What happens if Republicans really do kill the Education Department?

Linda McMahon, the person Donald Trump has tapped to destroy the Department of Education

While Donald Trump tapping the wildly unqualified Linda McMahon to head the Department of Education is currently the splashiest news about that particular agency, the real story is what will happen if McMahon successfully fulfills Trump’s campaign promise of shuttering the department. 

While Trump voters may think the end of the department would usher in some golden era of prayer in public schools and vouchers galore, it would also wreck funding and oversight for millions of students.

Conservatives of all stripes have hated the Department of Education for decades, and getting rid of it has been a hobbyhorse for the GOP since Ronald Reagan. It’s a goal that fits neatly within the Republican fixation on states’ rights—the idea that the federal government shouldn’t be able to impose rules about education, and those decisions should instead be at the local level. 

Setting aside that “states’ rights” is typically just cover for imposing racist and retrograde views on everyone, there’s the bigger issue, which is that the federal government doesn’t really set education policy. 

The federal role in education is much smaller than the fevered imaginings of conservatives. There’s no such thing as a federally mandated curriculum ramming woke ideas down the gullets of unsuspecting schoolchildren. Nearly all funding for education is at the state and local level. However, the funding and oversight the federal government is actually responsible for is mission critical for millions of students. 

Let’s start with Title I funding. That’s federal funding that goes to schools with a high concentration of students from lower-income families. While conservatives might assume that means money flowing toward large urban school districts in blue states, it’s really red and rural states that benefit most from the added boost of Title I funding. 

Overall, red states spend far less on education, and four of the five states most dependent on Title I funding—Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, and Arizona—are GOP-dominated and went for Trump in 2024. 

Because both the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee platform were criminally light on details, no one knows what Republicans think should happen to Title I money if the Department of Education is eliminated. 

House Republicans have routinely proposed deep cuts to Title I, but Project 2025, the actual blueprint for Trump’s second term, proposed eliminating Title I funding entirely—even though Title I funding is critical to addressing teacher shortages and axing it would result in a loss of almost 10% of teacher jobs in red states like Alabama and Florida. Sure, wealthier people in those red states could dodge the harm by sending children to a well-funded private school, but most parents can’t. 

Axing the Education Department also axes the agency that delivers federal funding for students with special needs. That’s no small slice of students. Roughly 15% of K-12 students—7.5 million children—fall under the protection of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, known as IDEA, which is supposed to guarantee that students with disabilities have the same educational opportunities as those without. 

In theory, the federal government is supposed to fund 40% of the cost of special education, but it has always fallen far short. States are also theoretically required to cover the remainder of the cost, but each state funds special education differently, leaving big gaps. 

Conservatives—particularly those associated with Project 2025—have been quick to note that no one has proposed getting rid of IDEA or Individualized Education Programs, which provides for special educational services for individual students. That’s true, but somewhat beside the point. 

Project 2025 proposes giving states no-strings-attached block grants for special education, funneled through the Department of Health and Human Services. States could then use the money however they want, including siphoning money away from public schools and shifting it to private ones. 

The bigger problem, though, is that eliminating the Education Department also eliminates its oversight of students' civil rights. Sure, the average Trump voter is probably fairly excited to think about stopping the federal government from protecting the civil rights of LGTBQ+ students or students of color. 

However, the majority of civil rights complaints investigated by the department are historically about discrimination based on a student’s disability.

Theoretically, that oversight could be shifted to HHS or the Department of Justice, which investigates other civil rights complaints. Neither of those are good alternatives. 

First, there’s the simple matter of expertise. Project 2025 proposes shuffling responsibility for the administration of IDEA to HHS’s Administration for Community Living, which has nothing to do with youth or education but instead focuses on ensuring people of all ages can fully participate in their community, regardless of disability. 

There’s also the problem that Trump’s pick for HHS, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., thinks that vaccines cause autism and antidepressants contribute to young people committing mass shootings. This is not a mindset well-suited to overseeing the fair treatment of students with disabilities. 

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s pick to lead Health and Human Services

Putting the DOJ in charge of investigating disability complaints is no better. There’s the same lack of specific expertise issue, and while the Justice Department at least won’t be led by someone facing allegations of sex trafficking minors, the top roles at that department are going to Trump’s defense attorneys. This does not suggest a robust commitment to civil rights. A Justice Department led wholly by people whose primary qualification is their ability to protect Trump from consequences is not one that will also be adept at protecting red-state students from discrimination based on disability. 

Eliminating the Department of Education isn’t even that appealing financially. The $268 billion it received in fiscal year 2024 represented a whopping 4% of the federal budget. The Department of Defense got triple that amount, while the Social Security Administration came in at over five times that. 

Trump’s proposed mass deportation of immigrants alone could cost taxpayers $200 billion, and the GOP goal of extending Trump’s 2017 tax cuts would add over $4 trillion to the national debt over the next decade. Gutting the country’s comparatively meager education funding won’t do a thing to close those gaps. 

What gutting federal education funding and oversight will do, however, is widen the gaps between well-off and low-income families, between well-funded and struggling public schools, and between blue states and red states. Trump voters may have believed they were casting a vote to hurt woke liberals, but they likely hurt themselves and their children much more.