{"id":2425,"date":"2025-10-24T10:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-10-24T10:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thetoptenwebhosts.com\/?p=2425"},"modified":"2025-10-28T13:41:55","modified_gmt":"2025-10-28T13:41:55","slug":"trump-administration-uses-shutdown-to-push-education-department-elimination","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/thetoptenwebhosts.com\/index.php\/2025\/10\/24\/trump-administration-uses-shutdown-to-push-education-department-elimination\/","title":{"rendered":"Trump administration uses shutdown to push Education Department elimination"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Education Department is trying to use the government shutdown to further push for its own elimination<\/a>.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

From an effort to lay off almost 500 more employees<\/a> to messaging from Secretary Linda McMahon herself, the federal department, which President Trump has long sought to shutter, is seeking ways to make changes during the shutdown more permanent, alarming its defenders.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt’s\u00a0nonsensical to think that the Trump administration … has an interest in preserving the Department of Education and preserving civil rights enforcement at the federal level,\u201d\u00a0said\u00a0David Hinojosa, co-director of litigation at the National Center for Youth Law.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Trump, who has told McMahon he wants her to put herself out of a job, had previously signed an executive order<\/a> to shrink the agency and laid off half its workforce.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

But the shutdown<\/a>, which has lasted for more than three weeks with no end in sight, seems to be another window McMahon thinks she can use to further these efforts.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Democrat government shutdown has forced agencies to evaluate what federal responsibilities are truly critical for the American people. Two weeks in, millions of American students are still going to school, teachers are getting paid, and schools are\u00a0operating\u00a0as normal. It confirms what the President has said: the federal Department of Education is unnecessary, and we should return education to the states,\u201d McMahon said in a statement on social media.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Department has taken\u00a0additional\u00a0steps to better reach American students and families and root out the education bureaucracy that has burdened states and educators with unnecessary oversight,\u201d she added.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Some 95 percent of department workers have been furloughed, pausing civil rights investigations and cutting funding for some schools, such as those that rely on Impact Aid<\/a>.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

But it will take time for further\u00a0consequences\u00a0to\u00a0be obvious to the education sector, as most of the federal funding was already distributed to K-12 schools for the year. Federal dollars make up about 10 percent\u00a0of\u00a0the average district\u2019s budget.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Opponents\u00a0say\u00a0it is a sleight of hand to say a government shutdown is similar to if the agency didn\u2019t exist all together.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI think that is very disingenuous,\u201d\u00a0said\u00a0Jon Valant, director of the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institute. \u201cWhat\u00a0it shows is that the federal government is not\u00a0running and\u00a0has not ever run schools directly. We\u00a0heard a lot of rhetoric at the beginning of this administration about how they were going to return control of education to the states, and that the federal government was\u00a0kind of running\u00a0everything in schools, and that was just never the case.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cNow, what does happen when\u00a0the federal government steps aside\u00a0is\u00a0we see fewer civil rights protections for students. We see that funds can be harder to obtain. We see fewer guardrails to ensure that funds are being spent as they should and that students are being served as they should. We get less data and research and evidence on how American students are performing,\u201d he added.\u00a0<\/p>\n

After the shutdown began, Trump\u00a0attempted\u00a0to institute mass layoffs across the government, including another 500 workers\u00a0at the already gutted Education Department.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

The layoffs, which were\u00a0paused\u00a0by the courts, had been expected to significantly shrink<\/a> the offices\u00a0that\u00a0helps\u00a0students\u00a0with disabilities, civil rights investigations and those that distribute federal funds to schools.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

McMahon has previously argued all these functions should either be moved to other federal agencies or the states. In her ideal world, civil rights investigations would go to the Department of Justice, oversight for the Individuals with\u00a0Disabilities\u00a0in Education Act would head to the Department of Health and Human Services\u00a0and student loans would go to the Treasury Department.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Despite\u00a0the outcry, the\u00a0attempts to\u00a0dwindle\u00a0the\u00a0number\u00a0of employees could put states in a spot where they must start\u00a0imagining\u00a0their future without some federal services, whether they\u00a0like it or not.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI think\u00a0states\u00a0attorneys general and state commissioners of education should be in conversation about how to handle these civil rights complaints within their borders. I do\u00a0think\u00a0right\u00a0that states should be looking for ways to use their own authority to\u00a0help to\u00a0resolve some of these things,\u201d\u00a0said Jonathan Butcher, the Will Skillman senior research fellow in education policy at the Heritage Foundation.\u00a0<\/p>\n

And if programs ever do get moved to other federal agencies,\u00a0Butcher\u00a0argues\u00a0state education commissions and school\u00a0districts\u00a0will just have to adjust.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cCan we reconfigure the lines of communication between the Department of Justice,\u00a0states\u00a0attorneys general\u00a0and state departments of education?\u00a0Frankly,\u00a0I\u00a0don’t\u00a0think\u00a0it’s\u00a0a stretch.\u00a0…\u00a0This is not a foreign concept.\u00a0It’s\u00a0just a different\u00a0part of the executive branch that\u00a0the …\u00a0schools and districts will need to be talking to, or state departments of education will need to be talking to,\u201d he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Education Department is trying to use the government shutdown to further push for its…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2427,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[9],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/thetoptenwebhosts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2425"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/thetoptenwebhosts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/thetoptenwebhosts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thetoptenwebhosts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thetoptenwebhosts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2425"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/thetoptenwebhosts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2425\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2426,"href":"http:\/\/thetoptenwebhosts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2425\/revisions\/2426"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thetoptenwebhosts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2427"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/thetoptenwebhosts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2425"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thetoptenwebhosts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2425"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thetoptenwebhosts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2425"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}