During his 1980 presidential campaign, former President Ronald Reagan ran on shutting down the Department of Education, then in its infancy. But he couldn’t even get a Republican in Congress to introduce a bill to do it.
Ever since, Republican presidential candidates have made the same campaign promise, only to not really know what to do with the department when their friends in Congress tell them to pound sand.
If he’s elected back to office, former President Donald Trump could totally break that mold.
After eight years of former President Barack Obama’s overreach, there was almost total consensus among conservative education policy wonks that it was time to rein in the Education Department. Back then, if you proposed using the agency to do anything proactive, you’d be told, “If we push the envelope, that’ll give them ideas and make them angry, and they’ll overreach even more next time.”
So, under Trump, former Education Secretary DeVos governed in a relatively restrained manner. And the Biden-Harris administration came in afterward and went about as administratively bonkers as anyone could have imagined anyhow.
Now there’s a split in opinion. Old-school conservatives want federal restraint. But an ascendant populist wing wants to see the Education Department punch back twice as hard. Rather than pursue administrative peace by unilateral disarmament, the next Republican president could seek deescalation through escalation. If you can’t get the Republican votes to shut down the department, make the Democrats resent it so much they want to shut it down too.
Let’s start with K-12 education. The Biden-Harris administration has used Title IX, a legal statute meant to protect both sexes from discrimination, to mainline gender ideology into public schools. They’ve used it to force boys into girls’ bathrooms and sports. If he wins in November, Trump could use Title IX to stop forcing girls to use bathrooms that boys can enter. And he could use it to maintain the integrity of girls’ sports. The Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights could simply issue guidance on these matters and then enforce it. If letting boys play in girls’ sports is worth the entirety of their schools’ federal aid dollars, then they can do it. If not, they can’t.
California recently passed a law forcing schools to keep it a secret from parents when they facilitate a social gender transition. If you send your daughter Joan to school in California, for example, school officials might take it upon themselves to call her John. And then, if you ask, they’ll lie and tell you they call her Joan. That’s their law.
It might be difficult to tackle that through Title IX, but this law obviously flies in the face of the Federal Educational Rights and Privacy Act. The Education Department could issue guidance clarifying this and then make a determination that the entire state of California is out of compliance with federal law. States and schools must comply with federal law to be eligible for federal grants. Our federal taxpayer dollars can subsidize school districts that don’t secretly facilitate the sterilization of schoolchildren, thank you very much.
Trump has promised to get “transgender insanity” out of schools. It’s hard, though, to locate the administrative mechanism by which Trump’s Department of Education could tell schools they can’t teach children that they’re born in the wrong body and that it’s great to medically treat preteen awkwardness with puberty blockers, sterilizing hormones, and mutilating surgery. But his Department of Justice could. In fact, the Biden-Harris DOJ tried advancing the utterly absurd argument that the 14th Amendment protected the right of doctors to sterilize dysphoric minors. The Trump DOJ could advance the argument that, under the Supreme Court’s Wisconsin v. Yoder decision, schools can’t teach children that it’s possible to be born in the wrong body without a parental opt-out option.
On the diversity, equity, and inclusion front, you can be totally certain that if any school district trained its teachers to recognize and combat the evils of blackness, the Biden-Harris Office of Civil Rights would come down on that district like a ton of bricks. Therefore, it’s only proper and fair for the Trump administration to drop the hammer on any school district that trains its teachers about the evils of whiteness. Trump’s OCR could write a “Dear Colleague” letter explaining that any such DEI training for teachers creates a racially hostile environment. The DEI consultant grifters, currently pulling in tens of millions of taxpayer dollars a year, would have to find an honest line of work.
Similarly, a couple of “Dear Colleague” letters on “transformative” Social-Emotional Learning (one from a Title VI perspective and maybe one co-signed by the Department of Health and Human Services on the dangers of unlicensed therapy) could disrupt that near-billion-dollar distraction.
The most interesting action, though, would be on higher education. The public has been appalled at the rabid antisemitism recently on display in our elite universities, which has been decades in the making. But the Biden-Harris administration has just been playing catch-and-release with colleges. Oh, your DEI department fomented a pogrom that led to a physical mob hunting Jews? Well, to fix it, you better invest more in your antisemitic DEI department!
A Kamala Harris administration would be no different. The students chanting for the genocide of the Jewish people make up the all-important core demographic for future Democratic congressional staff. Never mind winning Michigan, from a human capital perspective, keffiyeh-clad master’s students are a constituency that Harris couldn’t afford to alienate. But Trump owes these antisemites nothing.
The Office of Civil Rights can force a college to do practically whatever the Department of Education says if that school wants to keep its Title IV funding flowing. Trump’s OCR could force Columbia University, for example, to meet strict conditions: abolish its DEI department, provide a full report on all foreign students who supported anti-Israel protests on behalf of an international terrorist organization for visa revocation, and provide a full accounting for every dollar received from Qatar, for starters. If Columbia doesn’t want to do all of that, Trump could move to enforcement and cut off Title IV funding. Colleges love their anti-Western, antisemitic ideology. But they love their money more.
In the meantime, the Trump administration could also issue a finding that Columbia is out of compliance with federal civil rights law. Such a finding could be grounds to stop all federal research grants from flowing to Columbia. This would not only be good in itself, but it would also send a stark message to all colleges across America: nice research grants you got there — it would be a shame if something happened to them.
Colleges have systematically chosen to elevate DEI ideology over intellectual merit by making faculty swear fealty to racial Marxism in a “DEI statement” if they want to be hired or promoted. Trump could tackle this, too. These “DEI statements” are not only ideological litmus tests, they’re also a thinly veiled tool to discriminate against white applicants. Fortunately, the tide is starting to turn on this tool as elite universities such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology abandon them. Through Office of Civil Rights investigations and enforcement actions, Trump could toss DEI statements onto the ash heap of history.
Getting bombarded by DEI ideology has become, unfortunately, a rite of passage for anyone going to college and sitting through mandatory freshman orientation training. Trump could squash that. A “Dear Colleague” letter declaring that such training creates a racially hostile environment would force colleges to scrub their orientation programs.
Colleges have set up Stasi-esque snitch lines, known as Bias Reporting Systems, that effectively threaten to haul any student who expresses a conservative political opinion into a DEI-administrative tribunal. The Department of Education doesn’t have the legal hook to destroy these systems. But the Department of Justice has the power to protect students’ First Amendment rights. With DOJ assistance, it’s easy to project the Supreme Court ruling that such systems inherently violate students’ speech rights.
Trump has promised to leverage the accreditation system to promote systemic change in American higher education. Trump could block the accreditors’ push to mandate DEI in its various forms by making it easier for colleges to switch accreditors and by pushing to shut down the worst actors.
The Department of Education could also fast-track the approval of new accreditors. And it could even go so far as to pressure accreditors to require schools to eliminate DEI course graduation requirements. No student in America should be required to agree with neo-Marxist ideology to be eligible to graduate from college.
Of course, we all know that colleges are not all faithfully implementing the ban on race-based affirmative action mandated by the Supreme Court in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard. But we don’t need to rely on private actors to bring civil litigation to prevent colleges from discriminating against white and Asian students. The Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights could also get in on that action, referring schools to the Department of Justice when necessary.
None of the above would require a single vote in Congress. And this is to say nothing of what Trump’s Secretary of Education could do from the bully pulpit to promote better state-level policies in red states that want to tackle issues from restoring school discipline to improving gifted education.
If he’s elected, Trump probably won’t have the votes to shut down the Department of Education in his first 100 days. But if he uses it in the best way, he could have Democrats calling for it to be abolished before he leaves the White House.
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Max Eden is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.