Donald Trump Begins Dismantling the Department of Education
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From the opinion pages of The Wall Street Journal, this is Potomac Watch.

President Donald Trump signs an executive order directing Education Secretary Linda McMahon to dismantle the Education Department, reviving a one-time conservative ambition. But will the courts and Congress and voters get on board with the plan this time?

Welcome to Potomac Watch, the daily podcast from the Wall Street Journal opinion pages. I am Kim Strassel, and I am joined this week by two colleagues who look young enough to still be graduate students, but don't let that fool you. They are highly experienced policy hands, Mene Ukweberua and Alicia Finley.

Donald Trump on Thursday signed his order, flanked by schoolchildren sitting at desks who signed mini versions of that order. I did love that touch. Let's listen to him talking about his real goal in putting out this directive. My administration will take all lawful steps to shut down the department. We're going to shut it down and shut it down as quickly as possible. It's doing us no good. We want to return our

our students to the states where just some of the governors here are so happy about this. They want education to come back to them, to come back to the states, and they're going to do a phenomenal job. You know, Monet, for most of this country's existence, education was pretty much entirely the purview of the states. And then in 1979, mostly to fulfill a promise he got in return for teachers unions endorsements,

Jimmy Carter signed legislation creating the Department of Education. And Republicans worked for a while to rescind that legislation. And then time went on. And now here we are, and Trump is issuing an executive order. He was very careful in the wording of it.

It kind of matches the wording of some of the other outfits that he's been attempting to wind down in that it directs McMahon, the education secretary, to, quote, the maximum extent appropriate and permitted by law, take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education and return authority over education to the states and local communities. Here's my question. How much reduction or closure can he actually accomplish?

accomplish absent Congress? Can programs be moved? Can grants be cut? What are we looking at here? Well, it's unclear. And I think that we're going to see quite a lot of this in practice. I think that the laws that authorize a lot of these grants in different categories. So, of course, there are grants that go to public schools to help provide for the education of low-income students. There are grants that go to schools to help with special education.

And there are all sorts of competitive grants that school districts and states can apply for. And each of these has different sets of terms that allow the education secretary to, at their discretion, decide in what amounts and to whom to dispense this money to states and school districts. And so with some of these grants, it isn't necessarily firmly set in law that

A specific number has to be dispersed to the states. President Trump and his education team are already going to be reviewing each single one of these categories of grants and seeing which ones will we be able to hold back because we're not necessarily required to spend every penny. But in the broader sense,

A lot of them really are going to require Congress to step in if you're going to want to eliminate entire programs entirely rather than just pausing them or dispersing a lot less of that money. And so that's exactly what the language of the executive order is meant to do.

Education department is going to go ahead with the parts that are within its own purview to begin with. But then in the long run, if they want to switch some of these responsibilities to other departments within the executive branch or end programs entirely, they're going to have to get some legislative buy-in. Yeah.

Alicia, count me as someone that would have zero tears if they did end up entirely closing the Department of Education. And here's why. It's not really in the business of educating anyone. It doesn't step into a classroom or set bus schedules or discipline kids. It's essentially a big process.

piggy bank that hands out these hundreds of billions in grants, which largely inspires school districts to hire a lot of administrators and secretaries that spend ridiculous amounts of hours applying for those federal grants, the money for which largely goes into hiring more of these people to apply for more of the grants. It's kind of a full employment program for the teachers' unions.

And along the way, we get a lot of reports and studies and model conferences, but nothing in 40 years that has actually improved education outcomes. Along the way, as you all know, it's also become the Department of Education, this giant bank for student loans and all the things that come with that. If Congress were to get engaged here, if there were actually a plan, and I think that's a big if, a big plan where Donald Trump was working with Congress to restructure and strengthen

shrink the Department of Education, what should they be aiming to do? So there's a lot that Congress could do with Trump through the budget reconciliation process that they're now going to do to extend the tax reforms. And that would include perhaps block granting. Some of these programs Mene alluded to literally block

maybe even 100, I think, when I was going through them, grant programs for K-12 education, many of which are redundant and they have been added over the years at the behest of this or that congress member who wants to support this or that cause, arts education, civics education, literacy. I'll go through supporting effective educator development, $90 million, supporting effective instruction, $2.2 billion, education and innovation research.

$284 million. Innovative approaches to literacy, $30 million. Not to be confused with a comprehensive literacy development, $194 million. Wow. And you could just go on and on and on. There's a special program for Special Olympics at schools for disabled kids. And so...

All the various pots of money, including there's a separate two big pots of money that are allocated more on formula basis to the states, and that's for the disabilities and low-income kids, Title I program. That adds up to about $100 billion a year, and that's about 12.5% of schools' total funding. Not a huge share.

In my view, I think the federal government should be funding any of this, but I don't think that that's going to fly. And I think what Congress could do is just give states block grants based on their per total student population at a set amount per student.

So that way it wouldn't reward certain states like California and New York that had spent a lot more on educating kids than some more frugal states like Texas and Florida. And that's been a problem with some of these formula grants is they basically reward states for spending more and giving teachers unions bigger pensions and payouts.

So that's one thing that they could do. The second thing is just a wholesale reforms of the student loan program, which has just grown with the Republican backing, by the way, over the last couple of decades, a uncapped graduate student loans debt in 2005.

which has basically enabled a lot of colleges to add endless amounts of master's programs to reel in more federal dollars. In fact, graduate student debt now makes up half of all federal student debt. Undergraduate loans have actually been declining because the number of kids actually going to college has been declining. So colleges have just added more and more master's degrees programs to offset that.

So basically, I think I would recommend just getting the federal government out of the business of lending to grad students. Let the private sector take that up. Banks are actually interested in it. They've called for the Washington Congress to stop making loans to graduate students. And then they could do it on a risk-adjusted basis. So you may get a lower interest rate for someone who's going to get a law degree at Harvard, to be honest, versus someone who's getting a

Middle Eastern studies degree somewhere or, you know, basket weaving, community developments, you know, some of these other kinds of degree programs that have just proliferated. So I think that that's one thing. And then also eliminating these income-based or at least scaling back these income-based repayment plans that Obama and Biden both expanded partly by decree, um,

But it's become a real problem in terms of incentives with the public service loan forgiveness program in which students or borrowers can get their loans forgiven after 10 years of making payments, no matter how little they make, if they go to work for government and nonprofits. And so this is actually just encouraged and distorted the incentives and encouraged more students who graduate to go work for nonprofits and government so that they can get their loans forgiven faster. Quick

Question, Alicia, is there any reason why we couldn't or wouldn't reprivatize all student loans? Part of the problem is that there are certain students who probably, you know, low-income kids that probably wouldn't get loans if they were having to pay on a risk-adjusted basis. The private market just wouldn't do that, which they did through budget reconciliation with Obamacare, was do direct loans by taking out essentially the middlemen. So you used to have banks,

Sally Mae. Right. It would still be guaranteed by the government. But there was at least more accountability and the private lenders were much better at servicing those loans than it turned out that the government has been. I think it would be vexing and you'd probably hear a lot about how low income kids wouldn't be able to get access to higher education if you were to completely get the government out of lending. We're going to take a quick break. When we come back, more on Trump's education order.

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See if you qualify at Oracle dot com slash Wall Street. Oracle dot com slash Wall Street. Welcome back. I'm here with Mone Ukeburu and Alicia Finley, and we are talking about Donald Trump's efforts to close the Department of Education. Here's what I love about the block grant idea. It's not just that you are eliminating the need for these states to jump through all these hoops.

for these silly programs to get a hold of that money. But once they get it, that it's earmarked for specific things and that sometimes it even comes with a lot of strings attached and the threat of government coercion. I remember

Joe Biden essentially saying he was going to take away, this was a slightly different program, but take away lunch money for kids if schools didn't get on board with his transgender policies. So there's a benefit to getting rid of all of that, too. Manet, when you look at Washington, you are a keen Washington observer, right?

Here's a bigger question I have is, this all sounds great, what Alicia just laid out. That's my dream. How eager do you think anyone in Congress or on the Republican side is in touching this? We've heard a great deal about what they want to do in reconciliation, but there are certain areas where they tend to get cold feet and get a little scary. There are some polls out already showing that this is

Not necessarily as popular as some of other Donald Trump's moves. Popular at the base, maybe, maybe not as much overall. Are you hearing that there are plans to take this up? Well, first of all, with the question of how popular the idea of eliminating the education department is or a substantive education department reform is,

I think this is one of those issues where you have to take the polls with a grain of salt and can't just trust the results at face value because it depends a lot on how you present the issue. A lot of people, frankly, don't know a lot of what the education department really does and the involvement of the federal government in education. So if you tell them we're going to eliminate the education department without explaining exactly what that means,

Their first reaction is going to be, we want to make sure that money continues to flow to students. Of course, a lot of these people don't understand that 90% of the funding already does come from states and localities. And the education department is essentially adding a layer on top of that to steer local schools in certain directions that the federal government wants them to go. And so I do think that...

that over the past few years especially, you've seen a lot of people become more skeptical than ever of the state of public schooling, particularly the experience of COVID and having their kids essentially forced to attend school from home, I think led a lot of people to say the status quo isn't working. People are generally aware of the amount that education funding has increased

generation over generation and how that has led to stagnant results. Every couple of years we get the national assessment results. And I think that's something that gets talked about among parents. And so if you go one step forward from the basic question of do you want to close the education department and then talk about how the responsibilities of it would be resigned to other agencies,

how it would allow more freedom for states to be able to make education choices of their own. I think you see the needle move by quite a lot in terms of the number of voters who would be willing to go for that. And then there would be a corresponding increase in popularity among lawmakers when they know that they're not going to get hammered in negative ad campaigns about making that move. But I would just add to that, that I think one of the

promising opportunities for Republican lawmakers is the idea that some of this money that's already being used for federal education funding, if more of it were block-granted, could be used to support the school choice experiments that we've seen proliferating around the country, particularly in red states. There are certain states that have succeeded in actually creating programs where

the money follows the student, quote unquote. And so just the general education funding, when students choose to attend a private or parochial school, they're able to get that appropriation to follow them. But then there are other states where they've basically created a pilot program of scholarships with a specific appropriation. And so they're only able to offer a limited amount

amount to students who want to use that money to go to other schools, if they were able to flexibly use some of the money that's already coming from the education department to fund those programs, I think you'd see a lot more purple and probably even some blue states

take a step in the direction of saying, we're going to give this a go, see if we're able to maintain our funding for general education at the same time as promoting school choice. And so that's one of the ways that I think the idea of reforming the education department should be sold as a big positive and political winner to Republicans in Congress. We're going to take one more break.

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Welcome back to Potomac Watch. You know, Alicia, Randy Weingarten, the head of the powerful American Federation of Teachers Union, had a very short, pithy response to all this, which was, see you in court. Ever since the announcement yesterday, liberal groups, Democrats, they have been losing their minds over this. And a lot of press releases and chatter about how this is illegal and Trump is once again breaking the Constitution.

I have to say right now, at least looking at this broad executive order, I struggle to see any overwhelming basis for a lawsuit simply on the grounds of what he has asked Linda McMahon to do. We've been talking a little bit about...

the things that Congress would most likely have to do. But are they talking instead about actions they presume he's going to take, that they are going to jump on? I mean, what grounds are there at the moment to launch any lawsuits? Do you see any? And what would be the most dangerous thing Trump could do to put him in a situation where litigation bites him? As you pointed out earlier on,

that the executive order is very carefully drafted to ensure to say that take all actions that are permitted by law. And there are a lot of things that aren't permitted by law. The department can't just close down certain agencies or offices. There will be probably some kind of fights over impoundment if the administration just decides not

to spend or fund certain programs for which Congress is appropriated. As I mentioned, there are so many grant programs and the administration decides, well, I don't really think we need that grant program, so we're just not going to send out any money or spend any of the money or distribute any grants. So that could bring a lawsuit under the 1974 Impoundment Act

who would sue. It's not clear that teachers unions would actually have standing to sue under that law. What also will likely bring lawsuits, though I think the Trump administration would be on pretty solid ground, would be to withdraw some of the Biden overreaching rules like the borrower defense rule. And this was a rule that allowed college students to apply for and receive loan forgiveness if they claim that their colleges somehow deceived them. And

And, you know, it sounds great, but the way it was administered by the Biden administration was basically to provide blanket loan forgiveness for students of namely for-profit colleges if their colleges made any kind of footfall or anything in their marketing. So I think you'll likely see the Trump administration try to pull back that rule, a gainful employment rule, the Title IX rule that was actually already blocked by the courts, which

and many others. And I think the teachers unions and democratic states are likely to sue just as they did during the Trump at first administration when they tried to roll back some of the rules. And so that may actually make it a little harder, makes it delay. But at the end of the day, what you have to realize is that at least when they go about the process of rescinding them, they're not going to be enforcing these overreach and rules that the Biden administration had put in place. I think the empowerment thing is really fascinating because

All signs are that the administration is actually gunning for that fight. Russ Vogt, when he spent his interim period before Trump was reelected, he had a think tank and they put out a lot of papers by legal scholars trying to make the intellectual argument for why the president has empowerment power.

And, you know, I don't think that there's any question that they actually want to have that case go up to the Supreme Court. I'm not sure it's as clear cut as some of their legal papers say. I still think that's a little bit more of a toss-up decision. But I think we're headed for one of those legal battles one way or the other, whether it comes out of the Education Department or elsewise.

But, Mene, one last question because I want to go back to something you touched on on school choice. I was really struck. You'd have thought that there would be uniform applause by the right, at least those on the base and conservatives, for this move. And yet I heard a little pushback over the last day or so. Linda McMahon had talked about

block grants, like Alicia was talking about, changing the funding mechanism to just hand states pots of money. A lot of conservatives said, we can't do that because then you're just going to be giving money to reward states with terrible education models like California or New York.

Now, Alicia was talking about ways of doing this where they don't get disproportionate money using funding formulas. But those on the right are saying, you know what we ought to do is we ought to just take all this money and hand it to the parents. And if they want to use it and give it to the public schools and send their kids there or use it for charter schools or private schools, what do we think of that idea? Well, I think that going forward,

That far would probably be very difficult, I think, even for Republicans in Congress, because these schools are their constituencies as well. And they don't want the federal government to essentially entirely upend the education system across the country.

different states and localities. The idea is allowing those places to make more choices of their own, maybe using these programs around the edges to promote certain reforms. But I do think that the idea is these schools are going to have more flexibility to determine their own standards and to reform their own programs. The education department will still be involved in overseeing some of the

worst excesses, for example, critical race theory in public schools. And you'll definitely see the Trump administration challenge curricula that they do believe violate the civil rights mandates on these public schools. But generally, they want the choices to be made closer to the students and parents who are actually the beneficiaries of this funding. Well, we will see. This is going to be a fun thing to watch.

Manay, thank you. Alicia, thank you. We want to thank our listeners. We are here every weekday. If you like the show, please hit that subscribe button. And if you'd like to write to us, you can at pwpodcast at wsj.com.