Agency reassignments expected as Education takes further steps to eliminate itself

Updated Nov. 18 at 3:01 p.m.

The Education Department is partially offloading some of its major program offices by signing interagency agreements with other parts of the federal government, the agency is expected to announce on Tuesday, furthering the Trump administration’s effort to eliminate it entirely. 

The department announced the changes in a meeting with its entire workforce on Tuesday afternoon, which included six new partnerships with other agencies. Education posted a movie trailer-esque video on social media on Tuesday stating that “the clock is ticking” toward the end of the department, an objective President Trump demanded through an executive order earlier this year. 

The agency has already shed around half of the more than 4,000 employees who were on board in January through a combination of layoffs and incentivized separations. Education was not expected to further lay off staff as part of the reorganization announced on Tuesday, according to an employees briefed on the situation and the message delivered to staff, though future redundancies at other agencies could lead to reductions in force at those new offices at a later date. As part of a deal to end the government shutdown, all federal layoffs are currently paused through January.

Some Education employees will be transferred to other agencies, the department told staff on Tuesday, though it did not detail when those decisions would be made. 

The department said after its meeting that its Elementary and Secondary Education and Postsecondary Education programs will be run primarily at the Labor Department, its Foreign Medical Accreditation and Child Care Access Means Parents programs will largely move to Health and Human Services, Indian Education programs would mostly shift to the Interior Department and the International Education and Foreign Language will operate within State. 

"The Trump administration is taking bold action to break up the federal education bureaucracy and return education to the states,” Education Secretary Linda McMahon said. “Cutting through layers of red tape in Washington is one essential piece of our final mission."

Education laid off roughly one-third of the workforce in March, which faced legal pushback until the Supreme Court cleared the cuts a few months later. While the Trump administration has repeatedly argued its efforts would have little or no impact on schools, the states, school districts and unions that brought the suit have argued the dismantling of the department represented a significant blow to public education. The department issued additional RIFs in October, but Congress reversed and froze them through at least January. 

The department has been in the crosshairs of numerous politicians since its creation in 1980. President Reagan pledged to eliminate it, as have Republican lawmakers ever since in numerous failed bills. Trump’s Education secretary in his first term, Betsy DeVos, said after her tenure the agency she led “should not exist.”

Trump in his first term proposed merging the departments of Education and Labor into the Department of Education and the Workforce, but Congress never took up the suggestion. McMahon has acknowledged fully eliminating the department would require congressional action, but lawmakers this time around have similarly largely ignored the proposal. 

By creating the interagency agreements, the administration is looking to ensure statutory compliance by keeping the shifted programs housed within Education. Functionally, however, the programs will be run on a day-to-day basis elsewhere. The expected overhaul on Tuesday was first reported by The Washington Post. 

Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee, said that by acting unilaterally, the Trump administration was ignoring constitutional separation of powers limitations. She added that core parts of Education's missions were being offloaded to agencies without any relevant experience. 

“This is an outright illegal effort to continue dismantling the Department of Education, and it is students and families who will suffer the consequences as key programs that help students learn to read or that strengthen ties between schools and families are spun off to agencies with little to no relevant expertise and are gravely weakened—or even completely broken—in the process," Murray said. 

Education similarly created an interagency agreement earlier this year to enable the Labor Department to effectively operate Career and Technical Education programs, which also was able to move forward despite legal challenges after the Supreme Court intervened. McMahon was expected to trumpet that initiative as an overwhelming success to justify taking a similar approach in additional areas.

This story has been updated with additional detail.