The Trump administration has begun following through on its campaign promise to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education. Not surprisingly, the President is sidestepping Congress by doing so through legally questionable administrative measures.
The latest move, announced during the week of November 18, uses a series of interagency agreements to transfer the work of the Department of Education to other government departments.
According to AFSA’s government relations team, the administration is transferring core K–12 and higher-education functions to the Departments of Labor, Health & Human Services, Interior, and State. These changes include moving administrative responsibility of Office of Elementary and Secondary Education, which is responsible for major federal programs such as Title I, Title II, and English learner support, to the Department of Labor, which has little or no expertise in education.
Dispersing federal education responsibilities across multiple agencies reverses the very purpose for which the Department of Education was created in 1979: to bring coherence to federal support for public schools and prevent duplication, fragmentation, and inconsistent oversight across states.
AFSA Director of Government Relations Jon Bernstein has indicated that these moves may lead to:
- Delays and disruptions in distributing federal funds
- Reduced technical assistance, especially for high-poverty districts
- Weakened civil rights enforcement
- Loss of specialized expertise in areas like Title I, English learner support, school-leadership development, and evidence-based interventions
- Inconsistent guidance that leaves districts unsure of how to comply with federal law
“These moves are unsurprising but making them without clear guidance on the timely distribution of funds, and oversight from experts who understand how schools work is irresponsible. This is not streamlining; its making more work. This is not ‘returning education to the states’ or reducing bureaucracy; it is injecting confusion, chaos, and instability into the nation’s school systems,” said AFSA President Mark Cannizzaro.
Several Congressional Democratic leaders and a handful of Republican members have issued statements objecting to this move.
“There might be some reorganizational things that make sense, if it allows for the department, the functions, to be carried out more efficiently, if they align better with the missions of other departments,” said Rep. Kevin Kiley (R-Calif.) to Politico reporters last week. “But there’s a lot of really important things that the Department of Education does, and we need to make sure that it’s able to continue to do them, those services that need to be provided to taxpayers like charter school grants and kids with special needs.”
House Appropriations Committee Ranking Member Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) stated in part: “Any attempt to unilaterally remove programs from the Department of Education will fundamentally alter their purpose. This is not about efficiency – it is about creating so many needless bureaucratic hurdles that the Department of Education is rendered useless – a death by a thousand cuts. Imposing massive, chaotic, and abrupt changes on a whim will waste millions of dollars in duplicative administrative costs and impose wasteful burdens on the American education system.”
Her counterpart in the Senate, Patty Murray (D-WA), declared that this was "an outright illegal effort to continue dismantling the Department of Education, 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 and are gravely weakened—or even completely broken—in the process.”
Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.) said in a statement that, “the United States Congress created the U.S. Department of Education for very good reason. And for millions of families, particularly those raising children with disabilities or living in low-income communities, the Department’s core offices are not discretionary functions. They are foundational. They safeguard civil rights, expand opportunity, and ensure that every child, in every community, has the chance to learn, grow, and succeed on equal footing.”
He added, “we can, and must, always strive to strengthen how the Department serves our children. But we cannot allow any action that weakens the safeguards, services, or opportunities that families across this country depend on.”
In accordance with the 2025 AFSA Convention Resolution 9: Maintaining Funding for the U.S. Department of Education, AFSA calls on the Administration to abandon these ill-conceived interagency agreements before irreversible harm is done to America’s students and the future of public education.
Image from th U.S. Department of Education (https://www.youtube.com/c/usdepartmentofeducation)
