing to deliver on its core mission of improving education outcomes from kindergarten to college.
The department did not respond to questions from the Globe.
Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education in Washington, D.C., which represents about 1,600 colleges and universities, said efforts to dismantle the department are “misguided and would ultimately create more red tape, confusion, and delay in getting crucial resources to students, schools, and colleges.”
Republicans see it differently.
“The department has not lived up to the expectations set up for it when it was created,” said Jonathan Butcher, a fellow at the Heritage Foundation who contributed to the Project 2025 governing playbook for the Trump administration. “There is nothing about the agency’s existence that demonstrates it’s good for taxpayers or good for students.”
Still, Butcher cautioned the Trump administration against mandating curriculum for use in classrooms. (He does support the restart of the 1776 Commission and said it could be used for other purposes.)
“It’s not Washington’s job to be coming up with curricula,” Butcher said.
There is some disagreement within Trump world about whether the end goal is abolition or reform of the department.
Ilya Shapiro, of the conservative Manhattan Institute, said he would favor dismantling the department, but he acknowledges that couldn’t happen overnight. Some core functions, he said, would have to transfer to other agencies.
The student loan portfolio, for example, could move to the Treasury Department while the responsibilities of the Office for Civil Rights could transfer to the Justice Department, as outlined in Project 2025, which Trump distanced himself from on the campaign trail but is now implementing.
Some conservatives say that would make more sense than the current arrangement.
“It’s not clear that a bunch of bureaucrats around education are the natural stewards for a megabank with obligations in excess of $1 trillion,” said Rick Hess, fellow with the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute. “It probably makes more sense to have that run out of Treasury by people who know banking.”
Some of the department’s functions and responsibilities cannot be transferred or eliminated by executive fiat. Congress designated many of the department’s responsibilities and only congressional action can remove them. Many political observers think it’s virtually inconceivable Congress would go along with many of these changes because of the Republican Party’s slim majority in the House of Representatives and the need to secure some Democratic votes to overcome the 60-vote filibuster in the Senate.
David Randall, the director of research of the right-leaning National Association of Scholars, acknowledged that congressional action would be required to pare back the department to the extent he favors. But he said he’s not ruling any possibility out.
“The last two weeks have seen things unprecedented in politics such that I don’t think anybody is in a good position to say they know how people are likely to behave,” he said.
Trump, though, can nevertheless use the bully pulpit to spur schools to remake themselves according to his wishes, including adopting a more “patriotic” curriculum — as long as he doesn’t use the force of law, said Adam Kissel, a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation.
“He should express what he thinks makes an educated citizen, a patriotic citizen,” Kissel said. “It’s still up to every school [and] college if they agree with that, and do what the president thinks.”
Jackie Kucinich of the Globe staff contributed to this report.
Hilary Burns can be reached at hilary.burns@globe.com. Mike Damiano can be reached at mike.damiano@globe.com.