This week, House Republicans took their first real legislative swing at getting rid of the Department of Education — not by fixing it, but by chopping it into pieces and scattering the pieces across the government.

The House Education and Workforce Committee, led by Chairman Tim Walberg of Michigan, advanced a package of 10 bills called "Less Bureaucracy, Better Education." Together, the bills would pull the department's core jobs out and hand them to agencies that have never done them before. It is the clearest step yet toward making President Trump's promise to shut down the department real — and permanent.

Where the pieces would go

The Department of Education does unglamorous but important work: it sends money to poor school districts, backs the student loans that let working families afford college, and runs programs that help first-generation and low-income kids get a degree. Under these bills, that work gets handed off:

• The Office of Federal Student Aid — the department's single largest operation, which manages the loans and grants millions of students depend on — would move to the Treasury Department, according to Inside Higher Ed.
• TRIO programs (which help low-income and first-generation students get into and through college), funding for Historically Black Colleges and Universities, Title I money for high-poverty schools, migrant education, teacher-quality grants, and veterans' higher-education services would all move to the Labor Department.
• Childcare help for student parents, school-safety programs, and oversight of foreign medical school accreditation would move to the Department of Health and Human Services, per the Daily Signal.

That is not "cutting red tape." That is taking programs built and staffed to serve students and dropping them on agencies with no experience running them.

What Republicans say vs. what it does

Walberg dressed it up in the friendliest language he could find. "Education policy should be focused on helping students succeed—not preserving a federal bureaucracy for its own sake," he said. The bills, he argued, would "transfer key statutory authorities to agencies better equipped to carry them out while maintaining continuity for students and stakeholders."

Ask yourself a simple question: is the Treasury Department "better equipped" to help a first-generation student fill out a financial aid form than the office that does it now? Is the Labor Department set up to protect funding for Black colleges? Moving a program to an agency that has never run it doesn't make it work better. It makes it easier to lose, underfund, and eventually kill — which is the point.

Rep. Bobby Scott of Virginia, the top Democrat on the committee, said it plainly: "Despite Republicans' rhetoric, they are not 'modernizing' the department—they are blessing President Trump's scheme to dismantle it piece by piece."

This is Congress finishing what the White House started

None of this is happening in a vacuum. The Trump administration has spent the year trying to gut the Education Department from the inside — laying off staff and, in June, signing agreements to move the Office for Civil Rights to the Justice Department and special-education oversight to HHS. Those moves were done by executive action, which a future administration could reverse.

What Walberg's committee is doing is different, and more dangerous: it would write the breakup into law. Once Congress moves student aid to Treasury and Title I to Labor, it doesn't snap back when the political winds change. That's why supporters call it "permanent" — and why families should call it what it is.

Who actually loses

Strip away the talking points and look at who these programs serve. Title I is for the poorest schools in the country. TRIO exists so that kids whose parents never went to college have a shot at one. HBCU funding keeps historically Black colleges open. Federal Student Aid is how most families pay for college at all.

These are not "Washington bureaucracy." They are the ladder a lot of American kids use to climb. Republicans who control the House are choosing to pull that ladder apart and hand the rungs to agencies that don't know what to do with them.

There was a real choice here. Congress could fix what's broken, fund what works, and leave the programs where the expertise is. Instead, the House majority chose to advance a plan to break the whole thing up. We deserve better.

Source

Read the coverage at Inside Higher Ed and the Daily Signal. Photo: Education Secretary Linda McMahon, via The Daily Signal.