Trump Might Miss the Department of Education When It’s Gone

Eight years ago, pundits scolded shocked experts for focusing on the wild, harebrained substance of Donald Trump’s rhetoric instead of his very real appeal to disaffected voters. A wall on the southern border was an unserious idea with little evidence it would work—and that’s before you add in the claim that Mexico would, for some reason, agree to pay for it. But, the theory went, experts’ disdain for the idea showed voters that he understood their anger and would fight the establishment they hated—indeed, that was the point of bringing it up in the first place.

This whole debate lands differently in 2024, since Trump’s first term provided ample evidence that he was genuinely committed to pursuing many of his worst, most outlandish ideas.
Though Trump spent most of the past year insisting that he knew nothing about the Heritage Foundation’s “Mandate for Leadership,” broadly discussed as “Project 2025”—and Heritage’s influence in the new White House will certainly be contested by other factions in the MAGAverse—it’s clear that the radically conservative 900-page document is providing a portion of the policy blueprint for his second term.

And that’s why we could see a serious push to close the U.S. Department of Education. Most of the conservative candidates Trump is reportedly considering to run the department are supportive. Betsy DeVos, his first secretary of education, who is also on the short list for this term, once told Axios she supported closure: “It would be fine with me to have myself worked out of a job.” Oklahoma State Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters, perhaps the front-runner for the position, recently published a memo outlining how his state’s schools should prepare for the department’s closure.

There are hurdles, the foremost being the Senate filibuster. Republicans don’t have the 60 Senate votes for any proposal to end a Democratic filibuster protecting the department from any bill that would close it. And yet, the filibuster is little different from other governing norms and democratic guardrails that Trump has eroded in the past—indeed, he’s proposed ending it before. Trump is already hacking away at long-standing norms requiring Cabinet appointees to face Senate confirmation hearings—what’s to stop him from demanding that Republicans disarm the filibuster so he can govern as he likes?

Regardless of what happens with the filibuster, it’s clear that K–12 schools’ policy will be a governing priority for the new administration. Its campaign used fearmongering ads about transgender children playing on girls’ athletic teams as a way to gin up support from conservative voters—and as a possible wedge issue to attract voters from outside that base. It’s almost certain that the administration will continue pushing on K–12 issues while in office.

First, Trump is certain to issue new guidance encouraging states to mandate that children must play on sports teams that correspond with the sex they were assigned at birth. It may even threaten to withhold federal funding for states or school districts that refuse—and while that would likely require an unconstitutional usurping of authority from states and/or Congress, who’s to say that the courts are prepared to step in to stop it?

Policies targeting trans children are emblematic of the standard Trumpist move: They substantively harm a vulnerable, historically marginalized group and therefore foment outrage from “elites” (usually some combination of experts and civil rights advocates). Critically, however, the cruelty of these policies rarely benefits Trump voters directly—their value is in the culture war signals, in the harm they inflict on others.

That’s key to understanding the Department of Education’s true peril. Trump’s governing puzzle is a project of maximizing liberal and expert outrage while generally avoiding any actual harm to his base of supporters. And this could be tricky, since—just like eight years ago—a lot of Trump’s 2024 campaign promises are actually terrible ideas that would even hurt his supporters.

This dynamic is conventional wisdom as it pertains to Trump’s positions on immigration and trade. Mass deportations of immigrant workers would be devastating to the labor market and could crater the economy. His proposed tariffs are also likely to damage international trade and make America poorer. These issues made for effective rhetoric on the stump; the “elites” kept getting outraged—consider Trump’s baseless accusations of Haitians eating pets in Springfield, Ohio, for example—but they’re bad policy and probably risky long-term politics (once they start damaging the economy).

The same dynamic applies to K–12 education—particularly if the filibuster falls and Trump has latitude to do more. Trump’s most likely moves are those that will bother establishment elites the most while causing the least visible damage to voters. That’s why the department’s biggest problem may be the unpopularity of roughly everything else in Project 2025’s K–12 policy toolkit. For example, it calls for a 10-year winding down of federal Title I grants, which provided $19.1 billion last year for schools serving large numbers of children in poor families.

Stuff like this will cause real, visible, sudden harm to schools that families (including Trump supporters) would notice. Maybe you hate the feds and the pointy-headed bureaucrats you’ve heard about on cable news, and maybe you love Trump, but do you really want to find out that your district can’t staff its after-school program anymore because its Title I funds shrank? These funds support a wide range of services in tens of thousands of U.S. public schools, providing training for teachers, pre-K classes, counseling services, new education technology on campus, and more. Pennsylvania schools, to name one swing-state example, received nearly $750 million in Title I funds in 2023. Cuts like these will not be popular with many congressional Republicans.

Even Project 2025’s authors understand this political danger to their project. It’s instructive that the document proposes to leave Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) funding intact, just with less federal oversight or regulation. That’s because disability crosses racial, class, and political lines. Lots of conservatives have children with Individualized Education Plans, too, so contra the fears some people have voiced on social media in the aftermath of this election, Republicans are less likely to mess with federal support for special education.

What, then, to make of the Project 2025 and 2024 Republican Party Platform proposal to close the Department of Education? First, it’s worth noting that this is a long-standing conservative goal. As a candidate, Ronald Reagan pledged to close it, and it’s been a regular plank in the GOP’s platform in most subsequent election cycles. The main novelty now is that Project 2025 provides in-depth logistical details for how to make it happen. For instance, it proposes moving the department’s Office of Civil Rights—under Trump 2.0, now focused on prurient investigations of whether schools are forcing transgender children to use bathrooms that correspond with their genitalia—to the Department of Justice. Researchers at the National Commission for Education Statistics would be moved to the Census Bureau. And so forth.

And that’s why the department’s in real trouble. Closing and scattering its programs across the federal government would probably be less disruptive than big cuts to those programs. The department’s main K–12 role is to send out large formula grants like Title I and IDEA that states then distribute to school districts in exchange for a few national policy goals: support services for English-learning children or students with disabilities, the provision of school lunches, the administration of annual math and reading tests, and the like. But so long as Trump’s closure of the Department of Education keeps these grants flowing—just from different federal offices—the average family likely won’t notice too much disruption.

Meanwhile, “President Donald J. Trump Strongly and Boldly Closes the Federal Department of Education” is an apex MAGA press release header. It gives the White House the revenge optics and the elite outrage its base craves without much blowback from the broader public. Sure, these moves would create immense outcry from experts, who would warn that the department’s functions are essential to children’s and schools’ well-being and that they’ll be less efficiently done if scattered across the federal government. They’d be right, but their anger would validate the move for MAGA voters anyhow. Further, since the department isn’t particularly popular with American families across the political spectrum, a noisy push for its closure could even prompt some support from voters outside of Trump’s coalition.

As I’ve written elsewhere, the best case for persuading Trump—and Republican lawmakers more generally—to keep the department is probably to remind them that it’s easier to implement a conservative overhaul of American public schools through established regulatory levers and legal powers than to try to reinvent the wheel. In a 2023 video, after vowing that his administration would fire ineffective teachers, get schools to “teach students to love their country,” “ensure that students have access to project-based learning experiences,” and mandate job and career counseling in all schools, Trump vows to close the Department of Education. But it bears noting that nearly every idea preceding this promise will be more difficult to pursue without an established set of civil servants working on education policies.

Sure, closing the department is a bad idea, just like mandates requiring schools to police trans children’s bathroom usage to suit social conservatives is a bad idea. There’s no evidence that these ideas will make schools more effective or help children learn more in their math, reading, science, art, woodshop, or any classes. But if the goal is to signal bold populism by inflaming outrage from the Beltway establishment, these are precisely the moves to make.