An increasing number of Republican state officials are supporting President-elect Donald Trump’s plans to dismantle the federal Department of Education. One even formed an advisory committee to prepare for any new responsibilities the state may take on as a result.
“What we want to make sure that we’re able to do is implement big changes in the fastest way possible,” Oklahoma State Superintendent Ryan Walters said Nov. 11 as he announced the formation of a Trump Education Advisory Committee. “We’ve been at the tip of the spear for the most aggressive, conservative education agenda already, and now with President Trump bringing in an even bigger set of reforms, we want to be the state ready to implement that.”
Although they have yet to form their own task forces, Tennessee governor Bill Lee and Arkansas education secretary Jacob Oliva have echoed Walters, each saying they’d welcome the federal department’s shuttering.
All three Republicans have largely focused their endorsements on the benefits that redistributing responsibilities could bring to K-12 schools, largely ignoring the potential consequences such a change may have on higher ed. Some experts say this is likely due to the fact that there’s little chance the department will be shuttered entirely.
Instead, they suggest the state officials’ comments are largely an effort to get on Trump’s good side.
“At this point, public task forces are more political posturing than anything else,” said Robert Kelchen, a professor of education and head of the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. “But if there looks to be a serious effort to get rid of the Department of Education and move functions, states will begin serious preparations.”
Trump and the officials he has appointed have said certain agencies will be “deleted outright,” but the administration has yet to provide a detailed plan for how it would break up the agencies, including whether Trump would eliminate any programs. That makes it difficult to gauge how abolishing the department would work and what its demise would mean for states.
But experts predict the oversight of key higher ed programs would likely remain in D.C. under the Departments of Justice, Treasury and Health and Human Services and states would likely gain more control over the federal funds for K-12 schools. A bill introduced last week by Senator Mike Rounds, a South Dakota Republican, would eliminate the department but redistribute programs such as the Pell Grant to other agencies.
Governors and their education officials say that the funding and programs currently managed by the department are better off in the hands of local leaders.
“I believe that Tennessee would be more capable than the federal government of designing a strategy for spending federal dollars in Tennessee,” Lee told Chalkbeat, a K-12 industry publication, when asked about Trump’s plans. “We know our children. We know the needs here much better than a bureaucracy in Washington, D.C.”
Likewise, Texas governor Greg Abbott wrote on X this month that he also agrees with Trump’s plan. “End the indoctrination from federal bureaucrats. Empower states to focus on mastering education fundamentals,” he wrote.
Republican state officials have long tangled with the Education Department, particularly under Democratic leadership, bristling at what they see as overreach. Over the summer, they took issue with the Biden administration’s Title IX overhaul that expanded protections to transgender students in K-12 and higher ed. All Republican attorneys general sued the department over the rule, and they succeeded in securing court orders preventing the agency from enforcing it.
Most of Republicans’ fights and concerns with the Education Department revolve around on K-12. But that’s just one aspect of the department’s work, and abolishing the agency would likely have ramifications for higher education, several experts predict. They point to the botched introduction of the new Free Application for Federal Student Aid last year as evidence that any restructuring of this level can cause chaos.
“I would hope that some of the challenges stemming from the FAFSA rollout would give policymakers some pause before they pursue wholesale restructuring of education programs,” said Tom Harnisch, vice president for government relations at the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association. “Ultimately this could have significant downstream effects for students if these programs go to a different agency.”
Shifting Burdens
Kelchen said that Republicans’ lack of focus on colleges and universities makes sense, as they expect little consequence for higher ed and major gains for state K-12 systems.
“Given that the likely outcome [of abolishing ED] is just fewer regulations coming from Washington and most of the funding likely just flowing through the Treasury, most red states aren’t particularly concerned,” he said
Jon Valant, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute, said that getting rid of the Education Department would be “incredibly disruptive” unless Congress makes a substantial investment to support the transition.
And if states were to take on any responsibilities previously held by the federal government, he worries that they won’t have the bandwidth to do so. That the lack of capacity could hurt minority students, he added.
“It’s important to keep in mind with something like Title I, [which provides financial aid to school districts that serve low-income families] why it exists in the first place. It exists, in part, to offset the really severe inequities in school funding that would arise if we relied entirely on local and state sources,” Valant said.
Katharine Meyer, a governance studies fellow for Brookings’s Brown Center on Education Policy, said that the department’s main responsibility when it comes to colleges and universities is managing financial aid grants and loans. If Trump or Congress were to scale back the amount of aid provided or make it more difficult for students to access, the states would have to step in and fill the gap—if they have the money. The same would be true of accountability measures and potentially accreditation. (States, the federal government and accreditors currently work together to oversee colleges.)
“That would obviously be very expensive to the state,” she said, “so I think they would have a vested interest in that not happening.”
Valant added that states have “different capacities for managing these types of programs and different levels of commitment to attending to the needs of their most vulnerable students.”
“A lot of states would be overwhelmed,” he predicted.
Additionally, if the FAFSA fiasco showed anything, it was that “states really [bear] the burden of federal mismanagement,” Meyer said. “If the whole process gets shifted to another department, that’s just complicated, and that is going to take time, and that is unlikely to be a simple, smooth transition.”
Harnisch, from SHEEO, hopes that while rhetorically supporting the new administration, policymakers also remain mindful of the constraints states are under and the capacity they have to take on added responsibilities.
“State higher education agencies are often very underfunded,” Harnisch said. “The federal government can run deficits. States, at the end of the day, have to have to balance their budgets, and that oftentimes leads to cuts. Higher education historically has been on the front lines of many of those cuts, and administering new programs, given current budget constraints, would be very challenging in many states.”