On the menu today: The big news of today is likely to be President Trump’s executive order declaring his intent to abolish the U.S. Department of Education. But this may add up to the biggest window-dressing change since NAFTA became the U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade agreement. As dramatic as “abolish the Department of Education!” sounds, it really means reassign the duties of the department to other parts of the government like the Departments of the Treasury and Justice. And as much as Republicans may (justifiably) fume about the woke nonsense programs that the Department of Education funds and grabs headlines over, the overwhelming majority of Department of Education spending goes to programs that are popular — Pell Grants, Stafford Loans, K–12 funding for students in poverty or with learning disabilities. Meanwhile, President Trump prepares to fast-track the deportation of 240,000 Ukrainians back to the war zone, and the director of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency drops by to chat with Maria Bartiromo and explain why the U.S. halted military assistance and intelligence-sharing with Ukraine.
‘Abolishing the Department of Education’. . . by Moving the Duties Elsewhere
Last night the Wall Street Journal reported that President Trump will issue an executive order as soon as today, aiming to abolish the U.S. Department of Education.
It sounds big, sweeping, and enormously consequential. But the effects on America’s students may well turn out to be considerably less than either proponents boast or detractors decry. First, as the Journal notes, a president can’t eliminate a federal department with an executive order. The Department was created by federal statute and can only be eliminated by changing the law.
Nor is there reason to think the executive order will have any significant effect on the funding for the department’s programs. The money to keep the department (and the rest of the federal government) running was allocated through March 14, and “Speaker Mike Johnson has outlined plans for [a spending] measure, which is expected to extend funding at current levels through the end of the fiscal year, Sept. 30, and has the backing of President Trump.”
As the Journal says:
Fully unwinding the department would require a filibuster-proof, 60-vote majority in the Senate, legal experts have said. The major programs it administers — including money for students with disabilities and student loans — are codified in law and have significant political constituencies. The draft order doesn’t mention Congress.
Last month George Leef wrote here at NR, “The Department mostly interferes with our schools and colleges by imposing education-blob notions and DEI policies on them.”
That’s a popular view among Republicans, but the problem for those who want to eliminate the Department of Education is that it runs a whole bunch of programs that are noncontroversial and popular — and those are the biggest ticket items. The budget for the Department in the 2024 fiscal year was $268 billion. The biggest chunk of that, $160 billion, goes to the Office of Federal Student Aid, which runs Pell Grants, federal direct subsidized loans, federal direct unsubsidized loans, and the federal work-study program.
A bit more than one-third of U.S. undergraduate college students get Pell Grants; the maximum federal Pell Grant award is $7,395 for the 2025–26 award year. Pell Grant amounts “are determined by annual family income, household size, and number of dependents.” The average Pell Grant award is $4,491. A bit more than half of all Pell Grant funds go to students whose families earn less than $20,000 annually, and 88 percent of Pell Grant funds go to public universities.
A little more than half of undergraduate students who earned their degree, 53 percent, received a federal loan at some point. Just under 55 percent of federal student loan debt is in Stafford Loans. (Technically these are no longer called Stafford Loans and are part of the “William D. Ford Federal Direct Student Loan Program,” but almost everyone still calls them “Stafford Loans.”) The federal government loans an annual total of $82 billion to all postsecondary students.
Then there’s Department of Education spending on kindergarten through 12th grade education. The two largest federal funds for K–12 schools are Title I, which supplements state and local funding for low-achieving children, especially in high-poverty schools, and the Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act (IDEA), which helps schools cover special-education costs. In 2023, Title I received $18.4 billion allocated to the program and IDEA received $14.2 billion.
Keep in mind that not all federal government spending on schools comes from the Department of Education; the U.S. Department of Agriculture runs the National School Lunch Program and the School Breakfast Program.
During 2021–22, which is the latest year of data available, public schools received $124.9 billion, or $2,536 in federal funds per student. That may sound like a lot, but it’s less than 14 percent of public school funding. The overwhelming majority of your local public school’s budget is funded by your locality (often through property taxes) and your state’s department of education.
The percentage of public school funds coming from federal sources varies a great deal from state to state: “In Mississippi, 23.2 percent public school funds came from federal sources, more than any other state during the 2021–22 school year. New York had the lowest proportion at 7.3 percent.” It’s not precisely uniform that all red states have a higher dependence on federal funding for public schools than all blue states, but beyond Mississippi you’ll find Arkansas, South Dakota, Montana, and Alaska near the top and New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire near the bottom.
Most Republicans want to “eliminate the Department of Education” without eliminating any of the popular stuff that the department does. Last month, my double-colleague Ramesh Ponnuru pointed out that when Republicans talk about “abolishing the Department of Education,” they really mean shifting almost everything the department does to other cabinet agencies:
Most proposals to eliminate the department don’t end the programs it houses; they just send them to other parts of the government. The Justice Department would take over the work of enforcing civil rights in education, for example, and the Treasury Department would oversee student loans.
Even some of the most vocal opponents of the department do not wish to discard its substance. Betsy DeVos, the education secretary during Trump’s first term, recently outlined an abolition plan that would reassign many of the department’s responsibilities to other agencies, such as the departments of Commerce and Labor. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 similarly seeks “to redistribute the various congressionally approved federal education programs across the government” rather than end them altogether. . . .
The history of their quest to end the department suggests that the fight will erode their political standing, and that victory might not amount to much more than the federal government no longer having a building or a website labeled “the Department of Education.”
Our new secretary of Education, Linda McMahon, in her confirmation hearing, said herself that President Trump did not have the authority to single-handedly eliminate the Department of Education:
Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana: President Trump is reportedly drafting an executive order, requiring the Secretary of Education to develop a plan for downsizing the Department of Education and working with Congress to eliminate entirely. Yes or no, do you agree that since the department was created by Congress, it would need an act of Congress to actually close the Department of Education?
Linda McMahon: And certainly, President Trump understands that we’ll be working with Congress. We’d like to do this right. We’d like to make sure that we’re presenting a plan that I think our Senators could get on board with and our Congress could get on board with that would have a better functioning Department of Education, but certainly does require congressional action.
Cassidy: Okay. And in terms of the plans to downsize, what would be the components of that plan that would not require congressional approval?
McMahon: Well, I do believe, Senator, that there are Departments of Education that are established by statute and those particular departments, we’d have to pay particular attention to, but long before there was a Department of Education, we fulfilled the programs of our educational system. Are there other areas, other agencies, where parts of the Department of Education could better serve our students and our parents on a local level? And I am really all for the President’s mission, which is to return education to the states. I believe as he does that the best education is closest to the child and not certainly from Washington DC.
Cassidy: If the department has downsized, would the states and localities still receive the federal funding which they currently receive?
McMahon: Yes.
Cassidy: Okay. With that, I-
McMahon: It is not the President’s goal to defund the programs. It is only to have it operate more efficiently.
So, if you just move almost all the existing duties and programs to other cabinet departments . . . are you really making everything operate more efficiently?
The U.S. (Metaphorical) War Against Ukraine Continues
The Trump administration will inflict much more severe punishment upon Volodymyr Zelensky and the Ukrainians for the Oval Office confrontation than it will ever inflict upon Vladimir Putin and his regime for their litany of war crimes. This is not a matter of limited leverage; this is a matter of what Trump prioritizes.
Trump’s latest form of punishing the Ukrainians for their impudence is deporting Ukrainians who entered the country legally under the previous administration:
Trump’s administration is planning to revoke temporary legal status for some 240,000 Ukrainians who fled the conflict with Russia, a senior Trump official and three sources familiar with the matter said, potentially putting them on a fast-track to deportation.
The move, expected as soon as April, would be a stunning reversal of the welcome Ukrainians received under President Joe Biden’s administration.
Temporary Protected Status is granted by the U.S. government to individuals when “conditions in the country temporarily prevent the country’s nationals from returning safely.” You know, like when the whole friggin’ Russian army invades and starts firing missiles into children’s hospitals. The Temporary Protected Status for these refugees was supposed to last until October 19, 2026.
Meanwhile, CIA Director John Ratcliffe announced the U.S. is no longer sharing intelligence with the Ukrainians:
Maria Bartiromo: In addition to cutting off Ukraine in terms of aid, the U.S. also cut off intelligence. And I think that was really interesting and important. Because up until now, Ukraine was actually able to use the U.S.’s intelligence understanding, where Russia was operationally, but we cut that off, right? Is that a temporary thing? Can you tell us anything at all about the intelligence on Ukraine and Russia?
John Ratcliffe: Sure, what President Trump said, is he asked for a pause. As I mentioned, President Trump is the peace president. Never been a war under his leadership, and he wants to end the wars that exist. And so, in this case, as everyone saw play out, President Trump had a real question about whether President Zelensky was committed to the peace process. And he said, ‘let’s pause. I want to give you a chance to think about that.’ And you saw the response, that President Zelensky put out a statement saying, ‘I’m ready for peace. And I want President Trump’s leadership to bring about that peace.’ And so, I think, on the military front, and on the intelligence front, the pause that allowed that to happen, I think, will go away and we’ll work shoulder-to-shoulder with Ukraine, as we have, to push back on the aggression that is there. But to put the world in a better place for these peace negotiations to move forward. Again, President Trump is going to hold everyone accountable to drive peace around the world.
Putting aside the merits of this asinine decision for a moment . . . why is the CIA director going on Maria Bartiromo’s program on Fox Business Network to announce this?
ADDENDUM: I keep getting told I’ve turned into such a liberal squish since I started writing columns for the Washington Post. Meanwhile, Post readers are livid because I’ve told them how dramatically attempts to cross the border illegally have dropped since Trump took office.