Throughout this week, the Washington Examiner‘s Restoring America project will feature its latest series, “Reforming the Deep State: Reining in the Federal Bureaucracy.” We invited some of the best policy minds in the conservative movement to speak to the issues of what waste, fraud, abuse, and unaccountability exist throughout the federal government and what still needs to be done. To learn more about the series, click here.
This spring, Education Secretary Linda McMahon slashed staff at the Department of Education, laying off 1,400 employees to shrink the agency to just over 2,000 — about half its former size. The reductions vastly exceeded what most had expected and shattered the department’s comfortable lethargy.
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The savings aren’t enormous (probably totaling somewhere in the neighborhood of $300 million a year in salary, benefits, and facility costs), but they’re real and a terrific prelude to downshifting and course-correcting Washington, D.C.,’s role in education. But it will take much more to see the job through: namely, publicizing the problems, delivering on promises, and taking a hatchet to the accumulated red tape.
Now, some readers may say, “Hold on! Isn’t Trump going to abolish the department? What more is needed?” Well, the odds are that a smaller department will still be with us, in some form, in 2029. And even if it’s not, congressionally mandated education funds will continue to flow to K–12 and higher education. The bottom line: Whatever the department’s ultimate fate, it’s important to finish what McMahon started. There are a few steps that department leadership should take.
First, McMahon’s team needs to more aggressively and publicly make the case for why cuts were necessary and why there’s still more work to be done. Two-thirds of adults oppose closing the Education Department, not so much because they know what the department does, but because it seems like a laudable signal that education is important. Well, if they understood the waste, foolishness, and paper-shuffling that consumes so much of the department’s time, it’s a safe bet they’d be more supportive of McMahon’s efforts.
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The Department of Government Efficiency and McMahon’s staff have done an exemplary job of surfacing instances of excess and inefficiency this year. They discovered that research providers charged the Education Department much higher rates than other agencies for similar services due to comfortable, self-serving arrangements. They found that the department has been running its own (scarcely utilized) health clinic, which cost thousands of dollars per patient visit last year. The department operates a library that, most weeks, is never visited once. For its in-building gym, the department has had a personal trainer on contract for a cool $250,000 per year. These are the kinds of particulars that McMahon’s staff should be sharing widely.
Second, McMahon must respond to the drumbeat of warnings that cuts to the department will cause harm. The truth is, while it’s easy to imagine scenarios where streamlining, downsizing, and automation yield a huge win for taxpayers, it’s the job of Education Department officials to make the case. Thus far, they haven’t done so. For instance, at the Institute of Education Sciences, McMahon has erased lots of dubious activity, but it’s unclear whether she can fulfill her promise to protect and strengthen the important stuff, such as the Nation’s Report Card.
There have long been deep-rooted problems with the culture of the Education Department, marked by missed deadlines, failed audits, a sprawling communications office, and unanswered emails and calls. There were employees who may have been capable but were putting in, at best, 10 or 20 hours a week of actual work. But what’s less clear is how a leaner, meaner agency is going to work. McMahon needs to explain why the hand-wringers are wrong and how she plans to deliver for families and taxpayers. She can point to clear wins, such as this year’s extraordinary progress on the FAFSA, but she has to make the case.
Third, the department must commit to slashing red tape. Even with fewer staff, all the rules and regulations are still there, hindering congressionally mandated programs such as Title I, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, and Pell Grants. Staff cuts alone won’t address the red-tape problem in K–12 nor shift power to the states. Why? The culprits are aged, accumulated rules and regulations relating to “time and effort” reporting and “supplement not supplant” strictures. These are what encourage public schools to protect ineffectual staff or useless programs for fear of running afoul of federal auditors.
Similarly, the boggy bureaucracy that suffuses special education is mostly about case law and resulting rules that have accreted, rather than the federal bureaucrats themselves. Eliminating red tape and returning power to the states requires rewriting Education Department rules, convincing state and school leaders that it’s safe to do things differently, or enacting new legislation that can reboot the system. Absent such a push, reductions in staff won’t amount to meaningful change.
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Fortunately, McMahon and her team have signaled that they’re well aware of these challenges and understand that they need to step up their public communication, and they’re moving to weed out outdated and duplicative rules. Meanwhile, they’ve registered early wins in cleaning up former President Joe Biden’s FAFSA mess and streamlining the charter school program.
There’s a ways to go, but McMahon’s aggressive downsizing at the Education Department may be shaping up to be one of the rare good news stories in the annals of federal bureaucracy.
Frederick M. Hess is the director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute.