Matthew Yglesias: If Trump disbands the Department of Education, he will regret it

After winning the presidency by focusing on immigration, inflation and a vague sense that life was better in 2019, many expect Donald Trump to move ahead with plans to… eliminate the Department of Education. It is difficult to understand what meaning this makes – for him, his party or the country.

The Department of Education does not stand up to criticism, especially its policies regarding student loan relief and student discipline. But mostly he does boring things, like providing grants to support students with disabilities or school systems with many poor children. And this is not the main item ($238 billion) of the federal budget ($8.7 trillion). If the president-elect wants to make serious cuts to federal spending, he needs to look at either the military or programs for the sick and elderly.

But if it’s not about money, then what is it? It can’t really be a question of efficiency, Elon Musk’s DOGE notwithstanding, since the disappearance of cabinet departments – or the creation of them – is never a big deal.

It is easy to imagine the liquidation of, say, the Ministry of Commerce and the distribution of its functions between the Ministries of Finance, Internal Affairs and Labor. But what will this fix? A similar issue concerns Congress’s creation of the Department of Homeland Security after 9/11. This new cabinet-level agency took various immigration functions out of Justice, lured the Secret Service out of the Treasury, took aviation security out of Transportation, merged them all with FEMA and, yada, a new agency!

So if Trump’s goal is simply to redraw the lines in some federal bureaucratic organizational structures, it will be a waste of time, but a harmless waste of time.

Overall, it’s counterproductive to delve too deeply into Trump’s motives—his love of chaos explains much of his behavior—but the desire to dismantle the Department of Education is evidence of a larger impulse on the right that deserves further exploration: solving public education problems through relentless decentralization. This is a path that leads to the federal government retreating from its role, state governments handing over the management of schools to local governments, and ultimately the privatization of the entire enterprise.

Are Americans going to support this agenda? Mark me as a skeptic. Democrats squandered their historic role as the party focused on education with extended school closures during COVID. Exaggerating privatization measures will hit back at Republicans.

More broadly, viewing the Department of Education as a source of malign leftist influence is critically counterproductive. Under President Joe Biden, the department has not shut down gifted and talented programs or told students that “worship of the written word” is an aspect of white supremacy. This is what leftist school boards did.

Biden should have done more to fight back. And now that Trump is ready to control the levers of federal power, he must use them. This means not only a culture war, but also good old-fashioned education reform, like that carried out by George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Both of these administrations rightly believed that America’s public school systems tended to care more about what teachers and a distinct minority of parents wanted than about educating children.

A federal government that champions the national interest in promoting basic literacy and math education is invaluable—and conservatives should know this well. Mississippi, governed by a Republican for more than two decades, has dramatically improved its once-dismal reading scores thanks to a multifaceted effort focused on teaching phonics and the so-called “science of reading.”

These methods work and can be deployed on a large scale. But history shows that decentralized school systems and individual teachers attacked them for a reason. There must be a central body that will disseminate best practices and insist on results.

This is true for higher education as well. The Obama administration unveiled a so-called “gainful employment” rule that made for-profit colleges ineligible for federal student loans if too many of their students could not earn enough money to repay their loans. Industry representatives protested, rightly arguing that it was unfair to hold for-profit schools to higher standards than traditional public and private nonprofit schools.

Instead of engaging in this debate when he took office, Trump simply abandoned the rule, allowing all schools to continue receiving money without any accountability.

A much better answer would be to apply this rule to all schools. Trump could still do this in his second term, delivering a far more powerful blow to the bad elements in the US higher education system than any culture war claims. But this will require a functioning Department of Education.

Of course, conservatives who are philosophically opposed to federal spending on education will not be convinced by any of this. But the beginning of wisdom for any new administration is to remember that no president achieves everything he sets out to do, and that insisting on huge policy changes on issues that were barely discussed during the campaign is dangerous.

Education is vital to economic growth and a well-functioning democracy, and Conservatives have good ideas about how to improve it. These ideas can be promoted much more effectively by using existing institutional structures rather than by destroying them. In other policy areas – immigration, anyone? Trump seems to understand that a certain level of centralization and regulation is necessary to advance the national interest. The same is true for education.