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The Education Department was created in 1979, and Republicans have sought to eliminate it ever since.
Former president Donald Trump wants the Education Department gone. A candidate for U.S. Senate suggested throwing the agency “in the trash can.” Another called it “one of the worst monstrosities that’s ever been created.”
Getting rid of the Education Department is hardly a new idea. In fact, Republicans have campaigned on killing the agency since it was created in 1979, arguing the agency’s existence violates the Constitution (because the document doesn’t mention education) and is a prime example of federal bloat and excess. But calls for its demise have increased and intensified in recent years.
Trump and others say the agency has grown too big and interferes in matters best left to local and state authorities. Driving the recent wave of calls is the Biden administration’s efforts to forgive student loans, the botched rollout of the federal financial aid application and the department’s overhaul of Title IX, which added new protections for transgender students. (The new rule is on hold in 26 states following several court rulings.)
“They’re trying to push gender ideology, which is just nuts, and all these other things,” said Eric Hovde, the GOP Senate candidate in Wisconsin, on a podcast in early October. “They’re trying to social engineer your children.”
But dismantling the department is more complicated than the campaign-trail promises suggest, and few higher education policy experts believe the department’s days are actually numbered. They point out that even Trump didn’t get on board with abolishing the agency during his first term, proposing instead to merge the Departments of Education and Labor. But momentum for the idea has grown since 2016, and Trump has made it more of an issue.
This time around, conservative groups, most notably Project 2025, have offered up some plans about how to dismantle the department in more detail, such as moving the federal student loan programs to the Treasury Department. (Project 2025, led by the conservative Heritage Foundation, offers a blueprint for overhauling the federal government in Trump’s second term.)
Critics of the idea say that such proposals need more specifics that spell out how exactly the plan would work, what programs would stay, which ones would go away and what agencies would take over the department’s responsibilities. They also question whether other federal agencies are more equipped than the Education Department to oversee education programs. More than 4,000 people work for the agency, which has an $80 billion discretionary budget.
Most analysts expect any effort to break up the department to leave its programs in place, assuming that federal laws related to higher education remain on the books. Proponents argue nothing else would change aside from who is overseeing them. Critics disagree with that notion, arguing that any disruption to the systems, particularly those involved with doling out federal financial aid, would affect students negatively.
More broadly, critics warn that dismantling the Education Department could make it more difficult for students to access federal financial aid, imperil institutions that rely on federal money and make higher education a riskier bet, though that’s a worst-case scenario.
“You could very well end up in a system where college access is blocked off for students who have financial need, and that really would reverse the progress that’s been made over the past decade to create a system that had more open pathways into higher education for anybody who wants them,” said Michelle Dimino, education program director at Third Way, a left-of-center think tank. “That is full-stop terrifying. I think the uncertainty alone would be a detriment to college access.”
Federal Student Loans
Of the many questions and logistics to figure out with breaking up the Education Department, one key issue stands out: What to do with the $1.7 trillion student loan portfolio and the broader federal student loan program. The department issues about $100 billion in student loans a year along with $30 billion in Pell Grants.
Project 2025 and other proposals say the Treasury Department should take over student loans. Why? Because the agency deals with money and lending.
Mark Schneider, a nonresident senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, said the current setup for student loans—having the Office of Federal Student Aid manage the portfolio—“doesn’t make any sense.” He recently suggested moving student loans to the Treasury as part of a broader opinion piece published in The 74, an online news publication, about how to break up the department.
“It’s clear the department hasn’t done a good job with FSA and managing student loans, so something has to be done,” said Schneider, who led the department’s Institute of Education Sciences from 2018 to 2024 and served as commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics during the George W. Bush administration.
But critics question why Treasury is more suited to managing the student loan program than Federal Student Aid and whether the agency has the capacity to take on the program. Plus, they wonder whether Treasury would also be charged with enforcing the laws related to federal financial aid, or just with distributing the funds.
Right now, the Office of Federal Student Aid, which has fewer than 1,500 employees, serves as the operational arm of the department, carrying out policies related to accountability, reviewing contracts with colleges that allow them access to federal financial aid and enforcing the current laws, among several other responsibilities.
Schneider said he would move FSA “lock, stock and barrel.”
To what extent moving Federal Student Aid to the Treasury Department would affect students is unclear. Dimino at Third Way said that keeping the FSA employees and everything else in place would likely lead to the least disruption for financial aid, but still, “the movement alone would mean sufficient chaos,” she said.
She and other critics point to the 2024–25 FAFSA rollout, which showed how any disruptions to the system can quickly hamper students. Throughout the spring, they faced delays and challenges in finding out how much aid they were eligible for. Some ended up not enrolling in college at all this fall.
“For students, the FAFSA snafu would look quaint compared to what would happen if we dissolved the Education Department,” said Dominique Baker, an associate professor of education and public policy at the University of Delaware.
But Schneider, who acknowledged that his plan was high-level and needs more work to hammer out the finer details, said moving federal student aid to Treasury shouldn’t change anything for students and could make the system “better and more simple.”
“If I thought it would leave students and institutions worse off, I wouldn’t say it,” he said.
Likewise, Neal McCluskey, director of the Center for Education Freedom at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, didn’t expect shifting programs such as student loans to have much effect on students and institutions, especially if Congress were to keep everything else in place.
“You would probably have some slight disruption or trouble as you move from one to the other, although I don’t think that has to be particularly large, and it could be totally seamless,” he said.
McCluskey is among the conservatives who believe the Education Department should never have existed, and should not going forward, because Congress never had the power to create the department in the first place. He wants to see the agency eliminated to rectify the constitutional issues alone.
But he argues the department has also been a pragmatic failure. “I don’t think there’s good evidence that the Department of Education has been net beneficial,” he said.
“In higher ed,” he said, “the federal government’s primary job has been … college affordability, and I don’t think there’s any evidence that the department has made college more affordable. I think there is evidence that the programs it runs makes college less affordable.”
But even McCluskey, who has advocated for years to get rid of the agency, doesn’t think the department is on the chopping block if Trump wins.
“I certainly don’t see evidence of a very powerful public groundswell to eliminate the Department of Education,” he said. “If there’s another Trump administration, I suspect you’ll see more talk about eliminating some programs and moving some programs [rather] than directly trying to get rid of the Education Department.”
Disruptions Predicted
But ifthe Republicans did move forward with abolishing the department and move programs to other agencies, Chris Marsicano, an associate professor of educational studies at Davidson College, would expect some level of disruption for colleges and universities.
Sending programs or responsibilities to other agencies could still change how they are run, depending on the agencies’ goals, he said. For example, if the Labor Department assumed responsibility over higher education, that agency might be more focused on how colleges support the workforce and dole out grants accordingly.
But eliminating the Education Department would leave students, educators, schools and colleges without an advocate in the president’s cabinet, and that “could undermine a major function of government,” he said.
“Whether it’s at the local, state or federal level, education is a major component of what the government does,” he said. “The vast majority of children in this country are educated in public schools, and the vast majority of college students go to public universities and community colleges.”
Marsicano repeatedly noted that “it’s not going to happen.”
“It is, politically, an easy win,” he said. “People like student loans in theory but hate student debt. People like funding for children but they hate the idea of the federal government telling a local school district what should and should not matter. So it is a low-stakes, somewhat high-benefit attack on the federal government.”
But would Republicans have to abolish the Education Department entirely to reduce the federal role in higher education? Baker doesn’t think so.
After all, she asked, what’s to stop the education secretary, with Trump’s approval, from deciding to not enforce the Higher Education Act at all? (The Higher Education Act of 1965 governs federal student aid programs and the federal role in the postsecondary education.)
“No one can know the exact methods that a future Trump administration would take to a higher ed policy,” Baker said. “No one should consider that precedent would win the day, that laws have to be followed.”
