Education Department Downsizing (or Elimination) Begs the Question: Is Spending Improving Outcomes?
A passing glance at recent expenditures turns up a litany of silly, wasteful spending examples.
Last week, President Trump signed an executive order directing Secretary of Education Linda McMahon to “take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure” of her department and send authority back to the state and local levels.
The move sparked a quick uproar for opponents of DOGE and special interest groups.
Randi Weingarten, who leads the American Federation for Teachers, is perhaps the best known face of teachers’ unions and heavily engaged in politics. She said she was “spitting mad” over the EO, claimed it would “hurt kids,” and gave Trump a pithy warning: “See you in court.”
It’s bound to be a protracted battle as deeply entrenched interests go on the defense and a debate ensues about the proper role of the feds.
It begs a couple of important questions: what does the EO explicitly eliminate and what remains? And what has the Department of Education been spending our money to do, if not boost student performance?
THE FINE PRINT
Trump’s executive order has a couple of key prongs:
First, Trump argues that the Department as it stands today is a failure, citing ever-decreasing test scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as America’s Report Card.
“Unfortunately, the experiment of controlling American education through Federal programs and dollars – and the unaccountable bureaucracy those programs and dollars support – has plainly failed our children, teachers, and our families.”
Trump cites $200 billion spent during Covid, added to $60 billion in routine annual spending, did little to staunch learning loss and nothing to boost student outcomes. “While the [department] does not educate anyone, it maintains a public relations office that includes over 80 staffers at a cost of more than $10 million per year.”
He also points out that DoEd. manages $1.6 trillion in student loans, about the same amount of debt as a major national bank like Wells Fargo, with less than 1% of the manpower.
All of this, he concludes, means the department’s core functions can and should be housed elsewhere in the federal government, or at a more local level.
Second, Trump draws some boundaries in the sweeping order. In returning authority to states and local communities, the Secretary should ensure “effective and uninterrupted delivery of services, programs, and benefits on which Americans rely.”
In other words, protections for students with disabilities, special needs or those in protected classes would remain within the federal purview.
Per the EO, the Secretary should also ensure all future allocations remain both legally compliant and comport with Trump administration policies (i.e. no more spending for “diversity, equity and inclusion”).
Further clarifications in the EO make plain that sweeping changes will also depend upon Congress’ appropriations decisions and existing limits on Article I authority.
RECENT SPENDING AT THE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT
Setting aside the massive federal lending program, as well as assurances for civil rights and other basic student protections, Open the Books took a look at where else the department’s money has been going in its fruitless pursuit of better outcomes.
Our auditors made the big picture clear recently, as auditors traced every agency’s headcount and spending changes over the decades (READ MORE: MAPPING GROWTH OF GOVERNMENT)
The department’s headcount has actually decreased slightly since 2000, by about 13.9% (4,930 vs. 4,245). But by 2024 annual spending was 749% of what they’d been at the turn of the Millenium! (Open the Books, FOX News)
What follows is just a brief laundry list of wasteful spending examples that can help explain the explosive growth.
These grants from recent years include some of the usual suspects like DEI and gender politics…plus millions headed to Chinese firms!
$475,000 to Ohio State University for the Race, Inclusion, and Social Equity (RAISE) Initiative (2022). RAISE seeks to add “at least 50 tenure-track faculty members whose research can help to address racial and social disparities.” Topics covered for these faculty positions include “Critical STEM fields: Chemistry, Math, and Physics,” “Climate, Race and Place,” and “Racial Equity by Design.”
$1.3 million to Framingham State University for Remixing Textbooks Through an Equity-Focused Lens (2022). This project publishes open-source textbooks. Three have so far been published, including “Overweight” Bodies, Real and Imagined, which endeavors to “decouple weight and health,” and Children, Families, Schools, and Communities, which features the now-infamous Genderbread Person.
All textbooks begin with a “land acknowledgement” for “the painful history of genocide and forced removal from [Indigenous Peoples’] territory, and other atrocities connected with colonization.” The land acknowledgement is a part of the grant’s overall mission.
$1.6 million to the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia for Development and Validation of the Culturally- and Racial Equity-Sustaining (CARES) Classroom Assessment System (2022)
$2.4 million to Delsea Regional High School in New Jersey for The Case for Student Voice as a Change Agent in Schools: A Focus on Culturally Responsive Climate, Equity, and Discipline (2020)
Since 2017, $2.8M went from the Department of Education to…China! (including):
$1.68 million to Dalian Jiahe Real Estate Broker Co., Ltd. including about $500,000 in Title I Grants “to help local educational agencies improve teaching and learning in high-poverty schools in particular for children failing, or most at-risk of failing, to meet challenging state academic achievement standards.”
Beijing Jianyan Ruihong Popular Custom Restaurant with nearly $700,000 for the same goal.
SIDENOTE: The same entity, Dalian Jiahe, also received $809,208 in grant money from the Department of Agriculture’s National School Lunch Program. The purpose was to “assist states, through cash grants and food donations, in providing a nutritious lunch service for school children and to encourage the domestic consumption of nutritious agricultural commodities.” It was part of $1.6 million in total sent to Chinese entities through the school lunch program. What part China could play in encouraging remains a firm question mark.
Why would the Department of Education be paying firms in China, an adversarial nation, to consult on improving outcomes for at-risk students? Not to mention giving them a hand in our school lunch program? While China is plainly besting the United States when it comes to STEM education, it seems unlikely they plan to share any useful wisdom. Instead, evidence suggests they’d like to sell their ideology in our academic institutions.
CONCLUSION
While unwinding the Education Department is certainly a complex task, the evidence is clear that enormous funds have been spent wastefully, whether it be to buttress far-Left research in higher education or to sprinkle DEI into public-school classrooms. These findings are just scratching the surface in the few days since Trump signed his executive order.
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FURTHER READING
FACT SHEET: President Donald J. Trump Empowers Parents, States, and Communities to Improve Education Outcomes (White House, 20 March 2025).
MAPPING GROWTH OF GOVERNMENT: US Department of Education (Open the Books)
Incidentally, when one sees that the teacher unions are not primarily labor unions but rather political unions you’ve cracked the code.
I like that you have a multiple choice exam in the pic. IMO these tests are worthless. Unless a student can define in his/her own words what the answer is, how can you know whether they know the material or not? with a 4 choice exam, you always have 25% chance of guessing right. I know someone who passed a Spanish test without knowing the language!