On November 18, the Trump administration unveiled a sweeping “restructuring” of the US Department of Education—which Trump has pledged to eliminate altogether—that will transfer several key functions to other federal agencies that have little experience in or commitment to education outcomes.
This is a calculated step toward fulfilling President Trump’s campaign promise to close the Education Department.
The Education Department announced it finalized “interagency agreements” to transfer primary responsibility for six of its programs to four other federal agencies. The affected programs support student success for youth and adult learners, providing not just billions of dollars in grant funding but also resources, policies, and enforcement for ensuring equal access to educational opportunity. Scattering these programs could collapse long-standing partnerships between the federal government and nonprofits working on public education issues.
More than a mere reorganization, this is a calculated step toward fulfilling President Trump’s campaign promise to close the Education Department, which he has baselessly claimed is infiltrated by “radicals, zealots, and Marxists.” Ending the agency has also long been a goal of the Republican Party and conservative policy organizations, and featured prominently in Project 2025’s plans to use public education to advance far-right political goals.
The administration’s maneuvers will not go unchallenged. In a statement, Kimberly Conway, ACLU senior policy counsel and a former attorney advisor with the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights, said that the administration “is violating laws that only Congress can change.”
The administration is…“deliberately weakening civil rights oversight, and putting millions of students at risk.”
Conway warned that the administration’s plan threatens to destabilize the nation’s education system in ways that will reverberate through classrooms, campuses, and communities.
“By transferring these offices across agencies that lack the expertise to lead education policy,” said Conway, the administration is “eliminating academic supports to close education achievement gaps, deliberately weakening civil rights oversight, and putting millions of students at risk.”
Education Programs Scattered
Under the administration’s plan, the Labor Department will oversee most programs for elementary, secondary, and postsecondary education, including funding for K–12 schools, Title I services for students from low-income families, teacher professional development, rural schools, and literacy initiatives. Native American education grants will shift to the Interior Department. Foreign medical school accreditation and subsidies for college campus childcare will be absorbed by the Department of Health and Human Services. The State Department will take over international education and foreign language studies, including the Fulbright US Student Program.
Created by Congress in 1979, the Education Department can only be restructured or closed through congressional action. But the Trump administration has pursued a workaround, systematically hollowing out the agency until it is no longer capable of carrying out its mission. In March 2025, the president issued an executive order directing the secretary of education to close the department. Framed as “empowering parents, states, and communities,” the order demanded an end to the agency’s support of diversity, equity, and inclusion and “programs promoting gender ideology,” and disparaged teachers’ unions and the “entrenched…education bureaucracy” of federal employees.
In the months since the executive order, the Education Department has slashed over half its workforce; moved career, technical, and adult education to the Labor Department; closed seven of its twelve regional civil rights offices; and made other staffing, funding, and policy changes.
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For conservatives eager to shutter the department, moving the education programs to other agencies puts the endgame finally within reach. As Lance Christensen, vice president of government affairs and education policy for the California Policy Center, a libertarian public policy organization, told EdSource, “I don’t see Congress holding on to pretty much an empty Department of Education for much longer.”
Education Advocates Push Back
Although the Education Department—now led by Trump appointees that include Secretary Linda McMahon and Lindsey Burke, a Project 2025 author serving as the department’s deputy chief of staff for policy and programs—claims that moving programs to other agencies will “reduce administrative burdens” and “streamline federal education activities,” critics warn it will do the opposite.
“I don’t see Congress holding on to pretty much an empty Department of Education.”
“Spreading services across multiple departments will create more confusion, more mistakes and more barriers for people who are just trying to access the support they need,” Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, the nation’s second-largest teachers’ union, noted in a statement.
The plan marks “a deliberate diversion of funding streams that have helped generations of kids achieve their American dream,” Weingarten said.
One Education Department employee told Government Executive that the changes “would not make anything easier for Education’s grant recipients,” pointing out that the Labor Department’s grant management systems “have much more limited functionality than Education’s custom-built platforms.”
The article further underscores just how messy things could get, stating that “for the programs transferring to Labor, only new grant awards will be part of the shift,” so that grantees with both ongoing and new grants will have to deal with two agencies with very different systems and requirements.
More than 60 civil rights and education organizations have issued a joint statement denouncing the administration’s plan, saying moving the programs will “sow chaos” and “only serve to further distance students from educational opportunities.”
The statement also noted: “The other agencies…do not have the relationships, expertise, or staff capacity to do these jobs. Put simply: there is a reason the U.S. Department of Education was established by Congress in the first place. When the administration fails to deliver services and support as a result of these decisions, it is students and families who will suffer.”
