Trump Threatens Department of Education Closure
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Story by Annabelle Hurst || Listen to the story on SoundCloud
On February 11th, it was announced that the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, will make $900 million worth of cuts to an educational program that tracks K-12 learning progress in the U.S. The announcement follows from two of President Donald Trump’s term goals, closing the Department of Education and cutting back on federal spending.
In January of this year, CNN reported that the Trump administration was drafting an executive order beginning the shutdown of the Department of Education. While it would take an act of Congress to close the Department of Education fully, Trump is still able to weaken the Department’s role through executive action and has worked to expand school choice in the first few weeks of his term.
Also in January, Trump issued a sweeping executive order telling federal agencies to push for school choice. According to NBC, the order told the Department of Education to prioritize school choice in making discretionary grants and in providing states with guidance for how they use federal funds. The Department of Health and Human Services was instructed to issue guidance to states on how they can use money from block grants for families and children for faith-based and private institutions. Additionally, Defense Secretary Pete Hagseth was told to put together a plan for how military families can use Pentagon funding for private schools and the Interior Secretary was told to plan for how students at schools run by the Bureau of Indian Education can use funds for school choice. The White House cited low-standardized test scores nationwide as a reason for the turn to school choice.
Trump’s cuts to DEI have also impacted the Department of Education. In February, dozens of federal Department of Education employees were placed on leave as part of the administration’s move to fire DEI employees. While the Department of Education does not actually handle the majority of school funding, they do provide a number of programs that local schools rely on, including Title I funding for special education and for students in poverty. They also are in charge of protecting students from discrimination. Additionally, they administer federal financial aid and student loans.
To learn more about Trump’s plans for the Department of Education and school choice, KCSB’s Annabelle Hurst spoke to UCSB Professor AJ Rice.
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AJ RICE: My name is AJ Rice. I am a third year assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and my work looks at the intersection of race, education, policy, and specifically education reform policy, in the United States.
HURST: Could you generally describe what school choice is and what would be considered a school choice measure?
RICE: Yeah, absolutely. So I think that’s a great question because school choice has meant a lot of things over the years. And it’s a concept that largely emerged in mass kind of during the 1950s and the 1960s in response to school desegregation as a result of the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954.
Broadly speaking, school choice has meant the creation of charter schools. It’s also referred to the creation of magnet schools, voluntary transfer programs or inner district school choice programs whereby students from one school district could actually transfer to another school district. There’s also kind of choice based desegregation plans historically as well. The No Child Left Behind Act under George W. Bush’s tenure, people had the right to transfer to other districts under that policy if their school was failing. If I hadn’t mentioned it, vouchers as well.
One of the things with choice schools, with inner district choice or even with some of the kind of charter approach, is that the receiving schools or school districts can oftentimes dictate whether or not they accept students. And so that has been a major factor in kind of sometimes choice programs actually reproducing segregation today or at least kind of in the post Brown era.
But to be clear, I guess with respect to the Trump administration, my sense is that their focus, at least if we go back to his previous administration, and Betsy DeVos, the former Secretary of Education, she had pushed vouchers as a particular school choice approach. And that was also something that she historically had pushed, vouchers and choice and charter schools, in Michigan where I’m from originally.
And that had destructive consequences on the public school system in Detroit and beyond Detroit. And so, you know, we should really be hesitant, I think, to embrace any kind of voucher or charter school approach. Especially given that the details of these programs are very important, and also that voucher and charter school programs, evidence suggests that they are not by themselves more effective than public schools.
One of the consequences of implementing choice in charters and vouchers is redirecting public resources to private charter management organizations, etc. And so it’s not, you know, we need to be very careful shifting resources away from already under-resourced schools to now private schools who may perform either the same or worse than those public schools.
HURST: During Trump’s first term, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos pushed for a federal voucher program as part of an ‘education freedom plan.’ Several states already have their own voucher programs, with Tennessee having passed a plan to open up 20,000 vouchers of $7,000 each on January 30th of this year. The Associated Press reports that President Trump supported the act on social media.
Why would Trump and other leaders want to expand private schooling and put in place school choice measures?
RICE: So I think there’s a couple reasons here, right. And so I mentioned that choice emerges first out of this kind of post-Brown v. Board decision in 1954, where the Supreme Court unanimously decided that school segregation and segregated schools were illegal, right, and unconstitutional and in violation of the 14th Amendment Amendment of the US Constitution.
So, as a result of that, a lot of schools, particularly in the South, but in the North as well, again Detroit is a kind of prime example of this, these school districts oftentimes resisted the desegregation edict, you know, handed down by the Supreme Court. And so this is where these kinds of choice policies started to really kind of emerge in mass. And so in the South in particular, you had places like in Virginia, you had places that had segregated schools.
And as a consequence of the Brown decision, some of these districts ended up shutting down certain schools, so shutting down their black school in Virginia, for example, and administering vouchers. And so what that allowed to happen was those schools that remained open could then determine whose vouchers they would accept, whose they wouldn’t, and also obviously they had limits on enrollment.
So by and large, a lot of those schools were able to and school districts were able to kind of maintain segregation for years after Brown v. Board through choice programs. And so again, this was not only something that happened in the South, but it was something that happened in the north as well, in places like Detroit, through optional attendance zones, where certain neighborhoods usually that were undergoing racial change, whereby African Americans were entering those previously all white communities or neighborhoods. Those neighborhoods could then start to choose, or have choice, in terms of determining which school district they went to, to be able to basically leave and, you know, avoid being in these schools that were increasingly becoming integrated.
So if we think about that, origins of choice policy, and choice as a kind of means to maintain segregation, I think that now with the Trump administration coming in taking over the Department of Education, which also has an office of civil rights, and implementing the school choice policies, if we think about that as part of this kind of broader make America great again approach, and this anti-DEI approach, pretty much pro white male elite approach, right, then I think, you know, the the reason why they’re trying to implement these programs is I think it’s a few things, right.
I think one, if we think about the Department of Education as emerging in the late 1970s and by and large as a kind of product of the civil rights movement, and other kinds of agitation for for broader rights and minority groups and disadvantaged groups, then his attack and assault on that on that department is also indicative of an assault and attack on those groups, right.
And it’s public money, right, that that department has. Congress allocated $80 billion last year, but I think their overall budget is somewhere around 240 260 billion dollars.
So we think about that those are public dollars, right, and so if those are public dollars that currently, by and large, cannot be accessed by private hands, right, then that I think is one reason that Trump, himself a billionaire, Linda McMahon who’s coming in right herself a billionaire to to head that office, I think that this is a corporate grab, right. I think that this idea of expanding choice, expanding – and I my sense is that it’s going to be primarily charter schools and vouchers – that money is going to be redirected to charter management organizations. And also these charters don’t have to abide by the same kinds of state regulations and laws. Charters can decide whether or not they have a diversity policy or not, right. And so my sense is that this administration would not support any kind of charter or voucher schools that would be promoting diversity or any kind of equity or inclusion or anything of that sort, right. So I think this is very much about shifting public dollars to private hands. I think it’s about maintaining segregation. And I also think it’s about sending a broader signal, right, to people across the nation that we’re only going to be promoting one narrative of what America is. And it’s a narrative that is, you know, make America great again, in effect.
HURST: Considering that school choice measures are normally state level decisions and not so much at the Department of Education’s level, how much of an impact do you think national level policy will have or has been able to have historically?
RICE: You know, obviously, right, there has been an effect at the national level. So if you think of – well, I say obviously, to some extent, right. So if you think about the Brown v. Board of Education decision, you did have desegregation efforts, right, that were pursued. And in some areas were relatively successful, at least able to desegregate more than they were. Although some of my hesitancy is that we have a lot of data that shows now that schools are, you know, have been undergoing a process of effectively resegregation. And there were also limits to that desegregation effort in the first place, right. So that said, there has been some effect, right, of these federal policies on the local level.
One thing to think about with respect to the Department of Education and the resources that it provides is that because it provides resources to, you know, citizens and communities, there’s a lot of people who are invested in the Department of Education persisting, right. And not only are there a lot of people invested in the department, have a personal investment in the Department of Education, not only persisting, but you have the majority of Americans broadly support increasing funding for public education. And so it seems like it might very well be a large, you know, highly unpopular move to engage in some kind of policy that would, that would reduce resources to school districts.
But again, you know, thinking about something like the, you know, no child left behind act by former President George W. Bush, or thinking about even the Race to the Top program under Barack Obama, both of these programs actually also were, you know, our federal education policies that were designed to expand educational choice as well. Right. And so in that sense, Trump is continuing, you know, Bush, Obama, Trump, they’re all kind of continuing in a particular tradition of moving further and further away from this idea of publicly run and publicly resource schools to now schools that are maybe publicly resourced, but privately run. Right. And so in that sense, Trump is, maybe to some extent unique in degree and maybe kind, you know, but he should be understood in this kind of broader trajectory lineage of a kind of moving towards a broader privatization of education in general.
Trump could not actually close the Department of Education without an act of Congress. Historically, when presidents have tried to get cuts to the department through Congress, the moves have failed. Trump attempted to merge the labor and education departments during his first term, but the proposal failed despite a Republican majority in the House and the Senate.
If Trump did close the department, certain programs would likely be relocated to different departments where they were placed before the Department of Education was created.
During the February 12th confirmation hearing of Trump’s new Education Secretary Linda McMahon, she emphasized rehousing certain programs instead of discussing completely closing the department. The New York Times reported that McMahon repeatedly argued that programs such as funding for special education and research on students and teaching methods would be more efficient under another department.
HURST: Could you go over exactly what he could do on his own?
RICE: So Trump has talked a lot about closing the Department of Education, shutting it down. And we’ve seen obviously him, well, Trump and DOGE and Elon Musk engage in this similar kind of practice, trying to carry out a similar kind of agenda with respect to USAID. And we’ve also seen, you know, a federal judge have some kind of injunctions on some of those efforts, right. And so obviously it’s already clear that the legality of his efforts are uncertain, right, at best. And so, you know, we can kind of take a look at what’s happening with USAID and kind of see that maybe as a template for a possible template for what’s happening with the Department of Education.
What I suspect will happen is that, you know, the Department of Education has some, has a budget and carries out certain things that are mandatory, right. They have a mandatory budget and they have a discretionary budget. So the mandatory side of things are things that have to be carried out, resources that have to be provided by law. Again, similar to USAID, I think what will happen is that the Trump administration will try to move some, base some of those activities to other, to other agencies, right, or to other departments. And some things will, as I mentioned, because they are discretionary, I think some things will be abolished. And so by and large, I think that as much as he can reduce funding within his power or eliminate programs, he will do that, right. And where he cannot reduce or eliminate programs, I think that’s where this idea of, you know, of thinking about how maybe these programs can be administered privately might be another option.
So this idea of choice and this idea of having kind of corporate actors come in and kind of administer certain kinds of programs, I think that that very well might be, you know, another approach to educational governance under this administration.
HURST: The Department of Education doesn’t handle most curriculum and most of the funding. But, as you have said, they provide funding for students with disabilities and low income students, and they’re in charge of protecting students from discrimination. Considering those programs that it provides, in the event that Trump could actually shut down the Department of Education, what programs would be at risk? And would the public schools at a state level be able to provide the resources to fill the gap left by the Department of Education?
RICE: Folks have already felt the effects of Trump’s proposed abolition of the Department of Education, as well as this assault on DEI, right. And so we know for example that the National Institute of Health has already rejected basically, throughout, the applications of some of their diversity grants, actually, and have disbanded their other diversity grant programs. Right. And so that’s one issue. We also know that just as of yesterday, you’ve had it, well, it’s been ongoing since last year, but you’ve had universities who are now either reducing resources to their DEI offices, they’re changing the names of those DEI offices, or they’re, you know, disbanding them all together. Right. And so, uh, So we know that this has real implications for folks, even folks that are not, you know, non-white, are also experiencing the effects of this as well because of this idea with that agencies to no longer be funding certain kinds of things.
In the event that Trump did actually abolish the Department of Education or significantly restructured it. Yeah, I think if we have a sense of what that department’s, you know, goal is, and who really is the primary beneficiaries of it, then it stands to reason that the primary beneficiaries are going to be the folks who are most impacted. Right. And so, again, that will be low-income communities.
But I should also say that, you know, the way in which the Department of Education operates and the way in which some of this ESEA money is administered, these are administered as categorical grants. What happens with the Department of Education, right, so the Department of Education receives money from the federal government. I think it was about $80 billion in 2024. A lot of that money, about $18.5 billion or so went to local educational agencies, right. So these are local school districts. And so those local school districts kind of can determine how they spend that money. And so, first and foremost, that $18.4 billion that’s going to local school districts, and those are not just low income school districts either, right. All those school districts stand to be harmed by any kind of reduction in funding or any kind of change in those programs. Right. Similarly, you have about $15, $16 billion that was appropriated for special education as well. You know, you have 890 million or so that goes to English language acquisition.
And so, all of these kind of line items that are appropriated and administered through the Department of Education, I think, you know, are at risk. Part of what the doge boys and the Trump administration are also trying, you know, ostensibly are suggesting they’re trying to do is reduce all of this spending to quote, unquote, balance the US budget.
But of course, the same questions that arose with respect to cutting for USAID arise with respect to cutting for education. What are the consequences? What are the long term short midterm and long term consequences of cutting these policies, right, as well? And so we know that if you’re, you know, in the context of, you know, low-income areas or that are, that don’t have a whole lot of resources, these things can be devastating. These cuts could very well be devastating.
HURST: With regards to university funding and financially with the federal funding like Pell Grants, and things like that be at risk and how would the universities make up for that gap?
RICE: A lot of the student loans are loans and grants are mandatory spending. Actually, I think the Pell grants themselves might be discretionary. But for those discretionary items, those things might be abolished, right.
And again, if we think about Pell grants and some of these other grants as grants that are again, particularly designed to support low income folks, these are things that, you know, I think things that Trump is very well going to target.
But the point that I wanted to make is that for those programs that are mandatory, those programs, again, because Trump can’t necessarily abolish them unilaterally, the question just becomes how they’re now going to be administered. And also, even though they might continue to be administered, it doesn’t mean that there won’t be a period of disruption, as we’ve been seeing right in the past week, a few weeks or so. It’s not simply just a function of whether or not certain programs will be retained, but it’s how they’ll be retained, as well as will they be retained without any disruption in the interim.
And it’s not clear to me that, for example, if you were to say that, okay, the Department of Education is abolished, now some other unit is going to be responsible for administering these loans or administering that program. Well, you have a lot of expertise in the Department of Education. Which, again, we already know that people have already, you know, been fired or been laid off and asked not to return to the office. Right. And so it’s a lot of expertise that’s being left. And these are people who are career bureaucrats who have decades of, you know, in some instances decades of experience. And so it’s not clear to me that, you know, these programs will, despite what the administration likes to claim, will continue to run effectively or efficiently, given these changes. In fact, we already know empirically that some of these programs are no longer running effectively and efficiently, just because of the shutdown just from this past week.
HURST: How do you see states, local school districts and the universities responding to these actions?
RICE: You know, it’s kind of back to this issue of like, what are we actually really talking about, right? And so kind of correcting some of the, you know, some of the mischaracterizations by the Trump administration thus far, right? So this idea that the federal government is deeply involved in education policy and is dictating all of these things to states – it’s just simply not true. Right. It’s just simply not true.
And in fact, why it’s not true is because politicians have long acknowledged the fact that citizens love the kind of right to be able to control their schools locally. And so if anything, the folks who have more control over school policy, or who have the most control over school policy or actually states, at least states more so than the federal government. Right. And this is also just a basic issue of federalism. You know, things that are not specified in the Constitution, which education is not, are left to the states. Right. And so states have significant power. No scholars of education have ever questioned this. Right.
So in terms of how states I think will push back, I think that, you know, how states and as well as as you mentioned as well as school districts, how they push back, I think will be a mixed bag. There are some states who, like Alabama and some others who have already, you know, banned, been engaged in banning DEI and diversity and these kinds of things, we can think about Florida as well and Texas. So I think that like, you know, if you’re thinking about those kinds of states, their leadership is already applauding the things that that Trump is doing and supporting, especially Republican states are probably going to be obviously much more supportive of these decisions than Democratic states. Although, there’s been a kind of eerie silence. I would have expected maybe more resistance than we’ve seen to some of the things that Trump has been doing – although in the past 24, 48 hours, and some things have been picking up a little bit and also we have to remember right he’s been in office for like three weeks or so right so this is been this kind of barrage of activity as well.
But I do think what you’re going to see, I think where you’ll see the resistance most robustly, and you already have been seeing that right, is at the kind of local level. So I think that absolutely you’re going to have school districts that are pushing back on this, and especially those school districts that are, you know, hurt, disproportionately harmed by these decisions, or could be disproportionately harmed by these decisions,l absolutely I think will be pushing back. But I think the, the question is, you know, what leverage do they have? because the biggest question I think will be, you know, there’s sometimes this idea that low income is synonymous with, you know, non-white people but there are a lot of white folks in low income rural areas as well, right and so they’re also benefiting from the resources that the Department of Education receives, and administer. So now if they’re harmed, right if you have – in other words, if you have, particularly let me be clear if you have Trump’s own supporters, you know, regardless of class regardless of geography, if you have Trump’s own supporters that are harmed by these policies, you know, then they’re very well maybe grounds for him to kind of maybe resist fully implementing right some of the policies that he that he wants to. And so I think that that might be the X-factor.
But again, you know, just for some context, the federal government provides about, on average, about one third of the overall budget for local districts right so for, you know, for educational budgets for the state. It’s not insignificant, right, but it’s not, you know, over 50% right – it’s not the majority. And so I think that that’s also something that has to be taken into account but it will hurt, losing Department of Education resources will absolutely hurt.
HURST: Is there anything else that you want to bring up or talk about?
RICE: The other things I can anticipate, right, and are already happening is a series of lawsuits. Right. And so you have a series of lawsuits by, you know, Democratic Secretaries of State, and you’re going to have lawsuits by citizens and by local governments as well. I think what are going to be a proliferation of lawsuits, right. And so maybe one of the best strategies then might be, or at least one strategy might be to just try to hold this up in court, you know, for a minimum of four years.
You know, while many of us are outraged and concerned about the Trump administration’s takeover of the Department of Education, and some of us are extremely concerned about this kind of pursuit of school choice. I do think that we should also temper it within a kind of an understanding that choice policies, again since Brown, right, they’ve taken all these different kinds of faces, but they also have had bipartisan support since that period. It was President Barack Obama and his race to the top program that represented the federal government’s largest investment in charter schools. And he actually used the context of the 2008 global economic crisis. His, his argument was that those school districts, cities and school districts that were struggling as a result of this deregulated global market – and they’re trying to now deregulate education, right, so we should see these parallels here – as a consequence of this deregulated market that had catastrophic effects on on communities, the only way that they would be able to get access to this race to the top money is if they began to implement or expand school choice and in particular charter schools.
This kind of support for charters. You have somebody like an Obama that is also at least in the same realm, right as a Betsy DeVos or as Trump. And so, again, they might have different intentions in terms of pursuing these policies, I think all of them have an interest in moving some of this money to corporate hands, I don’t think that Obama is as invested in maintaining segregation as some other folks are. But nevertheless, I just want to be clear that you know this school of choice has been a long standing trend, and it’s been a long standing trend that has had devastating, by and and large devastating impacts on low-income communities and communities of color.
Again, it’s all about how these programs are administered, how they are regulated or not. Right. So I think that oftentimes there is a kind of a pro, or kind of anti-charter school. You know I think that there is an important space to have a kind of critical conversation, to look at programs across the country because again, you know, school policy is local, right. So you have all these different kinds of local charter schools and choice policies all around the nation. And so there are absolutely some that have been more effective than others and in part what I mean by effective is helping to also reduce racial inequality and educational inequality and the distribution of resources in some of these places as well.
You know, there’s a concept in political science and it’s referred to as policy feedback theory. And this idea is that once a policy is passed, they’re very hard to repeal after they’re passed, right. Because they tend to provide resources to people. And not only do they provide resources to people, to constituents, but also when the department of education was established in 1980 – there were people who were hired, right. So it not only creates kind of bureaucrats that have a particular kind of set of knowledge, specialized set of knowledge, right, that can support teachers and can support educators, but then those educators and teachers and students who are benefiting from the department, they also have a vested interest now in supporting, you know, the department and its and its persistence. So theoretically, the hope is that there’s so many kind of interests that are connected to the department that, you know, it will be very difficult for Trump to kind of get rid of it. And I think the other thing is, you know, is not just getting rid of it but making sure that the kind of substantive concerns of the department are still, you know, are still there.
That was AJ Rice, Assistant Professor of Political Science at UCSB. Thanks for listening. With KCSB News, I’m Annabelle Hurst.