Multiple Republican presidential candidates made it clear at this week’s debate that the Department of Education is in danger if they are elected.
“Let’s shut down the head of the snake, the Department of Education,” Vivek Ramaswamy said. “Take that $80 billion, put it in the hands of parents across this country.”
Conservatives see the department, which has more than 4,400 employees and in its current form dates back to 1979 after first being established in 1867, as a prime example of Washington’s meddling in Americans’ lives. The time has come to “shut down the Federal Department of Education,” former Vice President Mike Pence said Wednesday.
But what would it mean to actually shutter the massive agency?
How could the department be eliminated?
Killing the Department of Education (DOE) would be easier said than done.
Conservatives have said since the creation of the department they want to get rid of it. From President Ronald Reagan and his Education secretary to President Trump and his own, Republicans have decried the department’s existence but failed to abolish it.
That is because the decision to do so is not only up to the president and would have to go through Congress.
“There would have to be some legislation to specifically outline this, but I do think it would need to have the support of the executive branch and, obviously, this is a Cabinet-level agency, so I think having the president — would have to take a leadership role and help to make sure that the proposal is carefully crafted,” said Jonathan Butcher, the Will Skillman senior research fellow in education policy at The Heritage Foundation, which supports nixing the DOE.
Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) proposed such legislation in 2021 and reintroduced it earlier this year.
“Unelected bureaucrats in Washington, D.C., should not be in charge of our children’s intellectual and moral development,” Massie said two years ago. “States and local communities are best positioned to shape curricula that meet the needs of their students. Schools should be accountable. Parents have the right to choose the most appropriate educational opportunity for their children, including home school, public school or private school.”
DOE did not respond to The Hill’s request for comment.
DOE’s duties would be absorbed by other federal agencies
DOE has an enormous number of responsibilities, including handling student loans, investigating complaints against schools and tracking education progress across the country.
None of the 2024 candidates during Wednesday’s debate detailed how they would handle eliminating it, but conservatives have longed to see many of its tasks either completely eliminated or absorbed into other departments.
“For example, the Office of Civil Rights at the Department of Education. I think that any duplicate responsibilities that it shares with the Department of Justice should be eliminated, and then the rest of that office should go to the Department of Justice,” Butcher said.
They want private schools, which basically means not everyone will actually go to school if this happens.
Or parents will go into debt to put their kids through K-12.
Or they put their kids in a cheap “school” without regulations and can be abused or whatever while the parents have to go to work
Or be home schooled
Or they have to go into the labor force early
All of these are terrible options
That’s very literally what they want.
They want to make education something that’s only available, with any quality, to those with money.
From there it’s only a matter of time until you’re back to a feudal state, with an ownership class and a worker class and a vast gulf between them. Where the only way out of that life is an education that they will make sure that you and your children and grandchildren can never afford.
Education is the first target because an uneducated populace is a more desperate, and more easily manipulated populace. They can be both made fully dependent on the upper class as well as more easily influenced (through deception, fear, and token incentives) to support measures to perpetuate that system.
In other words, your typical middle to lower class GOP voters already.
And for now, the GOP and the interests they serve currently still need some of these people to go along with their plans.
Until they get to the point in their plan where they can do what they want with no regard for the people, making more people less educated makes things easier for them.
Not if you’re rich 😏
K-12? It’ll be K-6 and into the workforce the way they’re trying to go
Chim chimmidy
Which is what they prefer. An easily manipulated population.
And legalized child labor.
Also means all the antidiscrimination rules no longer apply. The situation is right now a private religious school can pretty much hire and fire whomever they want for whatever reason. And this also kills tenure, which I am not sure is a system worth saving but at the same time I don’t trust the GOP to replace it with something better.
And in certain states you dont even need to be credentialed to teach at private schools
I assume they want the states to have full autonomy over their education for starters. RIP kids in the south, they’ll never even be taught how badly they’ve been screwed.
They want school choice, where parents take their school funding vouchers to charter schools, so they can segregate their children from the “less-fortunate” and “woke” (read people of color) and teach them all about the whitewashed history of the world and nothing about climate, healthcare, or gender and sexuality.
No joke, read this:
https://thf_media.s3.amazonaws.com/project2025/2025_MandateForLeadership_FULL.pdf
There’s an entire section on the department of education and what they plan to do.
Read at least the Forward. It’s disgusting and important that voters know exactly what the Republicans plan to do if they win the next election.
Worth it to continue reading until you get to the part where the founding fathers would have wanted you to be a good Christian and not choose whatever life is best for your family, but then in the next paragraph also state that only the family can choose what is right for themselves.
Couldn’t make it much further because I don’t want to be angry on a beautiful Monday, but knowing they couldnt keep their ideology straight for 2 paragraphs is all I need.
It’s absolutely filled with contradictions. Should the government have more power or shouldn’t it? Do you want to protect children or don’t you? Do personal freedoms matter or don’t they?
It gets as specific as one section claiming to get rid of the department of homeland security, then a following section wanting to expand it for border control.
There’s no real policy, it’s just “anti-woke” nonsense.
charter schools do provide a reliable and well rounded educational experience. public schools are rather dependent on the public