Funding for Mississippi schools, programs for disabled and poor children, Head Start and federal student loans could be at risk if President Donald Trump succeeds in his gambit to eliminate the U.S. Department of Education.
NBC reported on Tuesday that the president plans to attempt to abolish the agency using an executive order—a move that experts say would not be legal because presidents cannot abolish a federal agency without approval from Congress.
But it’s part of a series of actions the president has taken since entering office to implement proposals laid out in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, a plan Trump denied any connection to during the campaign. NBC reported on Trump’s planned executive actions on Tuesday.
Even before winning reelection, the Republican leader made clear that he intended to close the Department of Education.
“One thing I’ll be doing very early in the administration is closing up the Department of Education in Washington, D.C., and sending all education and education work it needs back to the states,” Trump said in a 2023 campaign video. “We want them to run the education of our children because they’ll do a much better job of it. You can’t do worse.”
During Trump’s first presidency, he proposed massive cuts to the Department of Education’s budget, though Congress never approved those budget recommendations. The DOE establishes policy for, administers and coordinates most federal education assistance. It also assists the president in implementing laws enacted by Congress and executing national education policies.
During his most recent campaign, Trump criticized the DOE’s work to protect transgender students, to end discrimination based on gender identity and to promote racial equality. Since reentering office, he has taken executive action to dismantle diversity programs and undo protections former President Joe Biden put in place for transgender students.
What the Department of Education Does
The U.S. Department of Education will be more difficult to close than many of its opponents realize, one expert told the Mississippi Free Press.
“I think that there is an assumption, especially by lay people and even some people who may feel like they know a little bit about it, that the federal U.S. Department of Education sets policy for K-12 public schools and that is the main policy-making body for K-12 public schools in the United States,” Mississippi First Executive Director Rachel Canter told the Mississippi Free Press on Nov. 20, 2024. “It is not. Most education policy is made at the state or local levels, most of it is honestly made at the state level.”
In 1867, President Andrew Johnson created the first education department but downgraded it to an office of education after facing backlash from white southerners who associated it with Reconstruction and educating formerly enslaved children. Congress passed and President Jimmy Carter signed the current Department of Education into law in 1979 and it began operations in May 1980.
The agency collects enrollment, crime and staffing data and manages national achievement exams. It also oversees federal funds for public school programs such as Title I, which provides financial assistance for high-poverty K-12 schools, and IDEA, which financially aids schools in serving individuals with disabilities under the age of 21.
The Department of Education funds Head Start programs, providing free early childhood education for children ages 5 and under. Head Start serves over a million children nationwide, including about 14,000 Mississippi children in 2024.
The DOE can create federal regulations and is also in charge of federal college student loans.
“It’s not as simple as saying, ‘Oh, we get rid of the U.S. Department of Education and all these programs go away,’ because Congress has still authorized the programs and appropriated the money,” Canter said.
Mississippi Depends Heavily on Federal Education Funds
Despite vowing to eliminate the U.S. Department of Education, President Donald Trump has tapped billionaire professional wrestling mogul Linda McMahon to lead it as the U.S. Secretary of Education.
The president has said that he supports state control of schools and “parental rights,” but the federal DOE has no role in local curriculum standards. The administration could use the powers of DOE to restrict funding to schools on an ideological basis, however.
When asked for comment after Trump’s election last year, the Mississippi Department of Education declined to discuss what abolishing the U.S. Department of Education would mean for the state’s public education system.
“The Mississippi Department of Education cannot speculate about the potential closure of the U.S. Department of Education because the impact on states would depend on the details of the transition plan and any replacement funding mechanisms that are established,” MDE Chief of Communication Jean Gordon Cook said in a statement to the Mississippi Free Press on Nov. 14.
Mississippi is one of the states that relies most heavily on the U.S. Department of Education for its K-12 budget because of high rates of child poverty. Education.org data ranks Mississippi as 7th in federal student funding.
The U.S. Department of Education distributes Title I funding based on the number of students from low-income families enrolled in a school. In the 2021-22 school year, 737 of 1,040 schools in Mississippi were eligible.
Mississippi relies on other federal education programs, too, Rachel Canter said, explaining that Title II money funds extra classes to reduce class size, support students experiencing homelessness, give grants to rural schools and pays to teach children English as a second language.
“I do think that people just don’t recognize the impact and it would be deep for Mississippi because we do rely on that money and those programs,” she said.
Handing responsibilities the federal agency currently handles to a state agency would not create a less “top heavy” department, Canter said. Instead, the State would have to hire additional personnel.
“Both MDE and (the Mississippi Institutions of Higher Learning) would have to dramatically expand the number of people they have to administer that money because billions of dollars require administration,” she said. “You want to talk about waste, fraud and abuse, if you don’t hire people to administer that money. That is why we have all these regulations because of concerns about waste, fraud and abuse.”
Federal Funds Help Poor and Disabled Children
Congress allocated $238 billion to the U.S. Department of Education in 2024, amounting to less than 2% of the federal budget. Federal education funds cover about 14% of the nation’s K-12 educational costs for states nationwide, but covered a much higher 23% of Mississippi’s costs in the 2021-2022 school year.
The U.S. Department of Education tends to allocate federal funds to specific populations of students through child nutrition programs for those in poverty or programs for students with disabilities. Rachel Canter said oversight of those funds is a significant concern.
“If your child has an IEP or is designated as a special education student, then the federal Department of Education sends money to the state, which sends money to your local school district to support that child’s education, as well as the additional needs that the child has,” she said.
“The federal Department of Education also is making sure that your child with special needs is getting the required education because, without the requirements in federal law, many states may not guarantee an adequate education to students with special needs,” Canter continued.
Trump wants to cut off federal money for schools that he claims teach “radical gender ideology and critical race theory.” In addition to closing the Department of Education, Trump has said he will use federal measures to pressure K-12 schools to adopt merit pay for teachers and eliminate tenure. He also supports universal “school choice” through voucher programs and charter school expansion.
Some advocates for eliminating the DOE have called for the federal government to provide education funding via block grants. In this scenario, the federal government would deliver funds to states with fewer regulations so the money can be used as states choose. That may not work in Mississippi’s favor.
“Depending on the program, we may get a larger share of that federal money than another state because of our particular population,” Canter said. “And if they just did it purely based on the number of people (in the state), we would probably receive fewer federal dollars because we have a smaller population, and they would not be taking into account the demographics of our population.”
The state receives block grants from other agencies. The funds at the center of Mississippi’s massive welfare scandal, which saw millions diverted to wealthy sports celebrities instead of Mississippi’s poorest, were block grant funds.
Education Department Oversees Student Loans
The U.S. Department of Education’s largest responsibility is overseeing federal funding for higher education. A large portion of undergraduate and graduate students rely on some form of student aid or loans to pursue higher education degrees. The DOE distributes approximately $30 billion in Pell Grant funds to low-income college students and also manages the $1.6 trillion student loan program and other federal financial aid programs.
“Were the U.S. Department of Education to go away, some other agency would have to service those loans,” Canter said. “Either Congress stops appropriating money for that work, which means that the loans go away and which would be devastating, or someone else is going to pick up the duty.”
Either eliminating the programs or reassigning them could upend life for college students.
“If you are a student right now in higher ed and you are relying on one of those federal programs to finance your education, and someone says, ‘We’re going to abolish the people who give you the money to go to school,’ you should be concerned about that,” Canter said.
“Even if they can’t just abolish it, even if it results in a delay of three-to-six months as they figure out what other agency is going to administer your program, that’s three-to-six months you can’t be in school because you can’t pay your tuition bill,” she continued.
The Mississippi Institutions of Higher Learning declined a request for an interview for this story.
Canter said that it is important for residents to understand that any conversation about the potential effects of shuttering the department is just speculation.
“We don’t know for sure what is going to happen and there are a lot of things that will need to happen,” Canter told the Mississippi Free Press. “I don’t want to panic people that this is definitely happening.”
Though Trump is now in office and planning an executive order to eliminate the department, such a move would invite legal challenges since the president does not have the authority to do so without congressional approval.
Trump has not outlined specific plans for what would happen to federally funded education programs if he did succeed in abolishing the agency.
Efforts to Dismantle U.S. Department of Education Not New
Republicans have argued to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education for decades.
Former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, who served in the Reagan administration and as the Republican National Committee Chairman from 1993-1997, described the U.S. Department of Education as a “behemoth” that amounted to “federal encroachment into what had been state and local decisions” in his 1996 book, “Agenda for America: A Republican Direction for the Future.”
In a subheading titled “Abolish the Department of Education” in the book’s chapter on education policy, Barbour argued that “schools should be free to respond to community priorities, parental demands, and student needs.”
“The few valuable activities run by the federal government (such as information gathering and research, drawing attention to education, ensuring access to education, and guaranteeing student loans) do not require a separate cabinet-level department,” he wrote. “They were running smoothly well before the department was established by Jimmy Carter.”
In the next section below, titled “School Choice,” the Mississippi conservative then argued for prioritizing policies like using public education funds to provide parents with vouchers to send their children to private schools.