The Department of Education From Carter's 1979 Bill to the 2025 Cuts

On October 17, 1979, Jimmy Carter signed the Department of Education Organization Act, and the federal government got its thirteenth cabinet department. It had not been an easy birth. The bill had cleared the House by a narrow margin after a long fight, with opposition from conservatives who feared federal control of schools and from some liberals who feared that pulling education out of the giant Department of Health, Education, and Welfare would leave it weaker, not stronger. The country's largest teachers' union, the National Education Association, had pushed hard for a separate department, and had made its first-ever presidential endorsement for Carter in 1976. Critics said the department was a political payoff. Supporters said that a country spending billions on schools and college aid ought to have someone at the cabinet table responsible for it. The first secretary, Shirley Hufstedler, a federal appeals judge from California, opened the department for business in May 1980. Six months later, Ronald Reagan won the presidency after promising to abolish it.

In short: The Education Department runs college aid, sends money to schools for poor children and students with disabilities, enforces civil rights in schools, and collects national data. In 2025 the Trump administration cut its staff roughly in half and began moving its programs to other agencies. Congress has not abolished it, and the new Democratic majorities will take office in January 2027 with that work largely unchanged.

What the department actually does

It helps to start with what the department does not do. It does not run schools, hire teachers, choose textbooks or set curricula. Federal law has long barred it from directing what schools teach. Most of the money spent on public schools comes from state and local taxes; the federal share is roughly a tenth.

What the department does is narrower and, for the people it touches, enormous:

• College aid. The Office of Federal Student Aid runs the FAFSA, the Pell Grant program for low-income students and the federal student loan portfolio, which is well over a trillion dollars. For millions of students, this office is the department.
• Title I. The largest federal K-12 program sends money to schools with many students from low-income families, under formulas written by Congress.
• Special education. Under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, the department sends funding to states and oversees whether students with disabilities receive the free appropriate public education the law guarantees.
• Civil rights. The Office for Civil Rights investigates complaints of discrimination in schools and colleges based on race, color, national origin, sex and disability.
• Data and research. The National Center for Education Statistics runs the National Assessment of Educational Progress, often called the nation's report card, and collects the basic statistics about American schools that researchers, journalists and states rely on. The Institute of Education Sciences funds research on what works.

That is the core. Almost every one of these functions predates the department, and almost every one is required by law passed by Congress, which matters a great deal for what happened in 2025.

Why it was split from health and welfare

Before 1979, federal education programs lived inside the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, a sprawling agency created in 1953 under President Eisenhower. By the late 1970s it was one of the largest agencies in the federal government, responsible for Social Security, public health, welfare and education all at once. Education officials sat several layers below the secretary, competing for attention with programs that touched far more voters.

Supporters of a separate department made three arguments. Education was big enough, with billions in grants and loans, to deserve its own voice at the cabinet table. Programs scattered across many agencies would be easier to coordinate in one place. And the civil rights enforcement that had grown up since the 1960s, especially in school desegregation and later in disability rights and sex discrimination under Title IX, needed a home that took it seriously.

Opponents on the left worried about something that sounds familiar now. A stand-alone department, they warned, would be smaller and easier to attack than one buried inside a giant agency. The teachers' union's role in its creation would make it look like a political favor, and that perception could become a weapon. Some of them proved prescient. Opponents on the right made the federalism argument that would follow the department for decades: that a cabinet seat for education would pull decisions away from states and school boards.

When HEW was split, its remaining pieces became the Department of Health and Human Services, and the new Education Department took over most of the federal education programs. The structure Carter signed has stayed largely the same ever since.

Forty-five years of trying to close it

Reagan's promise to abolish the department ran into Congress, where Democrats controlled the House, and also into his own education secretary, Terrel Bell. Bell commissioned the 1983 report "A Nation at Risk," which warned of "a rising tide of mediocrity" in American schools and helped make education a national political issue rather than a purely local one. That was the opposite of what the department's opponents wanted. The report made the department look more necessary, not less.

The idea of abolition returned regularly. The 1996 Republican platform called for it. Some Republican presidential candidates pledged it. But the department's programs had constituencies, from rural districts that rely on Title I to parents of children with disabilities to college students, and no Congress voted to eliminate it. Meanwhile, the department's role grew in other directions, especially under No Child Left Behind in 2002, which brought federal testing requirements, and under the Obama administration, which used grants and waivers to push states toward its priorities. Each expansion fed the argument that Washington had too much say over schools.

There's a fair point in that argument, and progressives should grant it. Federal programs layered over decades can be bureaucratic and slow. Paperwork for Title I and special education is notoriously heavy for districts. The student loan system has been mismanaged by administrations of both parties, with servicing failures that cost borrowers years of progress toward forgiveness. Wanting a leaner, more effective department is not the same as wanting none.

Worth noting, too: the department has never been large by federal standards. Before 2025 it had roughly four thousand employees, one of the smallest staffs of any cabinet department, while overseeing grant and loan programs worth hundreds of billions of dollars a year.

The 2025 layoffs

The second Trump administration went further than any before it. In March 2025, shortly after Linda McMahon was confirmed as secretary, the department announced a reduction in force that, combined with buyouts and earlier departures, cut its workforce roughly in half. Days later the president signed an executive order directing the secretary to take steps to close the department to the maximum extent permitted by law, while continuing to deliver the services the law requires.

The layoffs hit offices across the department. The Office for Civil Rights closed several of its regional offices. Much of the staff of the Institute of Education Sciences and the National Center for Education Statistics was eliminated, and many research and data-collection contracts were cancelled earlier in the year. Democratic attorneys general from about twenty states, along with school districts and unions, sued, and a federal district judge ordered the layoffs reversed. In July 2025 the Supreme Court, on its emergency docket and without a full explanation, allowed the layoffs to go forward while the litigation continued. That case, McMahon v. New York, was not a ruling on the merits. It let the administration act while courts sort out whether it had the power to.

Later in 2025 the department announced agreements to move the management of some of its programs to other agencies, including the Department of Labor for a large share of K-12 grant programs. The legal foundation for those transfers is contested: Congress assigned these programs to the Education Department by statute, and critics argue that moving them by interagency agreement does what only Congress can do. Supporters say the agreements simply hand day-to-day administration to agencies with spare capacity while leaving the legal authority in place.

What changed for students and families

It is easy to talk about a federal agency in the abstract. The practical effects tend to land in a few places.

Civil rights complaints. With regional offices closed and staff cut, families who file a disability or discrimination complaint face a smaller office handling a large caseload. Complaints take longer, and some are dismissed or deprioritized. The rights in the statutes have not changed; the capacity to enforce them has.

Data. The national data system lost staff and contracts. That matters in a quiet way. States and researchers rely on federal data to know whether reading scores are falling, whether chronic absence is rising, whether students with disabilities are graduating. A gap in data is a gap in accountability, and it is hard to restore once lost, because data series depend on consistency over years.

Student aid. The FAFSA and loan programs continued, but borrowers and colleges have dealt with service disruptions, policy changes and uncertainty, layered onto a system that was already strained.

Grants to schools. Formula programs like Title I and special education funding are written into law and have continued to flow, though the timing of some funds was disrupted. In the summer of 2025 the administration withheld billions in funds for programs such as after-school and English-learner support for several weeks before releasing them under pressure, including from Republican senators.

The strongest case for what the administration did

Defenders of the cuts make an argument that deserves to be stated well. The department, they say, grew into a bureaucracy that spends heavily on administration and compliance while national achievement scores have stagnated or declined. Sending authority back to states and parents is a principled federalist position, held by many conservatives for decades. Programs Congress requires can be run by other agencies that already manage large grant programs. And the size of a federal workforce is not a measure of how well children are served.

The answer is partly legal and partly practical. The legal answer is that Congress, not the president, decides whether a department exists and which agency administers a statute. If abolishing the department is the right policy, there is a constitutional route to it: pass a law. The practical answer is that the department's critics rarely identified which of its functions children could do without. Civil rights enforcement, disability protections and national data are not things states have historically supplied on their own; they became federal because states didn't. Halving the staff without changing the statutes leaves the obligations in place and removes the people who carry them out.

The lesson for people who want government to work

There is a broader point here for progressives, and it is uncomfortable. Agencies that serve the public well are easier to defend than agencies the public knows mainly through frustration. For many families, their main encounter with the Education Department was a student loan servicer that lost paperwork, a troubled rollout of the redesigned FAFSA, or a civil rights complaint that took years to resolve. When the cuts came, that experience made it harder to rally public support.

The answer is not to concede that the department should be dismantled. It is to argue for rebuilding it so it works better than before: faster civil rights investigations, a student aid system that functions, data published on time, grant applications districts can complete without hiring consultants. A government that is defended only in the abstract is vulnerable. One that people can see working for them is not.

What a new Congress can and cannot do

Democrats won the House and Senate in November 2026 and will take control in January 2027. That changes the oversight picture immediately: committees will be able to hold hearings, demand documents and question officials about what was moved and why. Appropriations bills can direct funding to specific offices and set staffing conditions.

What a Democratic Congress cannot do alone is change the law over a presidential veto. Restoring the department's capacity will depend on spending bills the president has to sign, on oversight and on court rulings in the cases still underway. It will also depend on whether experienced staff who left are willing to come back, which is the hardest part of rebuilding any institution.

What you can do

A department's capacity is set by Congress every year in spending bills and checked in oversight hearings. Both respond to constituents.

• Call your representative and senators and ask whether they will press for funding and staffing for civil rights enforcement and education data in the next spending bills. Their phone numbers, contact forms and recent votes are at the representatives lookup.
• Keep up with the cuts, transfers and the lawsuits over them on the topic page on the federal government's cuts.
• Follow the cases on the Supreme Court's emergency docket and its merits opinions on the Court Watch page.
• If your family has a disability or civil rights concern at school, find a legal aid or disability advocacy organization in your state through the organizations directory. This is general information, not legal advice; an advocate can help with your specific situation.