Thanks, President Carter 

Where in Washington can you find a person who will acknowledge that a bureaucracy has failed ? Furthermore, what if that person now takes appropriate steps to try to protect Americans from further damage? Well writes James Freeman in the WSJ, kudos to Linda McMahon for working to send power over education back to local communities where it belongs.

During his presidential campaign, among Donald Trump’s promises was to return education to the states. In March, he issued an executive order directing Education Secretary Linda McMahon to “facilitate the closure” of the Education Department by following  “the maximum extent appropriate and permitted by law.”

Over its lifetime, critics have ignored or not recognized the Department of Education and the money it has blown, an estimated $3 trillion in federal taxpayer dollars, with nothing to show for it but falling test scores.

The WSJ wonders, will Linda McMahon’s reshuffle rescue education? “No” quickly responds the Journal, yet it’s hard to see how this reform could make the situation any worse.

Time Is Nigh 

Eight months later, Ms. McMahon has found a novel approach. The Education Department announced “six new agency partnerships” designed to “break up the federal education bureaucracy.”

The Legalese

McMahon is transferring entire pieces of the Education Department remit to other departments.

Smart

“Good going,” asserts the Journal.

McMahon has conceded that only Congress can officially shutter the Education Department’s doors.

But there is the beauty of her transfer strategy that it can accomplish nearly the same, and precisely because of the Education Department’s fatal flaw: it’s unnecessary.

Unbeknownst to many, DoED was always a political creation. It was Jimmy Carter’s payback to teachers’ unions—and remains little more than a money redistributor.

Its function is to primarily oversee grants and loans—all jobs that, prior to its creation in 1979 (to the extent those jobs even existed) were handled by other departments. For the most part, these jobs are handed back to other recipients. If anything, some transfers will reduce interdepartmental duplication.

Here’s what’s changing, what’s not, and reactions:

• A labor future: On the rationale that education exists to prepare kids for jobs, Education is shifting its office of elementary and secondary education—which holds the purse strings for about $28 billion in grants for K-12 programs—to the Labor Department. The goal will be to “align” this funding better with “workforce and college programs.” Labor will also take over the office of postsecondary education, which oversees about $3 billion in grants to help kids finish college, and which the administration says will, under Labor control, be more focused on moving students toward skilled professions.
• Streamlining childcare: The Department of Health and Human Services is already the point agency for childcare-focused grants, overseeing the massive Head Start program. It will now also have authority over an education program that assists college students in obtaining on-campus child care. Trump’s 2026 federal budget actually called to cut this program as duplicative, though Education in its fact sheet suggests a consolidation with HHS is an alternative to elimination. HHS will also take over Education’s foreign medical accreditation program.

• Going international: The State Department will become the new home to Education’s international education programs and grants. State already administers the Fulbright program, and so is a natural fit to take over Fulbright-Hays grants, which support teacher research and training overseas. An Education explainer highlighted the degree to which some of these grants had gone off the rails, including a recent example of awarding $27,000 to a “doctoral student to investigate non-binary and trans francophones’ linguistic attitudes and ideologies towards inclusive French in Montreal, Canada.” Secretary of State Marco Rubio has proven adept at weeding out such waste.

• Native American education: The Department of the Interior, long the primary administrator of native affairs, will take over the Indian Education Office. Education says this will allow Interior to integrate the entirety of its native programs better as well as “reduce the administrative burden on tribal nations” by allowing them to cut back on duplicative reporting and “coordinate with one fewer federal agency on programs specifically designed to support their communities.”

• Status quo: The Education Department dodged for now the hot-button question of special-education funding, which is a big chunk of its budget. Its $1.6 trillion student-loan program is also staying put, as is its Office for Civil Rights. For now. Officials didn’t rule out more agreements with other agencies down the road.
• Under whose say-so? The administration is claiming legal authority for these transfers under the 1982 Economy Act, which lets bureaus and agencies engage in ”interagency agreements” to obtain supplies or services from each other. And, as noted, it is referring to each shift as a new “partnership” with the corresponding agency. It’s also highlighting an example of Joe Biden’s administration doing the same: The Federal Bureau of Prisons, part of the Justice Department, designated the Department of Labor as the agency to administer grants under the First Step Act. Still, no one should kid himself: The Education Department is already facing a mountain of lawsuits, and more will come to try to block these transfers.

• Practical effect: In addition to the streamlining and alignment benefits of repositioning some of these programs in other agencies, the transfers will have the important effect of diluting union power over a centralized education bureaucracy. The Education Department was created as a pawn of the teachers’ unions and remains so. Programs will now be spread across government, run by officials that have priorities that run beyond catering to teachers’ unions demands.