Conservatives have spent decades talking about abolishing the agency. Here’s how a future Republican administration could actually get it done.
Conservatives have spent decades talking about abolishing the agency. Here’s how a future Republican administration could actually get it done.
C ries to shutter the U.S. Department of Education have grown louder and more constant as the 2024 presidential race heats up. Announced and potential candidates are already on message: The department has devolved into a lobbying platform for a continuously more expensive and expansive federal role in support of a heavily unionized education system, with tragic results for the nation and its students.
One difficulty in closing the Education Department is that the agency has become ingrained in the minds of policy-makers and the law. For more than 40 years, Congress has willingly assigned most K–12 and postsecondary funding and rulemaking initiatives to the department. With an $83 billion budget, a $1.6 trillion student-loan portfolio, 4,400 employees, and thousands of contractors, there is a lot to unravel, and it won’t happen overnight.
But it is worth the effort to begin the unraveling. The department has grown into a multibillion-dollar regulatory behemoth that public-school unions, the higher-education lobby, far-left civil-rights groups, and their elected allies manipulate for their own purposes. The self-interests of these groups don’t align with the interests of students or taxpayers.
Even though the feds provide less than 10 percent of K–12 funding, federal rules and regulations dominate local school management. Worse, they discourage the innovations needed to ensure that every child in America reaches his or her potential. Meanwhile, nearly one-third of our 14-year-olds today cannot read and comprehend a basic grade-level passage.
In higher education, federal taxpayers shoulder an even higher portion of the tab (close to half, and much more if President Biden gets away with his massive student-loan-bailout schemes). The current system encourages unprepared high-school graduates to seek ever-more-expensive four-year degrees — many awarded by institutions that run roughshod over free speech and due process. Meanwhile, the department largely ignores students wanting apprenticeships or a trade, skill, or other career-focused experience.
Although the department’s annual budget is less than 2 percent of the total federal budget, it’s still a staggering amount of money. As Congress wonders how to pay for high priorities like national defense, Social Security, Medicare, or the $600 billion-plus in interest on our more than $31 trillion in national debt, policy-makers need to stop talking about closing the department and develop an actual plan to do it.
Congress and the next administration should include in that plan four critical measures:
First, empower families by enacting a tax credit to encourage voluntary contributions to K–12 scholarship programs. By creating choice for students and competition for public schools, these scholarships will give children a better chance to find a school that fits their needs, and it will encourage public schools to innovate and improve.
Second, empower states by consolidating funding streams and sending the money as no-strings-attached block grants to states. Despite more than $1 trillion in Department of Education spending, K–12 achievement gaps have not closed, and student outcomes have not improved. States should be entrusted with federal funds to experiment and find solutions to their pressing education problems. Any federal agency could write checks as effectively as the Department of Education. With this model, both the Right and the Left would have to give up on imposing their pet K–12 policy preferences as a condition of funding.
Third, move civil-rights enforcement in education to the U.S. Department of Justice. The federal government has a critical role in enforcing equal opportunities in education without regard to race, color, national origin, ethnicity, sex, age, and disability. The Education Department and the Justice Department share responsibilities in this area. Congress should rationalize civil-rights policy by moving the Department of Education’s enforcement responsibilities to DOJ for enforcement through litigation.
Finally, empower learners and protect taxpayers by creating a new, simplified system of postsecondary-education aid. The federal student-aid program has evolved into a policy playground for progressives. Aided and abetted by an educational bureaucracy intent on encouraging borrowing and then forgiving loans, far-left politicians have successfully saddled taxpayers with the growing costs of college with little added benefit for students. President Biden’s never-ending pause on student-loan payments and mass student-loan forgiveness have turned federal loans into costly grants at taxpayer expense.
As part of the department’s winding down, Congress should sunset the current student-aid program and transfer its $1.6 trillion student-loan portfolio to the Treasury for straightforward servicing and collection. In its place should come a simplified, easy-to-understand system of postsecondary aid that helps both college-bound students and high school graduates who eschew academic degrees in favor of apprenticeships and career training.
Because the Department of Education will be out of the picture, Congress will need to create a nimble entity with professional governance and management that would shield taxpayers from the waste and abuse of policies like the president’s student-loan bailout. We’re not proposing another lawless Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — rather, an entity with a governing authority appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate, funded by annual congressional appropriations, and accountable to the taxpayers for the integrity of the program. The FDIC could provide a model.
Conservatives have talked about closing the department since 1980, the year the agency officially opened its doors. Ronald Reagan was among the first to call for its closing. In response, for decades, D.C. insiders and skeptics have rolled their eyes because, well, within the Beltway everyone knows it’s nearly impossible to terminate a single federal program, much less an entire cabinet-level department. Inertia is always bureaucracy’s biggest ally.
We hope the expected crescendo leading into 2024 will result in serious policy and legislative efforts to shut down the Department of Education, once and for all. It’s time to stop talking about it and just do it.
Robert S. Eitel, a former senior counselor to the U.S. secretary of education, is the president and co-founder of the Defense of Freedom Institute for Policy Studies. Jim Blew, a former assistant secretary of education for planning, evaluation, and policy development, is a co-founder of DFI.