Trump’s Lying or Dreaming: The Department of Education Is Here to Stay

The right hates it. But you know what? It provides billions in grants that states love and need. They’d either have to do without—or raise taxes. By a lot.

Oct 22, 2024

One of Donald Trump’s flagship promises is that he’d wipe out the U.S. Department of Education. “We will move everything back to the states, where it belongs,” he’s told cheering audiences. The states “can individualize education and do it with the love for their children.”

But the promise rings false—it’s something that he can’t, wouldn’t, and never would be allowed to do. There are three reasons why.

First is the “we” in Trump’s promise. No president controls the bureaucracy. Under the Constitution, Congress defines the structure of the federal government: It creates and eliminates agencies, the number of employees they hire, the amount of money they spend, and the programs they fund. The president isn’t a CEO, and Congress isn’t a board of directors. Congress isn’t about to pass a law eliminating the department.

The second reason is the specter of raised taxes. The Department of Education doles out billions in grants of all kinds. If they went away, states could, in theory, just do without. And that sounds great to conservatives—less government! But in fact, those grants come in pretty handy. For example, presidential candidate Ron DeSantis said he’d eliminate the Department of Education if he were elected. But Florida Governor Ron DeSantis would never take his own deal. The Sunshine State got $5 billion from the Department of Education in 2023 from both grants and college student aid.

Florida would thus face a choice: Do without those popular grants, which really do help many thousands of people, or replace the money. And replacing that money would require the state to hike taxes by 5.2 percent, at a time when DeSantis had to cut spending 2.2 percent to make the 2024–2025 budget balance.

In the seven swing states that will decide the election (Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin), state and local officials would have to increase taxes permanently by 3 percent to make up for the money lost in federal grants—or cut programs that everyone likes. The tax hikes would range from 3.6 percent in Georgia to 2.3 percent in Pennsylvania, according to calculations I’ve made from the General Services Administration’s USASpending.gov website.

And if the department’s aid goes completely away, states would have to figure out whether they’re going to cut college students off from aid. They could turn their backs on the crushing costs of student loans once the federal government leaves the scene—or they could step in to make up the difference. That would double the tax increases. Aid to state and local schools is half; aid to college students is the other half. How about savings from eliminating the administrative costs of running the department? That’s just 0.42 percent of the department’s entire budget, so that’s less than a tiny drop in a very large bucket. It’s hard to see any of that happening.

The third argument is that Trump supporters claim that the states would be able to save lots of money from ridding the system of “suffocating bureaucratic red tape,” as Project 2025 puts it. But that’s not the way it works. In general, states spend about 10 percent of their Department of Education grants on administration and the rest gets passed along in subgrants to local schools. By way of comparison, nonprofits tend to spend about a third of their budgets on administrative costs, a rate more than three times higher than state governments. State administration is already pretty lean, and there isn’t much fat to be trimmed from operations. States won’t be able to keep their educational operations afloat if they lose the federal cash.

In the swing state of Michigan, critics contended that federal grants mostly funded bureaucrats—67 percent of the positions in the state Education Department, it claimed. But almost all these positions involve workers delivering programs ranging from educating disadvantaged students to providing technical training for new blue-collar jobs. Those, of course, are the very constituencies that Trump is counting on to win Michigan.

The Education Department sent $20 billion to Michigan for special education programs and another $2 billion for career and technical education. Project SUPPORT at Wayne State University received $125 million to prepare more teachers to provide better education for students with disabilities. Saginaw Public Schools got a $515,000 grant to boost their career and technical educational efforts. Programs like these have increased high school graduation rates by 8 percent around the country. It would be very hard to walk away from these programs.

The same story percolates through other states. In Georgia, the Department of Education–funded “Literacy for Learning, Living, and Leading Program” has boosted students’ reading skills. North Carolina used department money for an artificial intelligence summer camp for teenagers, while Nevada celebrated its department-funded initiative to help the families of students with disabilities navigate the many organizations that provide a piece of the services their children need.

So it’s one thing to boldly proclaim the abolition of the Department of Education. But the consequences here, as is the case with most of the other slash-and-burn proposals, will cut deeply, right to bone—to the local schools and the students they serve. There’s no way to make up the budget cuts through greater efficiencies, and hard-pressed states don’t have the money to fund the programs that would go away.

It’s certainly fair game to debate whether the federal government ought to pull back from its current programs. Congress could certainly decide whether it wants to abolish the department. But Trump’s proposal hides behind assumptions that doom it from the start.

In fact, this proposal is an especially cruel hoax. It’s irresistible bait for Trump’s base, but it doesn’t stand a prayer of passage. And if somehow he succeeded, it would hurt some of the kids who most need a boost and on whom the nation’s future rests.