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The Supreme Court gave the Trump administration the green light to proceed with its downsizing of the U.S. Education Department while litigation on the matter continues in the lower courts. The Supreme Court’s emergency order set aside, at least temporarily, a Biden-appointed federal district court judge’s ruling that had reinstated terminated employees at the department.
The Trump administration has announced the termination of more than 1,300 Education Department workers out of a total of about 4,400, as part of a reduction in force to promote maximum efficiency. After also taking into account some probationary workers who have been let go and employees who have accepted the administration’s offer to resign, about one half the size of the Education Department’s workforce prior to President Trump’s second term still remain.
Judge Myong J. Joun of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, who had issued the reinstatement order, based his decision on the premise that only Congress can legally shut down or eliminate a congressionally-created department, not the executive branch unilaterally. But that is not what happened here.
Downsizing, which still leaves about half of the total number of pre-Trump 2.0 employees in place, is hardly tantamount to shutting down the Education Department altogether. Whether the Trump administration intends in the future, and is authorized, to totally abolish the Education Department and leave its discretionary functions to the states, while still performing its statutorily mandated functions elsewhere in the executive branch, is not relevant to this downsizing case.
The Education Department’s net outlays in fiscal year 2024 totaled $267.9 billion, nearly four percent of total outlays by the federal government. Since 1980, when the Department of Education was established, this department’s spending has increased 371.6% in comparison to an increase of 193.7% in overall federal spending during the same period.
Looking for opportunities for significant cost savings in the bloated Department of Education’s budget, the Trump administration has identified non-mandated, extraneous department activities and functions to cut, which means reductions in force.
The Education Department’s Office of Federal Student Aid (FSA) is the department’s highest spending bureaucracy.
The FSA oversees the federal government’s nearly $2 trillion federal student loan portfolio covering more than 40 million borrowers. The Education Department, Pew Research reported, is “the single largest lender to college students – operating in some ways more like a bank than a government agency.”
But the FSA bank is sinking under its own weight of many billions of dollars worth of delinquent and defaulted student loans. The Biden administration compounded this financial disaster by forgiving tens of billions of dollars of student debt, even after the Supreme Court had ruled that a previous executive order issued by former President Biden forgiving a huge chunk of student debt was unconstitutional.
This unsustainable situation is fortunately being corrected by the Trump administration. The Big Beautiful Bill Act (BBBA) has established caps on certain categories of loans that students or their parents can take advantage of, courtesy of the federal government. The BBBA also limits the available options for federal student loan forgiveness and repayment plans.
The FSA employed 1,444 employees in 2024. This staff total is being cut in half, reflecting the FSA’s diminished role that the Trump administration has ushered in.
The Education Department’s Institute of Education Sciences (IES) is another example of a bureaucracy due for downsizing. The IES conducts superfluous education research regarding K-12 studies and adult and career education that can be funded by alternative means if so desired. The IES also oversees programs receiving grants, some of which probably should not have received the grants in the first place.
In short, the IES presented the Trump administration’s cost-cutters with low hanging fruit for reductions in staff, resulting in over one hundred terminations.
The Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights, which is both inefficient and redundant, is also ripe for staff reductions. The Department of Justice and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) have comprehensive civil rights enforcement powers and more competence in handling claims of discrimination in violation of the nation’s civil rights laws than the Education Department does.
The Trump administration is adjusting the size of the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights to a more appropriate level, including the closure of several field offices and a staff reduction of at least forty percent.
Finally, the Trump administration has confronted the Department of Education’s lavishing of federal funds to public schools with little accountability as to how this money is being used. About twenty-five percent of the Department of Education’s 2024 budget was directed to K-12 education.
Providing federal money to assist in funding resources for economically disadvantaged, disabled and special needs children in public schools is one thing. But since the states and localities control the public schools in their jurisdictions and set their curriculums, states and localities should not look to the federal government to bail them out from their own irresponsible overspending. With state and localities’ control must come state and local accountability. They should pick up the entire tab for such items they choose to offer as after-school and academic enrichment activities, summer camps, and community learning centers. They should also be entirely responsible to pay for their own teachers’ training and professional development.
Moreover, the Trump administration is doing the right thing by clamping down on the distribution of any federal funding to public school systems that promote leftwing ideological priorities in their instruction. For example, in one case, school improvement funds were allegedly used for a seminar on “queer resistance in the arts.” In another case in New York, public schools allegedly diverted funds designated for English-language learning to promote “illegal immigrant advocacy organizations.”
If any public school boards of education insist on indoctrinating their students with diversity, equity, and inclusion dogma, critical race theory, illegal immigration advocacy, and gender studies, they should not expect a dime from the federal government.
Needless to say, the teachers’ unions are up in arms. National Education Association (NEA) President Becky Pringle, for example, complained that the Trump administration is “robbing our students and classrooms.” She accused the federal government of “ripping resources away from public schools,” which she condemned as “outrageous and unconscionable.”
What is truly “outrageous and unconscionable” is that the NEA’s leaders have turned the NEA, the nation’s largest teachers’ union, into a rabidly partisan organization that does not look out for the students.
At its most recent annual convention, held this year in Portland, Oregon, the NEA delegates passed a series of blatantly leftwing, partisan resolutions. One called for the NEA to “defend against Trump’s embrace of fascism by using the term facism [sic] in NEA materials to correctly characterize Donald Trump’s program and actions.” The NEA convention also passed resolutions supporting “the mass democratic movement against Trump’s authoritarianism and violations of human rights” – a typical Democratic Party talking point- and supporting students organizing “against ICE raids and deportations.”
However, when it comes to fighting virulent antisemitism in the public schools, the NEA delegates exacerbated the climate of hate. They approved a resolution proposing to “not use, endorse, or publicize any materials from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL),” including their antisemitism and Holocaust education materials. The ADL is the leading organization dedicated to combating antisemitism.
“Despite its reputation as a civil rights organization, the ADL is not the social justice partner it claims to be,” the NEA resolution called New Business Item 39 stated. The rationale for this leftwing, progressive pronouncement is the ADL’s support for Israel in combating Palestinian terrorists.
A group known as Educators for Palestine, which gained official NEA recognition as a NEA caucus last year, praised the approval of the New Business Item 39 resolution as a vote to “support Palestine.”
A couple of more steps are required to finalize the pro-Palestinian, antisemitic resolution as official NEA policy, but the fact that a majority of NEA delegates supported this resolution is very disturbing.
For too long, the Department of Education has been captive to influential special interests, most notably teachers’ unions and higher educational institutions. The Trump administration is finally putting the interests of American taxpayers ahead of these greedy special interests.