The Education Department said Tuesday that it will move several of its offices to other federal departments, a unilateral effort aimed at dismantling an agency created by Congress to ensure equal access to educational opportunity but long derided by conservatives as ineffective.
The department has signed interagency agreements to outsource six offices to other agencies, including those that administer $28 billion in grants to K-12 schools and $3.1 billion for programs that help students finish college.
There was considerable speculation that the $15 billion program to support students with disabilities would be included in the announcement, but it was not. Other major functions of the Education Department, including its Office for Civil Rights and the federal student aid program, also were not affected by Tuesday’s changes, but a senior department official told reporters that officials are still exploring options for moving those programs elsewhere in the government.
President Donald Trump campaigned on a promise to shut down the agency, created in 1979, and in March, he signed an executive order seeking its elimination. He asked Education Secretary Linda McMahon to work with Congress to do so, but lawmakers have not acted or seriously considered Trump’s request.
That is at least in part because to clear the Senate, any legislation would require Democratic support, which appears highly unlikely.
McMahon and her backers advocate a shake-up of the federal education role, saying that falling test scores show the agency is not delivering and arguing that Americans are tired of government bureaucracy.
Supporters of the Education Department counter that administering education programs under one roof helps coordinate policy and better serves schools and students. The agency, they say, helps ensure that priorities important to students, parents and schools are high on the federal agenda. And they say it is illegal for the Trump administration to break up the department without congressional approval.
McMahon has acknowledged that only Congress can eliminate the department, but she has vowed to work to dismantle it from within. She has said the agency’s functions can easily be carried out elsewhere in the government, perhaps more effectively. This fall, she took a first step and moved career and technical education programs, including adult education and family literacy initiatives, to the Labor Department.
“The Trump Administration is taking bold action to break up the federal education bureaucracy and return education to the states,” McMahon said in a statement Tuesday. “Cutting through layers of red tape in Washington is one essential piece of our final mission.”
Shifting offices to other parts of the government will not by itself remove red tape or alter the power that Washington exerts over states and school districts. States and school boards already control most education decisions, but the Education Department enforces rules that are embedded in federal programs, such as requirements for grant funding.
Asked how moving offices to other departments will return education to the states, the senior official said states will have to work with fewer federal agencies. She argued that education’s purpose is to prepare students for the workforce.
“Nowhere is that better housed than the Department of Labor,” she said.
But most K-12 schools do not typically work with the Labor Department now. The K-12 grant programs that Labor stands to take on address a plethora of subjects not directly related to the workforce, such as support for children in poverty, after-school programs and aid for rural education. Critics noted that under this arrangement, states and school districts will be required to engage with more – not fewer – federal agencies.
“It is difficult to see how transferring cornerstone programs … out of the department will result in streamlined operations, especially for the nation’s small, rural and low-capacity districts,” said David R. Schuler, executive director of AASA, the School Superintendents Association.
Sen. Patty Murray (D-Washington) noted that federal law requires an act of Congress to close the department. She said in a statement that the administration is pretending that the constitutional separation of powers is “a mere suggestion.”
“This is an outright illegal effort to continue dismantling the Department of Education,” Murray said. “And it is students and families who will suffer the consequences as key programs that help students learn to read or that strengthen ties between schools and families are spun off to agencies with little to no relevant expertise.”
Under the new agreements, the Labor Department will inherit the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education, including 27 K-12 grant programs, and the Office of Postsecondary Education, which administers 14 programs to help students enroll in and complete college. The Education Department will move the Indian education program to the Interior Department; child care access and foreign medical education to the Department of Health and Human Services; and foreign-language education to the State Department.
Some of these are lower-profile offices without large constituencies that might vocally oppose the moves. By contrast, there was an outpouring of concern among disability advocates amid rumors that special-education programs would be moved.
The senior department official said Tuesday that the interagency agreements will ensure that experts from the Education Department still manage the day-to-day operations of the programs.
Federal law requires that many of the programs be housed in the Education Department. The interagency agreements amount to a work-around under which policy decisions will remain with the Education Department but the programs will be administered elsewhere. Staffers who work on the programs are expected to move to the new agencies.
The senior official said these types of arrangements have been used many times before. But in this case, officials are hoping that the transfers will lay the groundwork for eventually closing the agency altogether.
The announcement was welcomed by House Education Committee Chairman Tim Walberg (R-Michigan), who has noted that there is not enough support in the Senate to pass legislation to eliminate the department.
On Tuesday, he praised the actions as a much-needed break from the status quo at the Education Department, where, he contended, bureaucracy and liberal ideology have wasted taxpayer dollars and failed students.
“The Trump administration is making good on its promise to fix the nation’s broken system by right-sizing the Department of Education to improve student outcomes,” he said. “It’s time to get our nation’s students back on track.”
But public education advocates were furious.
“This administration is taking every chance it can to hack away at the very protections and services our students need,” Becky Pringle, president of the National Education Association, said in a statement.
McMahon has made the case for eliminating the Education Department in appearances across the country. Last month, department spokeswoman Madi Biedermann said the agency was exploring the move of special-education services to another agency.
“Secretary McMahon has been very clear that her goal is to put herself out of a job by shutting down the Department of Education and returning education to the states,” Biedermann said in October.
The Trump administration laid the groundwork for this change earlier this year when it signed an agreement to move career, technical and adult education grants out of the Education Department to the Labor Department. Under the arrangement, Education retains oversight and leadership while managing the programs alongside Labor, a way of sidestepping the federal statute.
“We believe that other department functions would benefit from similar collaborations,” McMahon wrote in an op-ed essay published Sunday in USA Today.
More broadly, McMahon argued that the recently ended government shutdown showed how unnecessary her agency is.
“Students kept going to class. Teachers continued to get paid. There were no disruptions in sports seasons or bus routes,” she wrote. “The shutdown proved an argument that conservatives have been making for 45 years: The U.S. Department of Education is mostly a pass-through for funds that are best managed by the states.”
The agency has taken other steps to shrink itself, including reducing its staff, which stood at 4,133 at the start of Trump’s term. That number was cut by about half earlier this year through layoffs and incentives to resign or retire.
The administration also tried to lay off an additional 465 people during the shutdown, a move that was blocked by a court and then reversed in the legislation signed to reopen the government.
After the government reopened, the Education Department mocked itself as irrelevant.
On social media, it posted a fake out-of-office message that it jokingly suggested its workers use: “We might be away from our desks … creating more red tape, and doing nothing to improve student outcomes.” It was signed, “Bureaucratically Yours.” In another post, the agency asked, “Let’s be honest: did you really miss us at all?”
(c) 2025 , The Washington Post · Laura Meckler, Danielle Douglas-Gabriel
