The Push to Abolish Education Department Goes Back Decades

In 1866, Ohio congressman and future president James Garfield championed the creation of a federal Department of Education to address high illiteracy levels among former slaves and an influx of European immigrants.

As part of the post-Civil War Reconstruction effort, the former Confederate states were required to guarantee education for all in their rewritten constitutions. The new federal agency would monitor and enforce compliance, according to a brief history of the Department of Education published by The Conference Board think tank.

Garfield’s efforts led to President Andrew Johnson’s creation of the Department of Education in 1867. However, representatives from both northern and southern states complained about the federal government having control over local schools. They downgraded the agency to the Office of Education after just one year and placed it within the Department of the Interior.

In the decades that followed, Presidents Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, and Franklin Roosevelt pressed for more federal involvement in public education, ahead of President Jimmy Carter’s successful campaign to establish the Department of Education as a Cabinet agency in 1980.

Seven presidents and trillions of dollars later, President Donald Trump and Education Secretary Linda McMahon have cut the size of the agency in half, transferred many of its functions to other agencies, and seek to eliminate it.

Politically, the main arguments for and against the Department of Education have been repeated often over the past 158 years.

“It’s like déjà vu for education all over again,” said Gerard Robinson, professor of public policy at the University of Virginia and an expert on the history of K–12 education policy.

All told, he said, there were more than 50 failed congressional attempts to elevate the Office of Education to a Cabinet-level agency.

The reasons for those failures before Carter’s success are the same as the reasons for its potential demise in the months ahead, he told The Epoch Times: Most people do not want the federal government involved in local and state policy, and the agency is simply “not worth the investment.”

What Carter Proposed

Forty years before Carter’s initiative, Roosevelt successfully expanded some functions of the Office of Education, but in 1953, that office was rolled into the massive Department of Health, Education, and Welfare.

Journalist Robert V. Heffernan worked for Sen. Abe Ribicoff (D-Conn.) in the late 1970s, after Ribicoff had served as secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare. Ribicoff was a key proponent of establishing a federal education agency.

Heffernan attended and documented the legislative hearings and proceedings leading up to the 1979 creation of the Department of Education during the Carter administration. His book “Cabinetmakers: Story of the Three-Year Battle to Establish the U.S. Department of Education” details the events.

Carter’s initiative to create the first Cabinet-level federal education agency was a campaign promise to the National Education Association teachers union. At the time, SAT scores and school enrollment were decreasing and the national high school dropout rate remained stagnant at 20 percent, the book notes.

Teachers were a powerful ally in Carter’s bid for the White House.

“The teacher network is politically perfect,” Heffernan wrote. “Teachers are in every town, hamlet, county, city, and state of the union. They have more spare time in which to volunteer their assistance in campaign work (especially during the summer months).”

Ribicoff’s legislation estimated that the agency would initially command an $18 billion budget and 24,000 employees but would eventually save taxpayer dollars by eliminating 450 jobs from Health, Education, and Welfare and consolidating computer systems for a $100 million spending reduction.

Meanwhile, the other national teachers union, the American Federation of Teachers, opposed the initiative, fearing that the agency would weaken its leverage in local labor negotiations.

Catholic organizations also opposed it, viewing a well-funded federal agency as a threat to private school autonomy, according to Heffernan’s book.

The nation’s largest daily newspapers criticized the proposal as unnecessary and expensive, the book notes, and smaller papers in every region of the country followed suit. The News & Courier of Charleston, South Carolina, for example, called the agency a “labor department for teacher unions.”

Black urban community leaders voiced opposition because the proposal called for transferring the Head Start program into the new agency. They felt that this change would make Head Start “a hiring program for unemployed teachers rather than a developmental program for low-income children,” the book states.

Conservatives in Congress attempted to sabotage the bill with amendments calling for school prayer, prohibition of busing and racial quotas, and the loss of federal funding for states or schools that supported abortion.

They also proposed amendments to rename the agency Department of Education and Youth, or the Department of Public Education, which would have resulted in an acronym of DOPEY or DOPE.

Rep. John Ashbrook (R-Ohio) said his fellow lawmakers had forgotten that “education was once a function of a family,” Heffernan wrote.

Before Ribicoff’s legislation to establish the Department of Education narrowly passed, Rep. Robert Michel (R-Ill.), citing lobbying by teachers unions, labeled the proposed agency “the Special Interest Memorial Prize of 1979.”

The Department of Education was officially launched on May 4, 1980. It oversaw federal funding at the K–12 level for low-income schools and special needs students, as well as research grant awards and student loan administration for higher education. The Department of Education also included an Office of Civil Rights, and it was given oversight of Defense Department schools on military bases.

In an attempt to limit its power, Republicans and lobbyists blocked attempts to transfer the Department of Agriculture’s school nutrition programs, the National Science Foundation, and Native American tribal school oversight functions to the new agency, according to Heffernan’s book.

The Department of Education was just months old when Ronald Reagan defeated Carter in the 1980 election. The Republican president-elect called it an “ugly blossom on the academic tree,” the book notes.

Decades of Bipartisanship and Rhetoric

Reagan never followed through on his intentions to eliminate the new agency.

Robinson, the University of Virginia professor, said 1996 Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole also campaigned to abolish the agency, while neither President George H. W. Bush nor President George W. Bush targeted the department.

He noted that both George W. Bush and President Barack Obama used the Department of Education to establish policy and incentivize public school improvements via the No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top initiatives, respectively.

In a 2024 paper titled “The Strange Career of the U.S. Department of Education,” Robinson said the federal monetary investment in K–12 education is, historically, less than 10 percent.

“Nonetheless, our system of federalism guarantees Washington a role in American K–12 schools,” he wrote. “But does it guarantee us a federal department of education?”

In 1998, during President Bill Clinton’s administration, a policy report from Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-Mich.) indicated that states completed 50 million hours of paperwork to comply with federal education requirements, reducing federal aid that makes it to classrooms to less than 70 cents per dollar.

However, at that time there was little political will for education reform, according to the Heritage Foundation think tank. Hoekstra was one of only 20 Republican House members who voted against the bipartisan No Child Left Behind education reform in 2001.

Robinson said Obama, unlike previous Democratic presidential candidates dating back to 1988, was not popular with either national teachers union because of his stances in favor of teacher accountability, charter schools, and student assessment.

And yet, Robinson wrote in a 2017 paper for the American Enterprise Institute, Obama was able to advance education reform on a school-by-school basis “without teacher-bashing.”

In 2015, although there was no serious movement to dismantle the federal agency, there was bipartisan support for limiting its power.

That year, Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.) endorsed Obama’s Every Student Succeeds Act, which made some cuts to the Department of Education and prevented its secretary from pushing the Common Core curriculum on states, according to a statement on her website.

The moves aligned with the recurring themes: The Education Department was considered to be a poor investment that threatened local control.

Two years later, under the Trump administration, Foxx voiced her hopes of transferring federal education services and money to states and districts and eventually eliminating the department, an April 2017 statement on her website reads.

Trump occasionally talked about reducing the department during his first presidency, but education reform was not a priority for him at the time. Then-Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos told a radio interviewer in 2019 that while Trump was supportive of her efforts, “Education clearly has not been at the top of his list of priorities to address directly.”

Under President Joe Biden, the Department of Education advanced diversity, equity, and inclusion-based programming and transgender ideology in K–12 schools. It also attempted to erase $138 billion in college student debt, promote gun violence awareness, recruit teachers, and endorse social-emotional learning initiatives, according to an Epoch Times review of 958 news releases from that agency.

Many of these initiatives met with opposition from states, school leaders, and parents, encouraging Trump to make education reform a top priority in his second administration.

The Final Mission

In 2023, the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 report said there had been no return on investment in the Department of Education between 1980 and 2022, as the agency’s budget grew to $80 billion and reading and math scores across the nation declined.

Moreover, the report said, 41 percent of its funding went to state education agencies instead of classrooms. A “shadow department” of 48,000 workers at the state level—or 10 times more workers than the federal agency employs—were employed to keep up with the paperwork burden imposed by federal mandates.

The report also criticized the Democrats’ “disparate impact” policy that prioritized racial parity for school discipline and discouraged the use of detentions, suspensions, and expulsions.

“Getting the federal government out of the business of dictating school district policy is a good start,” Lindsey Burke, director of the Center for Education Policy at the Heritage Foundation, wrote.

Poor test scores in the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress report, coupled with disappointing results in international standardized assessments for high school students, further ignited the Republican flame for eliminating the Department of Education.

In testimony at several committee hearings this year, McMahon has repeatedly stated that her agency is just a “pass-through mechanism” for funding appropriated by Congress—funding that has totaled about $3 trillion since the agency’s inception.

Other agencies could take over that job, she said at a May 21 House Subcommittee on Higher Education and Workforce Development hearing, and “the work is going to continue to get done.”

Democrats today have not attempted to refute Republican arguments about stagnant or decreasing academic performance, despite massive federal spending since 1980. However, they maintain that the agency has provided critical services, protections, and a pathway to college for special needs students and those from low-income communities who would be further marginalized without its assistance.

Robinson said while the Department of Education has yet to show a return on investment, he believes that it is not a total failure, filling a need as a “one-stop shop in D.C. and a place to call with questions.”

“It was never meant to increase student achievement,” he said. “It didn’t fail on something it was not created to do.”