“Honest question, what does the department of education actually do? What differences will we reasonably notice once it’s gone?” So tweeted “HannahReading” today.

Her tweet is one of many that have asked this same question since Donald Trump returned to the presidency on January 20, 2025. Folks are talking about the U.S. Department of Education because Mr. Trump has said he wants to abolish it. (It will not be easy.)

Here let me limit myself to addressing the first question.

The Department of Education does many, many things. Whether one approves of any, all, or some of them is a different topic I will not address here.)

To understand the scope of its activities, here are two tips:

First, look at the authorizing laws that authorize and direct its activities. Skimming it over gives you a sense of the Department’s myriad duties.

Second, read the Department’s most recent budget justification. This is the document it delivers to Congress each year to ask for funding. It includes details on what it has been doing and where it has expended funds that Congress previously appropriated.

Now, if you are a real glutton for punishment, you can learn more by reading the Department of Education’s Annual Performance Report, which has additional information on the agency’s operations and doings. (Mind you, it is biased, like any annual report.) Last, there’s the Department’s Annual Financial Report, which gets deep into the financial weeds.

Enjoy!

Any way you slice it, Congress will need to buy into the effort.

The Constitution does not empower the federal government to fund schooling. For much of our nation’s history, what children needed to know was a matter left to parents, localities, and eventually states.

Congress made no significant, lasting school policy until 1958, when anxieties about the Soviet launch of Sputnik prompted it to start funneling money to high schools for science classes. The dam of federalism burst shortly thereafter when President Lyndon B. Johnson and congressional Democrats passed the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 as part of the raft of Great Society enactments.

The subsequent creation of the Department was a political powerplay. Congressional Democrats had been enacting various new school policies and sought to protect them from cuts by housing them in a standalone agency. When Jimmy Carter was pursuing the presidency, he and the Democratic cut a deal with the National Association of Education: support us in 1976 and we will build you a new agency.

A wonk at the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service warned Congress the new department could become captured by the interest groups who benefited from its largesse. Majority Democrats saw that as a feature not a bug. President Carter signed the law to create ED in 1979.

Today, the Department of Education employs 4,400 employees and a discretionary budget of nearly $80 billion. These numbers are catnip to anyone who is eager to chop spending and pair back the scope of government.

Yet, getting rid of the Department will not be easy. Mr. Trump and the Department of Government Efficiency will need to convince Congress to pass a law to abolish ED or to defund it. The task is made all the harder by the narrow GOP majorities in the Senate (53-47) and the House of Representatives (219 to 215 with one vacancy). A couple of dissenting GOP members would sink the effort in the House, and getting an abolition bill through the Senate will require overcoming the filibuster.

Not to be discounted is that casting a vote to croak ED will require legislators to accept the electoral risk and steel themselves against the onslaught of criticism and negative advertising. The teacher’s unions and all the interest groups that support the Department’s programs will tar legislators for being “against education.”

Senators and representatives also will have to do a lot of work to persuade voters. Less than a third of voters polled earlier this year favored abolition. Indeed, voters’ feelings are the very reason the Republican party quit pledging to abolish ED after the 1996 election. Their candidate, Bob Dole, got whupped by incumbent Bill Clinton, who campaigned to improve schools through federal action.

A less appreciated challenge for Mr. Trump and his supporters is to understand that getting rid of the Department of Education does not need to mean entirely abolishing the federal role in schooling. The agency does a lot of things.

Most folks know that it runs student loan programs for college kids, and the Title I program that aims to send funds to communities with low per-pupil spending due to poverty.

Far fewer likely know the Department gives grants to communities to help educate non-native English speakers, the children of migrant farm workers and fisherman, and “special education” kids. It also spends money to support the schooling of American Indians and Native Alaskans, and Hawaiians, and rural kids.

But wait, there’s more! The Department of Education also gives “impact aid” grants to communities where there are federal facilities and activities that impose costs on the schools or that deprive it of land that might otherwise be taxed. And this is to say nothing of the various grants ED sends to states and communities to help teachers become better at teaching history and civics and for white boards and new technologies for classrooms.

So which of these programs are effective and matter to the nascent, polyglot Trump GOP coalition? And which ones should be terminated? The Trump Administration will need to answer these nettlesome questions in partnership with members of Congress because nearly every one of these policies was created by passing a law.

The White House and legislators could try to square the policy-politics circle of cutting ED and still supporting some school programs by rolling these innumerable niche grant programs into several big “block grants” or “revenue sharing” programs. In both cases, money still gets redistributed by the federal government but the amount of paperwork and ED bureaucrats needed would plunge. But, again, those options also will require Congress to pass a statute.

Not quite 45 years ago Ronald Reagan’s campaign promised to abolish the Department of Education and send authority over schooling back to the states. He never came close to succeeding. He never had a GOP majority in both chambers to help him. Donald Trump does have a unified government, but even so getting rid of ED or even greatly reducing its scope and spending will require a lot of work, political skill, and some good luck.

Kevin R. Kosar (@kevinrkosar) is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He is the author of Failing Grades: The Federal Politics of Education and Ronald Reagan and Education Policy.

This one-room schoolhouse —named in honor of Reverend Ezekiel Stanley— is located on Bayley Avenue and Route 16 in Cambridge, Maryland. If you want to see the inside of it, call 410-228-6657 to make an appointment. And if you visit you also should make time to swing by the nearby Harriet Tubman Center.

These photographs remind us that schools were once very rudimentary local institutions. The federal government had next-to-nothing to do with public schooling for most of the nation’s history. And with local control, unfortunately, came segregation and unequal schooling.