On July 9, 2026 — one week after introducing a bill to repeal the rule that keeps for-profit colleges from running entirely on federal money — Mark Harris introduced two more.

They are H.R. 9610, the Less Bureaucracy, Better K–12 Education Act, and H.R. 9611, the Less Bureaucracy, Better Higher Education Act. Congress's own bill records list the sponsor of each as Rep. Harris, Mark [R-NC-8].

Between them, they would strip the Department of Education of its two biggest program offices and hand them to the Department of Labor.

What's inside those two offices

The names are bureaucratic. What's in them is not.

The Office of Elementary and Secondary Education runs Title I — the money that goes to school districts with the most kids in poverty. It runs migrant education. It runs teacher-quality grants. It runs funding aimed at rural schools and at the federal testing that tells parents how their schools are actually doing.

The Office of Postsecondary Education runs the federal programs that get first-generation and low-income kids into and through college.

Harris's bills don't change any of those programs on paper. They change who runs them — moving the statutory authority, the staff, and the money to an agency that has never run them, as the Washington Examiner reported.

Here is how Harris explained it:

"With educators in my own family, I know the heart they have for helping students reach their full potential. The federal government should support that work, not get in the way with unnecessary bureaucracy."

Moving a filing cabinet is not the same as fixing a problem

The word doing all the work in that quote — and in both bill titles — is bureaucracy.

But nothing in either bill eliminates a form, a rule, a grant application, or a staff position. Title I still exists. Its regulations still exist. The people who administer it still exist. They just work at the Labor Department now.

The National School Boards Association, which represents the local elected boards that actually spend this money, put it plainly:

"While local school boards support efforts to streamline government, shifting core educational programs across disparate federal agencies does not eliminate bureaucracy — it fragments it."

There's already evidence about what happens. Rep. Suzanne Bonamici of Oregon pointed out during the committee's debate that when education functions had already been moved over to Labor, the result was "significant" funding delays, with staff struggling to get access to the internet and software they needed to do the job.

Rep. Bobby Scott of Virginia, the top Democrat on the committee, was blunter: "Whatever you say about the 'problems' at the Department of Education, these bills will only make things worse."

The point isn't efficiency. It's permanence.

Harris's bills are two of ten in a package the House Education and Workforce Committee called "Less Bureaucracy, Better Education," released July 10 and approved by the committee on July 16.

The package spreads the department's work across four agencies: K-12 programs and career education to Labor, family-engagement and special-education grants to Health and Human Services, civil rights enforcement to the Justice Department, and the entire federal student loan operation to Treasury.

We've written about what that package does as a whole. But the reason it exists is worth saying directly.

The Trump administration has spent two years moving these functions out of the Education Department by executive action. Those moves can be undone by the next administration, and courts have been asked whether some of them were legal at all. Congress already wrote down, in law, that dismantling the department this way wasn't allowed — and then Republicans let it happen anyway.

Bills like Harris's fix that problem for them. Once the transfer is in statute, no future president can move it back, and no court can call it unlawful. That's not streamlining. That's welding the door shut.

The district that has to live with it

Harris represents North Carolina's 8th District, which covers all of Anson, Montgomery, Richmond, Scotland, Stanly and Union counties plus parts of Cabarrus, Mecklenburg and Robeson. His district offices are in Monroe and Laurinburg.

Several of those are exactly the kind of counties Title I was built for: rural, low-income, with school districts that lean on federal poverty funding to hire reading teachers and keep programs running.

None of it disappears under Harris's bills. It just gets handed to an agency with no experience running it, in a transfer the committee's own witnesses say has already caused funding delays where it's been tried.

Harris is a first-term member on the Education and Workforce Committee. In the space of eight days in July, he introduced three bills touching federal education law. Every one of them removes a protection or moves a program away from the agency built to run it. Not one of them puts a dollar in a classroom.

We deserve better.

Source

Mark Harris introduces bill moving key education programs to Labor Department — Washington Examiner, July 9, 2026. Photo: Washington Examiner.