I’ve been getting a stunning variety of stressed-out emails from faculty college students and academics asking about what’ll occur to them if President-elect Donald Trump shuts down the U.S. Division of Schooling. They need to know what’ll occur to their Pell Grants, their colleges, or their retirement advantages. The extent of concern is exceptional for a 44-year-old Republican promise to shut a giant, distant federal paperwork. Given such reactions, it’s value explaining what’s occurring with Trump’s promise to abolish the division—and why numerous the breathless protection could also be lacking the forest for the bushes.
First, sure, Sen. Mike Rounds of South Dakota has already filed a invoice to disassemble the division, and Trump, as in 2016, has stated he’d abolish it. However the division isn’t going to be abolished. How do I do know? As a result of it takes a legislation to dismantle the division, and that requires 60 votes within the Senate (so as to break a Democratic filibuster). There are solely 53 Republican senators—and not less than two of whom, Sens. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine, aren’t any certain factor on this rating.
Even when the razor-thin Republican Home majority passes a invoice and each GOP senator votes for it, Senate Republicans can’t get sufficient Democrats to get to 60. So, the division isn’t getting abolished. It’s simply math. (These Democrats who denounced retiring Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona for preserving the filibuster in 2021 however out of the blue see its deserves are, hopefully, feeling a bit of abashed about now.)
Second, as a result of the discuss of “abolishing” the division tends to be extra metaphorical than concrete, it’s yielded numerous ambiguity and confusion. As an example, Rounds’s invoice “abolishes” the division by sending its part components over to different cupboard companies like Treasury and Well being and Human Companies. Is that abolition? Technically, I assume, because the division would not have a webpage.
However, except Congress particularly moved to slash or remove the division’s applications and funding streams, they’d nonetheless be there. Which means “abolishing the division” wouldn’t essentially quantity to vary that anybody exterior of Washington would discover. Certainly, since many federal workers who deal with varied applications would transfer with them, it’s not even clear how most of the Division of Schooling’s 4,000 workers would lose their jobs.
Third, I’m not suggesting the argument about abolishing the division is a “debate about nothing.” It’s symbolically necessary with implications for the scale of the federal footprint. On the identical time, the precise federal function in training relies upon way more on whether or not Republicans are inclined to downsize or remove main federal teaching programs than on whether or not these applications are housed in a “Division of Schooling.”
And, regardless of a few of the turbo-charged rhetoric concerning the division, Republicans have proven little urge for food for chopping or reshaping main federal teaching programs like Title I, particular training, Pell Grants, or pupil loans. Final yr, when given the possibility to vote on changing Title I right into a voucher program, barely half of Home Republicans voted to take action. (The proposal misplaced 113-311.) And that didn’t even require any spending cuts. Republicans have traditionally proven little need to scale back spending for low-income college students or these with particular wants, and that appears much more more likely to maintain after a Trump victory marked by broad help amongst working-class voters and dad and mom.
And understand that the federal function in training lengthy predated the creation of the division in 1979—see, as an example, the Morrill Land-Grant Act of 1862, the Smith-Hughes Vocational Schooling Act of 1917, the Nationwide Protection Schooling Act of 1958, and the Greater Schooling and Elementary and Secondary Schooling Acts of 1965. With or with no division, then, there might be fights over Washington’s function in training.
So, ED isn’t going anyplace. That stated, I actually assume it’d be simply nice if the division had been dismantled. In any case, it is sensible for a lot of of ED’s features to be run out of different companies. As an example, the federal student-loan portfolio is basically a mega-bank. It’d make extra sense to have it overseen by officers at Treasury who work intently with monetary establishments and oversee federal income assortment. And transferring ED’s workplace for civil rights over to the Division of Justice may present extra in the way in which of acceptable supervision.
