In 1965, prior to the inception of the independent agency, the Office of Education boasted a workforce exceeding 2,000 employees and a budget of $1.5 billion. Fast forward to mid-2010, the department had expanded to encompass close to 4,300 personnel and a budget hovering around $60 billion. The scope of its duties is extensive, ranging from ensuring that economically disadvantaged students receive financial assistance for higher education to overseeing a student loan portfolio valued at nearly $2 trillion, rivaling the holdings of major financial institutions.
Throughout the past few decades, the Education Department has weathered challenges from administrations spanning from Reagan to Trump. Each president, including the most recent, Donald Trump, has leveraged the agency to advance educational policy initiatives that are often upended or restructured with the arrival of new administrations.
Despite prevailing skepticism among Washington insiders regarding the feasibility of any legislation aiming to disband the department gaining traction given the Republican Party’s tenuous majority on Capitol Hill, the Trump administration has indicated a readiness to scale back the agency’s functions and reduce its funding. Vivek Ramaswamy, a former Republican presidential candidate appointed by Trump to spearhead a new “Department of Government Efficiency” in collaboration with billionaire Elon Musk, has vowed to eliminate what he perceives as frivolous expenditures within the federal government, including those attributed to the Education Department.
In a November post on X, Ramaswamy criticized the department’s expenditures, stating, “Our Dept of Education blows $$ without accountability. Unelected bureaucrats are the core problem.” Following Carter’s defeat to former President Ronald Reagan in 1980, the incoming Republican administration, much like President Joe Biden’s, pledged to shutter the agency, a promise that was ultimately left unfulfilled.
Zachary Schermele serves as an education correspondent for USA TODAY and can be contacted via email at zschermele@usatoday.com. For updates, follow him on X at @ZachSchermele.
The original version of this article was published on USA TODAY: Why Trump wants to ‘close’ one of Jimmy Carter’s top accomplishments.
