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President Donald Trump said last week that he’d like to close the U.S. Department of Education and, in the meantime, it seems he will move to reduce its activities. We now know that this includes canceling at least some programs at the agency’s research and statistics arm, and it will probably include more than that soon. There’s now an active contest between the courts and the president over whether he has complied with a district court order to undo the funding freeze. That story will evolve quickly and probably end at the Supreme Court.
We can’t know how these legal battles will come out, but it is a good time to get a better handle on the federal role in education and the likely impact of these moves here in Minnesota.
I’ll try to answer at least some of the questions I’m hearing. But an old college friend reminded me there’s also one big answer for anyone involved in education: Keep up your great work, because noise from over there shouldn’t interfere with what you’re doing right here.
As for answers — let’s start with the big picture. First, Congress created the Department of Education, so nearly everyone agrees that it would take an act of Congress to un-create it. It seems the plan is to reduce any of the department’s activities that have not been specifically established by Congress, and then work with Congress to eliminate it.
Would Congress do that? Republicans have a wafer-thin majority, so more than a few Democrats would have to join in abolishing the agency in order to clear the Senate’s 60-vote filibuster threshold. And in 2023, 60 House Republicans voted against abolishing the Education Department. So it seems unlikely that Congress would abolish the agency, but it’s 2025. Maybe anything is possible.
Would it matter? Perhaps. Education’s biggest programs were created in 1965 and administered by another agency until the Education Department came into existence in 1980. To end the federal role in education, Congress would have to end federal education programs. Reforming them is on the table, but ending them isn’t really. For example, Project 2025, the much-discussed but little-read blueprint for the second Trump administration, mainly proposed sending the department’s programs to different agencies.