When Elon Musk’s budget-cutters start hunting for waste in the US Education Department, good luck finding the smoking gun.
The agency’s roughly $240 billion annual haul isn’t a slush fund for whimsical bureaucrats — it’s mostly a conveyor belt, dutifully delivering dollars to programs Congress has already blessed.
Title I’s $18 billion for poor kids? Mandated. IDEA’s $15 billion for special education? Same deal. Pell Grants topping $30 billion? That’s the Higher Education Act, not some rogue educrat’s hobbyhorse.
Critics itching to dismantle the department often imagine it’s awash in frivolous spending, but the truth is more mundane: It’s mostly a middleman.
The real waste isn’t in the budget lines — it’s in the mailroom.
Enter the “Dear Colleague” letter, the department’s occasional billets-doux to schools and districts.
These missives don’t spend taxpayer dollars directly, but they’re masterful at prying them loose from state and local coffers.
Thinly veiled as “guidance,” they’re closer to a shakedown: Comply with our enlightened vision or risk a civil rights probe that could cost you your federal funding.
And when that vision skews ideological — as it often did during the Obama and Biden years — the result is a cascade of spending and disruption that leaves educators scrambling and taxpayers poorer.
All without a single line-item to point to in the federal ledger, much less any measurable benefit to students.
Take the April 2011 Title IX letter on sexual violence. A noble aim — protecting students from harassment — morphed into a bureaucratic sledgehammer.
Schools and colleges were told to adopt a lower “preponderance of evidence” standard for adjudicating cases of alleged campus rape and sexual assault, and to sidestep legal protections like cross-examination of witnesses and accusers.
The result was an explosion in the number of Title IX coordinators hired, each earning $150,000 a year or more. The cost of compliance rose by at least $2 million per year at some universities.
Multiply that across thousands of institutions, and you’re staring at hundreds of millions yearly — state and local dollars, mind you, not Uncle Sam’s — until the letter’s 2017 rescission.
Accused students sued in droves, claiming their rights were trampled, while critics like the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education decried a “guilty-until-proven-innocent” regime.
Schools, caught in the crossfire, spent money on compliance and lawyers that should have been spent teaching students.
The Biden administration similarly sought to warp Title IX to its liking. Its 2021 executive order decreed “gender identity” would now come under Title IX’s umbrella.
The Education Department dutifully followed up with a “Notice of Interpretation” a few weeks later, nudging schools to toe the line — and shoulder the cost — or risk their federal funds.
Then there was the January 2014 discipline letter, a joint production with the Justice Department that tackled racial disparities in K-12 school suspensions.
The intent was arguably laudable — who wants bias in the principal’s office? — but the execution was a master class in overreach.
Districts suddenly wary of “disparate impact” on racial minorities embraced trendy fixes like restorative justice, or simply stopped disciplining unruly kids altogether.
Teachers got implicit bias training costing $2,000 to $10,000 per session, with no guarantee that it works; facilitators were hired or redirected, and new data systems tracked every classroom time-out by race.
A conservative estimate of the cost of compliance would be $100 million to $200 million over several years, mostly in urban school districts desperate to avoid a civil rights investigation.
But misspent dollars aren’t even the worst of it: As student suspensions dropped to appease federal monitors, teachers complained that relaxed student discipline was creating classroom chaos. Compliance trumped learning, which ground to a halt.
These letters don’t show up in the Education Department budget, but they’re fiscal vampires, draining local resources under threat of enforcement, and diverting staff time and attention from schools’ primary business of teaching and learning.
The Obama-era versions were particularly brazen, leaning hard into progressive priors — Title IX as a gender-justice manifesto, student discipline as a racial reckoning — while leaving schools and districts to foot the bill for Washington’s culture-war whims.
Efforts to trim the Education Department’s wasteful spending and redirect attention to student outcomes are overdue and necessary.
But don’t just scour its budget — start with its stationery.
Robert Pondiscio is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a former public school teacher.