Published on 21/03/2025
Ronald Wilson Reagan entered Congress in 1982, ready to deliver a bold message: the Department of Education must go. His words ignited Republicans’ enthusiasm and Democrats’ resistance. The battle over federal education policy had only just begun.
As he strode into Congress for his State of the Union speech in 1982, US President Ronald Reagan was prepared to deliver a message that resonated with many Republicans: let’s end the Department of Education.
“We must cut out non-essential government spending,” Reagan told lawmakers, vowing to cull the wider federal workforce by 75,000.
For 43 years, that vision for abolishing the education department – backed by members chafing at “big government” control over state issues – went unrealised.
But now, Donald Trump is attempting just that, through an executive order that instructs his Education Secretary Linda McMahon to take “all necessary steps” to shutter the department and “return education authority to the states”, according to a White House-provided fact sheet.
Trump has already moved to lay off half of the agency’s workforce. While closing the department outright would require an act of Congress, a political longshot, the president can take steps to break up the department and narrow its remit.
If ultimately successful, he would fulfil a campaign promise and long-running policy that has united disparate groups within the Republican Party, ranging from establishment Republicans and evangelical Christians to the Make America Great Again wing of the party that is most aligned with Trump.
Trump’s executive order cites a number of reasons for dismantling the department, including $3tn (£2.3tn) spent “without improving student achievement”, plummeting test scores, excessive “ideological initiatives” and a return of control to the states “where it belongs”.
Jonathan Butcher, an education policy veteran with experience in South Carolina, Arkansas and Arizona, told the media that these reasons, broadly, are ones shared by various factions of the Republican Party – and have been for years.
“Reagan correctly saw the philosophical and practical point that when you create an agency in Washington, it only grows in size and assumes additional responsibilities,” said Mr Butcher, now a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank that has long called for the abolition of the department.
“And sure enough, that’s what the US Department of Education has done,” he added.
While the first US Department of Education was established by President Andrew Johnson in the wake of the American Civil War in 1867, it soon shrank and faded into relative obscurity, housed under various names and agencies.
Over a century later, the now-cabinet level department was revived under Democrat Jimmy Carter in 1979 – immediately drawing the ire of Republicans such as Reagan.
During his victorious campaign to become president, Reagan described the department as a “new bureaucratic boondoggle” that allowed Washington, rather than “local needs and preferences”, to determine how American children were to be educated.
Similar arguments were made by Republicans during subsequent administrations, although a lack of congressional support long made efforts to dismantle or eliminate the agency impossible.
“I do not believe we need a federal department of homework checkers,” then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich told the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities in 1995.
Gingrich, who was one of only a small number of Republican lawmakers to support the department’s original creation, added that it had become a “massive disappointment”.
While many of the same arguments are being made today, some experts point to heightened “culture wars” – a hallmark of US politics in recent years – as having breathed new life into efforts to scuttle the department.
“What I think is so unifying for the right is that there was always a sense that it offered a kind of one-stop access for the education ‘blob’ to influence policy,” said Frederick Hess, director of education policy at the American Enterprise Institute, another Washington-based think tank. “That has been part of the critique going back to Reagan.”
“But the department had never been as forcefully involved in ferocious national culture battles,” Mr Hess added.
“While there are a lot of reasons those on the right might want to see the department downsized or abolished… this has given it all a new energy and focus that has really changed it from a talking point and given it another level of import.”
Experts, however, warn that there remains significant misunderstanding of what the department actually does, and the federal government’s power to influence educational outcomes.
Unlike the UK’s Department for Education, for example, its US counterpart takes no part in laying out national curricula, which it leaves to the states. It contributes only a small fraction of funding for student spending when compared to state-level counterparts.
It does, however, administer student loan programmes and Pell grants that help low-income students attend university – which the White House says that it will continue to do even once largely dismantled.
Mr Hess, for his part, compared the department to a “McGuffin” – a plot device famously used by Alfred Hitchcock to develop a character’s plot arc, while at the same time being largely irrelevant.
“There absolutely is an enormous amount of red-tape and regulation that gets in the way of schools, abolishing the department doesn’t get rid of that red tape and regulation,” he said. “These are baked into law.”
As an example, Mr Hess pointed to programmes such as Pell grants or Title I, a federal initiative to provide funding to schools with large numbers of low-income students.
“Even if you downsize the department, all of those requirements are still in place. You need to actively shave down the requirements and regulations or re-write the law in order to make a significant difference,” Mr Hess said.
Already, the Trump administration’s efforts to slash the size of the department have been the subject of lawsuits, and the new executive order has already faced fierce criticism from Democratic lawmakers who say it endangers student education and jeapordises school funding and financial aid.
The truth, Mr Hess said, is likely somewhere in the middle of the opposing sides.
“Both sides are, for different reasons, overstating the importance of downsizing or abolishing the department, and neither side is paying as much attention to the stuff that would really fundamentally change federal education,” he added.
But for those supportive of the move, Trump’s efforts are the fulfilment of a campaign promise.
“On the campaign trail, he [Trump] said it was a priority for states, not the federal government,” said Mr Butcher of the Heritage Foundation .
“While a move towards efficiency and streamlining, it would really do more for state’s autonomy… it’s a much deeper issue than a financial one.”
