Neal McCluskey
If you ran a corporation, and a division you did not need suffered massive losses while proving either ineffective or downright incompetent at its job, you would seriously consider dissolving it, right? After all, not only is it not helping, it is an albatross around your neck.
That’s largely what the US Department of Education appears to be for American education. Yet if you propose eliminating it the first reaction from some people is shock and lament: “But it’s about education, so it must be good.” That seems to be the presumption of former Republican Maryland governor, and current Maryland Senate candidate, Larry Hogan, who in this weekend’s Washington Post dismissed the Project 2025 proposal to end the Department. He called it “absurd and dangerous.”
I cannot speak to Project 2025 as a whole because I have not read the vast majority of it. But I have read the section on the Department of Education, and far from being either “absurd” or “dangerous,” it is a thoughtful examination of not just the Department, but the whole federal role in education and how it can be reengineered. I, too, have written about removing the feds from education, including with Lindsey Burke, the author of the Project 2025 Department of Education chapter.
The Project 2025 chapter—which is really part of the most recent iteration of Heritage’s Mandate for Leadership—lays out K‑12 results on the National Assessment of Educational Progress and shows that mainly stagnation has accompanied major federal involvement, while it is hardly clear that what progress there has been was either sustainable or a result of Department of Education spending.
Much worse than K‑12 has been higher education, where the Department of Education has essentially run almost the entire student loan industry. In 2022, the GAO reported that twenty-five years’ worth of federal student loans would cost taxpayers nearly $200 billion due to forgiveness plans and other non-repayment. There is, though, difficulty in making estimates, in part because the Department has failed in its basic operations, including tracking borrower repayments, as documented in another 2022 GAO report. And while the Biden administration focused on unconstitutional mass student debt cancelation, the Department failed at another basic job: simplifying the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA).
The FAFSA is the gateway to student aid that is, unfortunately, baked into the price of college and, hence, necessary for many people to attend college. Of course, the necessity of aid is another major reason to end fed ed: it is a hugely negative, unintended consequence of federal “help” that is almost certainly a disease worse than the cure.
And do not think the feds have historically been essential for education. A major federal funding role only began in the mid-1960s; the Department has only existed since 1980. This is in large part because the Constitution gives the federal government no authority to govern education (alas, a point neglected in the Project 2025 chapter) and for most of our history few people would have imagined a major federal role.
Finally, just think of how fed ed works: The federal government takes money from taxpayers either today or in the future, hires thousands of people to tie rules and regulations to it— including some advancing highly controversial, values-laden policies—then returns what is left of the money with the rules and regs attached. That is hardly an efficient, or pluralism-respecting, way to deliver education.
In light of its unconstitutionality, failure, and cost, the stronger argument is not that eliminating the US Department of Education is “absurd and dangerous.” It is that keeping it is.