Trump can’t kill the Education Department by interagency agreement

President Donald Trump wants to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education. It’s the right goal. The Constitution gives Washington no authority to govern in education, much less with a Cabinet-level department, and there is no meaningful evidence the thing has done much good. It is mainly a pass-through for money and has proven incompetent, failing, for instance, to even complete basic audits three years in a row.

But wanting to shutter the department is not the same as having the power to do it, which shows in the president’s recent actions that merely move functions out of the Education Department and into other agencies.

Accusations of cruelty and cries of doom from folks such as National Education Association President Becky Pringle notwithstanding, the Trump administration ended zero federal education functions or funding. Pringle declared, “Not only do they want to starve and steal from our students — they want to rob them of their futures.” But all the administration did was use interagency agreements to essentially contract out responsibility for day-to-day operations of various functions.

Specifically, the Labor Department will run several elementary, secondary and postsecondary programs, which largely means keeping money flowing from Washington to states, school districts and colleges. The Department of the Interior, which already contains the Bureau of Indian Education, will handle Indian education programs. The State Department will get international education and foreign language programs. Finally, Health and Human Services will administer a program focused on child care for parents in college and take on the job of determining if medical school accreditation in other countries is comparable to our own. HHS already runs the Head Start early-childhood program, and “Health” is in its name.

What these moves do not do is change how much is spent under the programs or their compliance requirements. They do not even alter which department is ultimately in charge: Education.

So, is this semi-dismantling good or bad?

It is good in that it moves us closer to eliminating the Department of Education. Having almost any federal education function — outside of civil rights enforcement — for the military, in the District of Columbia, or for Native Americans, is an offense to the Constitution. The supreme law of the land simply does not authorize federal intervention. Having a Cabinet-level department for such a purpose is even worse, giving special interests such as the NEA direct access to the president and allowing the Secretary of Education to act, too often, like the nation’s school superintendent. And under the Education Department, student achievement has been largely flat, while spending has risen markedly. Most Americans agree that education should be controlled at the parental, local and state levels, not in Washington. Ending the department is consistent with that.

But the president’s transfers do not end the department. Again, responsibility for the moved functions is ultimately with the Education Department. Many functions remain fully there. Most notably, Federal Student Aid — loans, Pell Grants, Work Study — which is the department’s biggest responsibility. It also still has the Office for Civil Rights, which is tasked with enforcing nondiscrimination in educational institutions receiving federal funds. Of course, the Department of Justice is the federal government’s primary civil rights enforcer, and it has an education division.

Even more important than ending the department is eliminating all the unconstitutional things Washington does in education, which also impose huge regulatory burdens on states, districts and colleges. Iowa recently pegged the cost for it and its districts to comply with core federal K-12 regulations at around $53 million annually, money that could instead go into classrooms. Ending this does not happen just by shuffling things from agency to agency.

The core problem for the administration is that eliminating the department and programs is widely believed to require an act of Congress, and there does not appear to be a strong appetite for that. At the very least, it is not a front-burner issue, perhaps in part because there is rarely a sudden Department of Education crisis. It is more just an unpleasant bureaucratic presence.

Given this, the administration is restricted to what appears to be within constitutionally proper executive power: controlling staff sizes, undertaking administrative reshufflings and using the bully pulpit.