This week, CNN and the Wall Street Journal both reported that President Trump is preparing an executive order to dismantle the federal Department of Education. Whether he signs an order or not (White House Press Secretary Karolina Leavitt accurately denied that it would happen on Thursday) such a dismantlement would need an act of Congress. Oops!
Federal departments are created by Congress and can only be eliminated or substantively modified by Congress. It applies to the first, the Department of Foreign Affairs (later renamed the State Department), signed into law by President George Washington on July 27, 1789, when the U.S. Capitol was downtown Manhattan. And it applies to the Department of Education, signed into law by President Jimmy Carter on Oct. 17, 1979. But Trump seems to genuinely believe he can rule by diktat.
Still, even if Trump doesn’t go the obviously illegal route of issuing an executive order, he and his Education Secretary Linda McMahon (a former WWE executive) seem to have that as a clear endpoint. Hours after her narrow Senate confirmation, McMahon told agency staff to prepare for their “final mission” of shutting down the department.
Here we have yet another example of a federal department or agency becoming something of an avatar for what the MAGA culture warriors imagine it to be, as opposed to them having bothered to try to understand what it actually is. The Department of Education is not a centralized organ of curriculum development and lesson plans, but rather more of a central financial coordinator of federal funds.
In fact, the DOE has a helpful web page dedicated exclusively to delineating what it does not do, which includes setting state educational standards, establishing enrollment or graduation requirements and developing curricula — all the things that most enrage conservatives about the DOE, if only it actually did them.
In this country, educational criteria and standards are handled almost entirely to states and localities, which are free to shape curricula and textbooks such that they, so Texas does what it wants and so does Minnesota.
What the U.S. agency does do is manage the nation’s sprawling student loan program, now encompassing $1.5 trillion in debt for millions of borrowers; if Trump wants to take up his predecessor’s mantle of finding ways to forgive some of this massive debt pile, then have at it, but we imagine that’s not what he has in mind.
A dissolved DOE would mean this servicing and issuing of loans would have to move elsewhere, and maybe Trump would find ways to try to privatize it all and dole it out to his oligarch buddies.
We can also imagine some broad supervisory functions that do grind conservatives’ gears, even if they’re less likely to openly admit it. Chief among these is our entire scheme of civil rights enforcement, which ensures that students are not discriminated against based on factors like race and gender. Remember Brown vs. Board of Education?
The Trump movement, with its DEI obsession, has landed on the point of view that absolutely any effort to actively prevent discriminatory practices and policies essentially itself amounts to discrimination, and will be happy to throw students to the wolves of local and state officials. But dismantlement or not isn’t up to the president, which is today’s lesson.
