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 the work of two of its major program offices and hand it 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 those programs on paper. They change who runs them — moving the statutory authority, the staff, and the money to the Department of Labor, as the Washington Examiner reported. Labor has managed most of them only since November 2025, under interagency agreements; the bills would make that permanent.

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 apart from the four higher-education programs H.R. 9611 repeals outright — including the Robert C. Byrd Honors Scholarship and the College Access Challenge Grant — 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 — every title begins "Less Bureaucracy, Better" — introduced July 9 and approved by the House Education and Workforce Committee on July 15.

The package would send K-12, higher-education and career-education programs to Labor and the entire Office of Federal Student Aid to Treasury, with smaller pieces going to other agencies. It leaves out the Office for Civil Rights and special education, which the administration has separately tried to hand to the Justice Department and Health and Human Services.

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 more than a year moving these functions out of the Education Department by executive action. Those moves can be undone by the next administration, and a federal lawsuit calls the agreements unlawful. Congress's own bipartisan spending package said, in a nonbinding statement attached to it, that the department had no authority to hand off its core responsibilities this way — 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 for good to the Labor Department, in the kind of transfer a committee Democrat says 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.