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Plan to Abolish or Overhaul the U.S. Department of Education

Lindsey Burke, Heritage Foundation

https://thf_media.s3.amazonaws.com/project2025/2025_MandateForLeadership_CHAPTER-11.pdf

1. Block-grant the program to the states
   • Funding to institutions should be block-granted and narrowed to Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and tribally controlled colleges. (Historically Black Colleges and Universities)
   • To the extent that federal taxpayer dollars are used to fund education programs, those funds should be block granted to states without strings, eliminating the need for many federal and state bureaucrats. Eventually, policymaking and funding should take place at the state and local level, closest to the affected families
   • Transfer Title I, Part A, which provides federal funding for lower-income school districts, to the Department of Health and Human Services, specifically the Administration for Children and Families. It should be administered as a no-strings-attached formula block grant.
   • All other programs at OESE (Office of Elementary and Secondary Education) should be block-granted or eliminated.

Most IDEA (Individuals with Disabilities Education Act) funding should be converted into a no-strings formula block grant targeted at students with disabilities and distributed directly to local education agencies by Health and Human Services Administration for Community Living.

2. Transfer the program to another agency

• To the extent that OSERS (Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services) supports federal efforts to enforce our laws against discrimination of individuals with disabilities, those assets should be moved to the Department of Justice (DOJ) along with the Office for Civil Rights (OCR).
• Move programs deemed important to our national security interests to the Department of State.
• Move ED’s statistical office, the National Commission for Education Statistics (NCES), to the Department of Commerce’s Census Bureau. If Congress believes the federal government can play a valuable research role, those research centers can be moved to the National Science Foundation. If Congress decides to maintain IES as an independent agency, it needs to address major governance and management issues that keep it from being a productive contributor to the knowledge base related to teaching and learning.
• The next Administration should completely reverse the student loan federalization of 2010 and work with Congress to spin o” FSA (Federal Student Aid) and its student loan obligations to a new government corporation with professional governance and management. With a statutory charge that preserves the federal student loan portfolio for the benefit of the taxpayers and students, this new entity would be (1) professionally governed by an agency head and board of trustees appointed by the President.
• OCR (Office for Civil Rights) should move to the Department of Justice. The federal government has an essential responsibility to enforce civil rights protections, but Washington should do so through the Department of Justice and federal courts. The OCR at DOJ (Department of Justice) should be able to enforce only through litigation.
• Attorneys, accountants, experts, and specialists in the department’s remaining offices subject to closure, and whose positions are indispensable to serving the mission, should have the opportunity to join other agencies
• Attorneys, accountants, experts, and specialists in the department’s remaining offices subject to closure and whose positions are indispensable to serving the mission should have the opportunity to join other agencies.

3. Phase out and eliminate the program

• Phase out earmarks for a variety of special institutions, as originally envisioned.
• The next Administration should abandon this change redefining “sex” to mean “sexual orientation and gender identity” in Title IX immediately across all departments.
• All ongoing investigations should be dropped, and all school districts affected should be given notice that they are free to drop any policy changes pursued under pressure from the Biden Administration.
• On its first day in office, the next Administration should signal its intent to enter the rulemaking process to restore the Trump Administration’s Title IX regulation, with the additional insistence that “sex” is properly understood as a fixed biological fact. Official notice-and-comment should be posted immediately.
• As part of this effort, the new Administration should also direct the department and DOJ jointly to issue enforcement guidance stating that the agencies will no longer investigate Title VI cases that exclusively rest on allegations of disparate impact.
• Phase Out Existing Income-Driven Repayment Plans While income-driven repayment (IDR) of student loans is a superior approach relative to fixed payment plans, the number of IDR plans has proliferated beyond reason. And recent IDR plans are so generous that they require no or only token repayment from many students. l The Secretary should phase out all existing IDR plans by making new loans (including consolidation loans) ineligible and should implement: a new IDR plan.

4. Transfer or Eliminate Program

• Reduce the number of programs managed by OESE (Office of Elementary and Secondary Education), and transfer some remaining programs to other federal agencies.
• Transfer Title I, Part A, which provides federal funding for lower-income school districts, to the Department of Health and Human Services, specifically the Administration for Children and Families. It should be administered as a no-strings-attached formula block grant.
• Transfer the Vocational Rehabilitation Grants for Native American students to the Bureau of Indian Education.
• The next Administration should work with Congress to eliminate or move OPE (Office for Postsecondary Education) programs to ETA at the Department of Labor.
• The Department of Education should work with Congress to amend the HEA to eliminate the negotiated rulemaking requirement. At a minimum, Congress should allow the department to use public hearings rather than negotiated rulemaking sessions.
• Eliminate Grad PLUS loans (for graduate students) and Parent PLUS loans (for parents of undergraduates).
• Eliminate the “list of shame.” Educational institutions can claim a religious exemption with the Office for Civil Rights at the Department of Education from the strictures of Title IX. In 2016, the Obama Administration published on the Department of Education’s website a list of colleges that had applied for the exemption. This “list of shame” of faith-based colleges, as it came to be known, has since been archived on ED’s website, still publicly available. The President should issue an executive order removing the archived list and preventing such a list from being published in the future.
• Eliminate competitive grant programs and reduce spending on formula grant programs. Competitive grant programs operated by the Department of Education should be eliminated, and federal spending should be reduced to reflect remaining formula grant programs authorized under Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) and the handful of other programs that do not fall under the competitive/ project grant category.
• Eliminate the PLUS loan program. As mentioned above, the PLUS (Academic Partnerships Lead Us to Success) loan program, which provides graduate student loans and loans to the parents of undergraduate students, should be eliminated. This would generate an estimated $2.3 billion in savings.
• Eliminate GEAR-UP. It is not the responsibility of the federal government to provide taxpayer dollars to create a pipeline from high school to college. GEAR UP (Gaining Early Awareness and Readiness for Undergraduate Programs) should be eliminated, and its functions should instead be handled privately or at the state and local levels, where policymakers are better equipped to increase college preparedness within their school districts.
• MISSION Federal education policy should be limited, and ultimately, the federal Department of Education should be eliminated. When power is exercised, it should empower students and families, not the government. In our pluralistic society, families and students should be free to choose from a diverse set of school options and learning environments that best fit their needs.
• The future of education freedom and reform in the states is bright and will shine brighter when regulations and red tape from Washington are eliminated.
• The next Administration will need a plan to redistribute the various congressionally approved federal education programs across the government, eliminate those that are ineffective or duplicative, and then eliminate the unproductive red tape and rules by entrusting states and districts with flexible, formula-driven block grants.