The National Association of Scholars (NAS) welcomes the Trump administration’s plan to reduce the size of the United States Education Department (ED) staff by approximately 50%. Federal bureaucrats have tended to reduce the productivity of American K-12 and postsecondary schools; the fewer bureaucrats in Washington to meddle in American education, the better for American students.
We write with the first news of Secretary McMahon’s action still coming in, so we may need to revise our judgment as more news comes in. But this is our understanding of the main outlines of the suggested cuts:
- Approximately 600 of the ED’s 4133 staff have accepted resignation offers since Inauguration Day; a further 1,315 will be subject to reduction-in-force measures, which brings the total staff reduction at ED to about 50%. The fired staff will receive 90 days final payment and generous severance pay, per federal contractual rules.
- Most staff reductions are “inward-facing” roles—internal bureaucratic roles, and largely duplicative. The Trump administration intends all external functions to continue as per statutory requirements—most certainly including, Title I fund distribution to disadvantaged school districts, special education, FAFSA reform, and civil rights enforcement.
- Several ED branch offices will be closed, including those in New York, San Francisco, and Cleveland.
We expect there will be immediate headlines about “vital functions of ED being cut!” We strongly doubt this is the case. The Trump administration, especially Secretary McMahon, have prepared a thought-out plan to cut unnecessary personnel from ED. If we were asked a year ago, how many ED personnel can go and still have ED perform the same functions?, we would have said, about half.
Of course ED should not perform all its functions. As we stated in Waste Land: The Education Department's Profligacy, Mediocrity, and Radicalism, virtually every ED program beyond the big four (Title I spending for disadvantaged school districts, special education, Pell Grants, and college loans) should be eliminated, by having the underlying statutes repealed. We also favor a reduction of ED’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) by at least 75%, and its merger with the Justice Department. It’s better to have ED performing its current functions efficiently—but even better to reduce the functions it attempts to perform.
We say this to restate clearly what the ultimate goal of ED reform should be, not to criticize the Trump administration or Secretary McMahon. What we recommend requires Congressional action; they have begun by working within the constraints of existing federal law—and working excellently. This is only but a first step. We only wish to encourage them to take the second step, and the third, and all the ones needed for comprehensive and enduring ED reform.
We have said that we may need to revise our judgment as more news comes in. We expect to hear 1,315 stories about how the 1,315 employees just terminated were each and every one of them essential to make sure that America remains a land of mom, apple pie, and good schoolin’. We expect most of these stories will be just stuff—but to err is human, and maybe some of the 1,315 really should be re-hired. If so, we expect that ED will sensibly change its mind. But on the whole, we think that ED has thought through its cuts, and that little or no backtracking should be in order.
We have cheered these staff cuts, but we should close by restating why we cheer them on. NAS has been a close observer of postsecondary education since our foundation in 1987, and has paid increasing attention to K-12 education from the imposition of Common Core some 15 years ago. We have seen two generations of ill effects proceed from ED—at best, the dead weight of expensive bureaucratic regulation and at worst a host of arbitrary actions intended to radicalize America’s schools, colleges, and universities. We have seen ED’s personnel do their all-too-effective best to ruin American education—and we love the system of American education, which they have disfigured. These staff reductions are a necessary means to restore to America the jewel of an education system it once possessed. We do not love these job cuts for themselves, but because they are the means to heal our K-12 schools and postsecondary institutions.
We think the Trump administration acts in the same spirit. Secretary McMahon loves America’s schools, colleges, and universities—as do we. That love requires strong medicine, to restore and bring them back to health.
Photo by Andy Feliciotti on Unsplash
