Can Trump deliver on his promise to ax the Department of Education?

(WASHINGTON) -- President-elect Donald Trump has proposed a plan to eliminate the Department of Education to “send all education work and needs back to the states,” according to his Agenda47 policy platform.

According to education experts, an end to the Department of Education could leave billions of funds, scholarships, grants and more hanging in the balance for the millions of K-12 and college students attending schools in the U.S.

Critics of the department argue that federal education spending has ballooned since its founding -- costing $23 billion to date in the 2025 fiscal year, about 4% of government spending so far -- but measures of student success like reading and math scores have fallen in recent years.

What does the Department of Education do?

The DOE was established as a Cabinet-level agency in 1979 under then-President Jimmy Carter, but was initially created in the late 1800s to collect data on what is working effectively in education for policymakers and educators.

The education agency facilitated the expansion of federal support for schooling over the years. After World War II, the GI Bill expanded education assistance for war veterans. After the Soviet Union launched Sputnik into space, the agency led to the expansion of science, math and foreign language instruction in elementary and secondary schools and supported vocational-technical training.

In the 1960s and 1970s, anti-poverty and anti-discrimination efforts shaped the Department of Education’s mission to provide equal access to education nationwide. This led to the founding of Title I funding to reduce educational achievement gaps between low-income and rural students and non-low-income schools.

The DOE also holds schools accountable for enforcing non-discrimination laws like Title IX based on gender, the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 and Americans with Disabilities Act based on disability and Title VI based on race.

Federal Student Aid, awarding more than $120 billion a year in grants, work-study funds, and low-interest loans to approximately 13 million students, is also backed by the Department of Education.

The Department also holds schools accountable under the Every Student Succeeds Act, which requires each state to provide data on subject performance, graduation rates, suspensions, absenteeism, teacher qualifications, and more.

The department states on its website that it does not develop school curricula, set requirements for enrollment and graduation, or establish or accredit schools or universities.

However, it has played a major role in school funding for decades, particularly as state investment in K-12 schools worsened amid the 2008 Great Recession.

According to the Education Law Center, U.S. students lost almost $600 billion from states' disinvestment in their public schools in the decade following the Great Recession.

The complicated nature of a department closure includes administering the billions of DOE funds directly to the individual states, according to higher education expert Clare McCann. McCann said doling out the money is something skilled employees at the DOE would be equipped to do.

“There's a reason the Department of Education was created and it was to have this kind of in-house expertise and policy background on these [education] issues,” McCann told ABC News, adding, “The civil servants who work at the Department of Education are true experts in the field.”

Education Analyst Neal McCluskey at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, argues that dismantling the department could be as simple as giving states the funding, but allowing them to decide how it's administered.

"What I've seen most often, and I've written about myself, is you could, for instance, take all the K-12 money, Title One, IDEA [Individuals with Disabilities Education Act] etc. -- You would, of course, have to change the law, but one of the things you could do is block grant it; You'd say, 'we're going to fund these things, but we're going to give it to the state so they can decide how it's administered,'" he told ABC News.

Some education experts like Wendy A. Paterson, a professor and dean at Buffalo State University's School of Education, told ABC News in an interview that she "could not see how serving families and children under the offices of the Department of Education could continue" without a federal department.

Paterson said that if funding itself is changed, it will likely worsen the national teacher shortage and impact the targeted communities the Department of Education specializes in -- including low-income, disabled or FAFSA-seeking students.

"There's an intimate relationship between our schools and the society that we create and that we pass along to our children, and it's that important," said Paterson. "So if we don't have a federal organization that acknowledges the importance of schools and post-secondary education and the right of all children to have access to education, what are we saying about democracy?"

Why does Trump want to get rid of the Department of Education?

In a 2023 statement on his plans for schools, Donald Trump said that “one thing I’ll be doing very early in the administration is closing up the Department of Education in Washington, D.C., and sending all education and education work and needs back to the states.”

“We want them to run the education of our children because they'll do a much better job of it,” said Trump.

Trump’s Agenda47 does not state how the dismantling of the department would impact the programs the Department of Education runs.

However, on the campaign trail, in interviews with Elon Musk and on "Fox & Friends," Trump has repeatedly said he wants to shutter the agency and instead choose one education department official for his Cabinet, aligning with Trump's goals of dismantling "government bureaucracy" and restructuring the government agencies for more efficiency.

Several prominent conservatives and Republican figures have similarly proposed department closures over the years, including Ronald Reagan, Vivek Ramaswamy, and lawmakers on Capitol Hill.

McCluskey said in a recent essay that the department is "unconstitutional," arguing that it exerts too much power over schools above local and state entities.

House Education and the Workforce Committee Chairwoman Virginia Foxx has also argued that it's not a constitutional requirement to have such a department: “I can't find the word education in there [the Constitution] as one of the duties and responsibilities of Congress or the federal government,” Rep. Foxx, R-North Carolina, told ABC News.

Is it possible to eliminate it?

While possible in theory, education policy experts who spoke with ABC News suggest that would be an extremely chaotic – and unrealistic — task on Jan. 20, 2025, Inauguration Day.

The bold initiative won’t happen immediately, but McCluskey told ABC News it could be done through Congress.

“The Department of Education was created through legislation,” McCluskey told ABC News. “Legislation comes through Congress. If you want to take the Department of Education apart, you have to do that through legislation,” McCluskey added.

At this point, without congressional approval, McCluskey said the campaign trail messaging by the president-elect has no standing.

“I think that what is said on the campaigns and what actually is done have to often be two different things because, in campaigns, politicians say a lot of things that make it seem like it's easy to do what they want to do,” McCluskey said.

“No president can just fire everybody in the Department of Education and have one person administer those programs,” he added.

Trump's education policy

Trump, however, does list several federal policies he hopes to implement in schools nationwide. This includes instructing a future education department to cease programs that he claims "promote the concept of sex and gender transition, at any age" as well as punish teachers or schools who do so.

He hopes to create a credentialing body to certify teachers "who embrace patriotic values and support the American way of life," though he does not further elaborate on what that consists of.

He also would prevent Title IX from allowing transgender women to compete in sports. He said he will create funding preferences and favorable treatment for states and school districts that abolish teacher tenure and adopt merit pay for educators for grades K-12 and allow parents to vote for principals.

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