The U.S. Department of Education is under the guillotine as President Donald Trump quickly moves to reduce what he calls federal "waste, fraud and abuse" — but the administration's efforts to cut the agency's resources could backfire, education leaders and policy analysts warn.
In the weeks since his Jan. 20 inauguration, Trump and his newly created Department of Government Efficiency have trimmed Education Department staff, cut $900 million in contracts, and appointed a secretary of education committed to ending what she called "bureaucratic bloat" by reviewing its programs as the agency's "final mission."
With an anxiously anticipated executive order on the horizon that is expected to further gut the department, education experts fear that fewer federal resources will lead to decreased oversight and an increase in mismanagement flying under the radar. In the process, they say, the most marginalized public schools and students will be harmed.
"These cuts could throw K-12 and higher education in chaos, especially for the K-12 students most reliant on federal funding — low-income students and students with disabilities — as well as students who rely on federal financial aid to attend universities and colleges," said Alexander Hertel-Fernandez, an associate professor of international and public affairs at Columbia University.
Although Trump cannot unilaterally shutter the department without congressional approval, he can make changes that will have a deep impact — and some would say, already has.
"A lot of what he has been doing so far includes firing people and attempting to starve the department or agency into extinction," said Michael Gerhardt, a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's law school.
"Nothing remotely close has ever happened before in American history," said Gerhardt, whose research focuses on constitutional conflicts between presidents and Congress.
The Education Department did not respond to several requests for comment by publication time.
Research funding eliminated
Last month, the Trump administration canceled about $881 million in contracts of the department's nonpartisan research arm, the Institute of Education Sciences, and put on leave the public voice of federal student assessments, Peggy Carr, who led the IES' National Center for Education Statistics for over three decades across different administrations.
NCES research serves as a major informational resource for educators and, in the past few years, its work included tracking the pandemic's impact on student learning, widening inequities, and educator and student mental health. School and college leaders rely on its research to improve student performance, and its findings often helped inform federal and state policymakers on funding decisions to help districts recover from the pandemic.
"Limiting the important work that NCES does by terminating these contracts will have ramifications for the accuracy of national-level data on the condition and progress of education, from early childhood through postsecondary to adult workforce," said Felice Levine, executive director for the American Educational Research Association, in a Feb. 10 statement. "Without such research, student learning and development will be harmed."
The risk to vulnerable students
Some worry that the students most at risk educationally and emotionally — those who are already marginalized — will also be most at risk from the federal cuts since they rely on federal funding and oversight to ensure their equal access to education.
"The Trump Administration’s plan to destroy the U.S. Department of Education will hurt our most vulnerable students, families, and communities," said Chrisanne Gayl, chief strategy and policy officer at Trust for Learning and senior policy advisor at the Education Department in the Obama administration, in a March 7 statement. Trust for Learning is a philanthropic partnership that works to improve early public education settings for underserved children.
The department manages programs like Title I for low-income schools and oversees the implementation of civil rights protections such as under the Individual with Disabilities Education Act and the Title IX anti-sex discrimination statute.
While these protections will by law remain in place, it's possible that the department will scale back on enforcement.
"Generally it would mean that the mechanisms of compliance, like investigations or guidance, would move more slowly," said Julia Martin, director of policy and government affairs at The Bruman Group, a legal and consulting group based in Washington, D.C. Martin formerly served as an education policy advisor for the House Committee on Education and Labor.
"Interestingly, less guidance and responsiveness from federal agencies can increase fraud, waste, and abuse since there’s less oversight and less help when people have questions," Martin said.
A change in civil rights investigations
In fact, Trump has already halted thousands of civil rights investigations conducted by the department's Office for Civil Rights according to reporting last month by ProPublica. Instead of launching investigations into public complaints, the office is opening its own investigations to align with its priorities, such as keeping transgender girls from playing on teams aligning with their gender identities and looking into alleged antisemitism or bias against White students, the publication reported.
Other federal agencies could step into the breach left by a thinning Education Department by investigating potential civil rights violations at schools, said Martin.
They could do so in cases where they have overlapping interests — for example, HHS oversees education programs like Head Start, while the Interior Department manages Bureau of Indian Affairs schools.
A case in point: the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' OCR recently conducted — and concluded in just four days — an investigation into the Maine Department of Education over its transgender athlete policies. While the Education Department is conducting its own investigation, the HHS found that the Maine agency violated Title IX when it allowed transgender girls to compete on teams aligning with their gender identities.
The HHS probe went at a breakneck speed compared to past practices at the Education Department. Traditionally, such a compliance review would have taken months — if not years — to complete, as investigators conducted department, school or district employee interviews, and reviewed logs, correspondence or other documentation.
"This approach bypasses the standard investigative and resolution processes that schools, colleges, and universities expect in federal civil rights enforcement," said Jackie Gharapour Wernz, a former civil rights attorney for the Education Department's OCR under the Obama and Trump administrations, in a March 6 analysis on her website, Education Civil Rights Solutions.
"Many assumed that ED OCR’s enforcement capacity would shrink due to staffing constraints. However, HHS OCR’s approach suggests that federal civil rights agencies may be shifting toward aggressive enforcement tactics that bypass traditional investigative processes, allowing them to pursue violations without expending significant resources," wrote Gharapour Wernz, who is now an education civil rights consultant for Education Civil Rights Solutions, which provides expert witness, training and other services.
The Education Department's OCR oversees compliance of institutions that receive billions of dollars in education funding, whereas the HHS OCR oversees a much smaller portion of federal education funding.
"Without the existence of the department, you will have less oversight of civil rights enforcement," said John King Jr., secretary of education under the Obama administration, during a press call on Thursday, the day the executive order gutting the department was expected. The order did not come out that day after all, but many expect it to still come down, or for the administration to continue thinning out the department even in absence of one.
If the department is shut down, King said, "you will have less oversight of the responsible use of these dollars."
Districts 'scrambling to fill the gaps'
As a downsizing of the Education Department seems imminent, educators are concerned their federal cashflow is at stake and leaders are warning that states may not be able to backfill the losses.
"It would leave states and local districts scrambling to fill the gaps," said Keri Rodrigues, president of the National Parents Union, on the same Thursday press call. "We're going to witness massive layoffs of teachers and support staff, larger class sizes, school closures. It's going to force kids to travel longer distances to get an education. And the loss of funding for special education programs … will be absolutely catastrophic."
Denver Public Schools Superintendent Alex Marrero said he is preparing to protect his district from federal cuts, if needed, and has already begun working with the state education commissioner and senators to that end. The state's largest school district currently relies on about $140 million from the federal Education Department, he said.
"The concern I have is with change comes a lot of uncertainty and new systems that create more turmoil," said Marrero on March 6, while attending the annual conference of AASA, The School Superintendents Association. "It just doesn't benefit the educational system."
