U.S. Department of Education began as an acorn and is now a forest

By Charles Mitchell

The U.S. Department of Education is a 21st Century manifestation of the 14th Century saying that a mighty oak gets its start as a tiny acorn – except that would be an understatement. Today’s DOE is more akin to a forest, starting small but now funding dozens of programs in all states and territories and issuing edicts forcing local schools to spend lots of cash on filing compliance forms. The department’s founding budget in 1981 was $2.6 billion. Its 2024 budget was $52.6 billion, up 13.6 percent from 2023.         

President Donald Trump says the department is not needed, that its job should be done by the states – perhaps with supplements from the federal treasury. Like his other edicts, this one has been challenged in court. A plus for his position is that public education is not mentioned in the Constitution as a federal duty. In fact, Congress stayed out of the school business until the civil rights movement, respecting the often-dissed 10th Amendment which says matters not delegated to federal authorities are the exclusive territory of the states. Southern states refused to desegregate, so the feds had no choice.         

There would be disruption – and disruption is too mild a term –if America’s education system from preschool to post-graduate research lost the targeted funding the DOE provides.        

Targeted? Yes. People who get their information from spinners on TV or from internet blather have shown they have no idea what the Department of Education does. Trump’s order does not “end public schools.” Local school districts provide the money for the buildings, books (or iPads), teachers and administrators. The federal funding is, generally speaking, for special needs such as special education and innovation. It accounts for about 15 percent of tax money spent nationally. The big-ticket federal items are Direct Student Loans and Pell Grants.         

Few families have cash on hand to pay two- or four-year college costs much less post-graduate studies. At least 70 percent of American families borrow through some method or another (and there are many) to pay higher education costs. Direct Student Loans are the largest line item in every state’s DOE allocation. In Florida, for example, DSLs accounted for $4.7 billion of the $9.6 billion total for 2023. Too, don’t forget that unless the law changes, that money will be repaid.        

Pell Grants are a big line item, too. They bear the name of U.S. Sen. Claiborne Pell, a Democrat from Rhode Island who only served one term (1961-1966) but worked effectively across party lines to address the fact that children of low- and middle-income families were being priced out of education on high school graduation day. Congress named a small program after him about 50 years ago. In that first year there were 170,000 recipients of Pell money, which is not repaid. But as if to provide a classic illustration of how government programs explode – which may be too mild a term – there were 7 million recipients in 2022. That’s more than a 4,000 percent increase.         

And there doesn’t seem to be a Pell plateau. Students in six Southern states – Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and Florida – collected $7.73 billion in Pell cash in 2023 and an increase of more than 10 percent was predicted for each state this fiscal year.       

People also tend to think of all these loans and grants are going to traditional, brick and mortar institutions – the kind with football teams and such. The truth is that Congress has surrendered to lobbyists time and again, and the number of outright scams and education-lite entities hauling in cash is substantial. Time and again Congress has refused to address the rip-offs, even after a 2022 case in which five people in Georgia and Alabama were convicted and ordered to pay $12 million in tax funds they were accused of collecting in exchange for online degrees in theology.         

As things stand, Trump does not have the authority to shutter the U.S. Department of Education, given that it was created by Congress in 1980 when former President Jimmy Carter requested that it be split off from the former Department of Health, Education and Welfare. Nor can Trump or any other president legally refuse to administer specific, mandatory program allocations made by Congress. He and his Department of Education leader, Linda McMahon, can ordain how many employees it should take to do the work and take other budget-saving steps. That’s about it, though.         

Trump is correct that federal education spending has spiraled ever upward and is totally out of control, but he’s absolutely wrong when he says the federal dollars don’t do anyone any good. There is waste and fraud, but there are also situations where DOE grants and programs have been transformative in helping people. Any tree farmer will tell you a forest must be thinned to flourish. Sadly, this president seems to prefer clear-cutting. Also sadly, oversight of the Department of Education by Congress has been so abysmal that the waste and fraud overshadow the benefits.

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Charles Mitchell is an associate professor in the School of Journalism and New Media at the University of Mississippi and a member of the Overby Center panel of experts.