What’s at stake as Trump targets the US Education Department

WASHINGTON – The Department of Education is facing a reckoning under US President Donald Trump. 

After spending months on the campaign trail vowing to close the department, Mr Trump took his first formal step towards fulfilling that promise by

signing an executive order on March 20

directing Education Secretary Linda McMahon to “take all necessary steps to facilitate” its closure.

Amid a broader push to slash spending and regulations across the government, Mr Trump has said his ultimate goal is to leave education oversight to the states. However, local and state officials – not the Education Department – already have primary control of the curricula and educational priorities of schools in the US. 

The order arrived after the Trump administration had already started to

reduce the department’s workload by slashing about half the staff

and terminating hundreds of millions of dollars in grants and contracts. 

The President does not have the power to completely abolish the department, a reality he and Ms McMahon have acknowledged. As the department was established by law, the administration needs congressional approval to close it. 

However, absent that, the Trump administration can still continue slashing staff and imposing policy changes at the department. The White House has already used those tactics to effectively stop other departments and agencies that were created by acts of Congress from operating.

Here’s what to know about the United States Department of Education and Mr Trump’s plans to scrap it.

What does the Education Department do? 

The department has three core responsibilities: administering federal financial assistance to subsidise educational costs; collecting and disseminating data; and investigating civil rights violations at education institutions across the country.

Perhaps the department’s most well-known function is overseeing the billions of dollars in federal financial aid doled out to American college students every year.

During the school year that ended in 2024, nearly US$121 billion (S$161.6 billion) in federal grants, loans and work-study payments were distributed to almost 10 million students, according to a 2024 fiscal year report.

Additionally, the department operates student-debt management programmes, such as income-driven repayment plans and expedited relief for public servants. 

The department also administers the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or Fafsa, a certification of a college applicant’s family financial status, which is used to determine how much federal and state funding they are eligible for. About 17 million prospective students complete the form annually.

At the K-12 level, the department financially supports more than 100,000 public schools, according to a January fact sheet.

Tens of billions in funding is directed to schools with a significant number of low-income students and those in rural or predominantly Native American communities, as well as to programmes for students with disabilities and those learning English as a second language. 

Additionally, the Education Department gathers information on school enrolment, finances, demographics, achievement and safety through the Institute of Education Sciences. The institute publishes reports based on its findings, with the aim of offering insights that schools might use to improve educational outcomes. 

The department’s office for civil rights receives formal complaints from teachers, students and parents about potential violations of the country’s equal rights laws.

When substantial evidence is found that an institution violated the rights of a student or teacher, the school typically commits to department officials to remedy the actions in order to avoid getting sued or losing federal funding. In the school year that ended in 2024, the office received a record 22,687 complaints.

How did the Education Department begin?

In 1867, President Andrew Johnson created a stand-alone department to gather information about the country’s schools. Soon after its creation, however, it was demoted to a small office out of fear that it would exert too much power over states – echoing concerns that conservatives cite today about the department’s influence.

The office was housed under various Cabinet-level departments for the following century.

But an effort to compete with the Soviet Union’s space technology in the 1950s, an anti-poverty initiative led by President Lyndon Johnson in the 1960s and a push to offer equal access to education for marginalised groups in the 1970s all spurred an increase in federal education spending – and with it, bipartisan support to resurrect the department.

A separate, Cabinet-level Education Department was finally re-established in 1979 when President Jimmy Carter signed a Bill that split what was then the Department of Health, Education and Welfare into the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Education.

Its stated purpose, according to the legislation, was to “strengthen the federal commitment to ensuring access to equal educational opportunity for every individual”.

Does the Education Department influence what is taught in schools? 

The 1979 law that created the department prohibits it from developing or setting standards for curricula. Those standards are set by state and local governments.

Nevertheless, Republicans have attacked the department for classroom content that concerns race, gender and sexuality.

Still, the Education Department releases non-compulsory recommendations to school districts on navigating critical issues, such as integrating artificial intelligence into classroom learning or reopening facilities in the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Those suggestions, and public statements by the education secretary on issues such as affirmative action in admissions, have been the subject of attacks from Republicans, who say these constitute undue influence on institutions’ priorities. 

The agency also offers competitive grants for a range of student programmes and teacher training, and some of these, too, have come under scrutiny from conservatives.

According to posts on the Department of Government Efficiency’s official account on social media platform X, the task force has cancelled at least US$489 million in grants for programmes that it says violate the administration’s prohibition on “diversity, equity and inclusion” initiatives in schools.

These include programmes such as training for teachers on racial inclusivity, bias and historical oppression. 

What will happen to programmes run by the Education Department if it’s shuttered? 

It is not yet clear. The executive order directs the Secretary of Education to ensure “the effective and uninterrupted delivery of services, programmes and benefits on which Americans rely” but does not detail any plans for the department’s programmes. 

However, during the signing ceremony, Mr Trump vowed to preserve some functions, such as funding for children with disabilities and special needs, by moving them to other departments and agencies.

Previously, Ms McMahon, in her confirmation hearing, committed not to “defund” programmes run by the department that were created by acts of Congress. These include Pell Grants, which are the largest source of undergraduate financial aid for low-income students, and loan forgiveness for people who work in public service. 

Mr Trump, however, signed a separate executive order on March 7 aimed at limiting eligibility for the government’s public service loan forgiveness programme.

The order directs officials to exclude people who work for organisations allegedly involved in the violation of immigration or anti-discrimination laws, such as by helping children relocate to “so-called transgender sanctuary states for purposes of emancipation from their lawful parents”. It is unclear what organisations, if any, the rule would apply to, and the order cited no specific examples.

Additionally, the President has said that he has spoken to his Cabinet about moving the Federal Student Aid Office to another department, such as Treasury, Commerce or the Small Business Administration. Conservatives have long advocated for the division to move to Treasury, arguing that the department’s large portfolio of loans could be better managed there.

Conservatives have previously called for Health and Human Services to absorb the department’s disability assistance programmes.

Legislation introduced in 2024 by Republican Senator Mike Rounds would make the Department of the Interior responsible for administering the federal government’s grants to schools in indigenous communities and the State Department responsible for the Fulbright-Hays Programme, which provides grants to US students and teachers to study or conduct research abroad.

Why does Trump want to shut down the Education Department? 

Mr Trump has accused staff at the Education Department of being “people that hate our children” and who promote “anti-American” left-wing values in schools.

“The Department of Education is a big con job,” Mr Trump told reporters in February. 

The President has expressed dismay that the US is ranked below some other wealthy countries in education, such as Denmark and Norway, despite having a high level of spending.

In 2019, the US spent US$15,500 per full-time student in public elementary and secondary schools, according to the National Centre for Education Statistics. Norway, Austria, South Korea and Luxembourg were the only countries to spend more per student than the US. 

Have there been prior efforts to shut down the Education Department? 

Opposition from conservatives to the department goes back to its origins in the aftermath of the Civil War.

Politicians from Confederate states opposed the creation of the department because abolitionists proposed using it to administer federal funding for the education of formerly enslaved people.

In his successful run for the presidency in 1980, Mr Ronald Reagan campaigned to shut down the department shortly after it was re-established by Mr Carter, vowing to save federal funds by cutting “wasteful” programmes.

Though Mr Reagan won, he faced opposition to his proposal in Congress, and the department was spared.

Attacks from small-government conservatives have continued in the decades since.

As recently as March 2023, the majority of House Republicans voted in favour of an amendment that would abolish the Education Department, but 60 Republican members sided with Democrats to oppose the measure, and it did not pass. BLOOMBERG