Trump’s reelection puts elimination of Department of Education on the table

President-elect Donald Trump has promised radical changes to education in the United States once he takes office.

In a video announcing his education priorities, Trump promised to close the U.S. Department of Education. Established in 1979, the department provides funding to K-12 schools and administers federal financial aid to college students; it also enforces antidiscrimination policies in schools and universities that receive federal funds.

“One other thing I’ll be doing very early in the administration is closing up the Department of Education in Washington, D.C., and sending all education and education work and needs back to the states,” the president-elect said. “We want them to run the education of our children because they’ll do a much better job of it.”

His other priorities include respecting “the right of parents to control the education of their children,” teaching students “to love their country, not to hate their country like they’re taught right now,” and “bringing back prayer to our schools.”

Trump’s announcement is in line with the education agenda in Project 2025, the 922-page blueprint of right-wing policies for the next Republican presidential administration put together by the Heritage Foundation and former Trump officials. On the campaign trail, Trump claimed he knew nothing about Project 2025.

The elimination of the department would end four decades of protections against discrimination that have been instituted since its establishment in 1979 and likely cut off a major source of funding for schools nationwide. State and local governments largely fund education, but the federal Department of Education allocates $18.6 billion in Title I grants to disadvantaged schools in its current budget. The Department of Education also recently awarded approximately $50 million grants to Nebraska, Montana and other states to improve literacy.

“The threats are serious, and it’s really not credible to suggest that these are not real threats that will happen,” said Skye Perryman, the CEO of Democracy Forward, a nonpartisan legal services group that works to expose corruption in the executive branch. “In Project 2025, there is a broad proposal to undermine public education and to seek to privatize education, including through school funding.”

Eliminating a federal department would require approval from Congress, including 60 votes in the Senate — barring a rule change — which would require bipartisan support. Still, the fact that it’s on the table portends poorly for the future of education in the United States, said Josh Cowen, a professor of education policy at Michigan State University and the author of the book “The Privateers: How Billionaires Created a Culture War and Sold School Vouchers.”

“My view is that Trump is about to usher in what I’ve called a new politics of humiliation and politics of exclusion when it comes to American schoolchildren,” Cowen said.

That attitude was on display when Trump announced his Department of Justice would “pursue federal civil rights cases against schools that continue to engage in racial discrimination and schools that persist in explicit unlawful discrimination under the guise of equity.” Making clear that he was referring to the advancement of equity in education as “racial discrimination,” Trump said that schools would face fines up to the entire amount of their endowments if they continued such efforts and that a portion of those funds would be used “as restitution for victims of these illegal and unjust policies.”

A key part of Project 2025’s plan for education is to roll back the Biden administration’s expansion of discrimination protections, which were extended to include people of all sexual orientations and gender identities.

In particular, the document characterizes the Biden administration as seeking to “gut the hard-earned rights of women” with its inclusion of LGBTQ+ people in antidiscrimination rules.

“Trump and, more importantly, Trump’s sort of goons that he’s bringing in with him really hate any type of oversight for the behalf of marginalized communities,” Cowen said. “So we really have to take seriously the fact that those protections,they’re going to make a strong effort to strip some of that stuff away.”

Project 2025 also makes the case for schemes that would hit Americans in their pocketbooks, including plans to take away affordable student loan repayment plans, eliminate the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, and privatize all student loans.

A plan to provide school vouchers funded by state and local governments to parents that can be used to help pay for their children’s private school education has already proven unpopular at the ballot box: Ballot initiatives supporting school voucher programs failed this month in Colorado, Nebraska and Kentucky.

“Hundreds of thousands of voters who voted for Donald Trump firmly rejected vouchers in each case,” Cowen said.

And school vouchers have been a fiasco in some places where Republican state governments managed to implement them. In Arizona, the state’s universal school vouchers program that was implemented in 2022 has shot far past its $65 million cost estimate to $429 million this year, according to ProPublica.

Perryman, whose organization was founded in the aftermath of the 2016 election and fought the first Trump administration in the courts, says Democracy Forward is ready to play that role again.

“I think the pro-democracy community is much stronger than it was going into 2017 and I think that there’s been a lot of institutions, including Democracy Forward and so many other organizations that have been founded, that have been scaled to address pressing threats to democracy,” Perryman said. “And we and others are committed to ensuring that the American people’s rights are protected, are willing to go to court and challenge unlawful and detrimental policies for people in community, and are going to seek to encourage the American people to use their voices and use their collective power to ensure that this is not the last chapter of our democracy and that the individual rights are protected.”