The U.S. Department of Education Is Dismantling Itself — and Nobody Agrees on What Comes Next

Every morning, there’s something strange about passing the Department of Education’s headquarters on Maryland Avenue in Washington. There are fewer badge swipes, fewer voices down the hall, and fewer people who know where the files are kept, so even though the building isn’t empty, it has the atmosphere of a place being wound down. The department has lost almost half of its employees since January 2025. Some departed on their own volition. For most, there was no other option.

Declaring the federal education bureaucracy irreparably damaged, President Trump issued an executive order directing the department’s closure. According to data from 2024, 72% of eighth graders performed below proficiency in math and 70% in reading. These figures are alarming because they are real. It’s unclear if doing away with the organization in charge of monitoring those figures truly resolves the issue or merely makes it more difficult to identify.

In American classrooms, the department was never the most influential. The majority of decisions have always been made by state and local school boards. However, the department quietly and consistently upheld certain lines, such as giving Pell Grants to low-income college students, enforcing civil rights laws in schools, and managing the Office of English Language Acquisition, which provided assistance to about five million children who do not speak English at home.

The $1 billion in Title III funding for that office is now being absorbed into a larger division that, according to critics, will treat English language learners more as an afterthought than as a priority. The office’s staff has also been reduced.

It’s difficult to ignore how quickly everything is moving. In a scathing dissent joined by two other justices, Justice Sonia Sotomayor called the Supreme Court’s decision to lift the injunctions that had temporarily stopped the staff cuts “indefensible” without providing an explanation. She claimed that by abruptly terminating almost 1,400 workers and denying them access to their work files overnight, the agency was essentially shut down without the consent of Congress. She wrote that the only body with that power is Congress. Most of them remained silent. The weight of that silence is its own.

The decision was applauded by Secretary Linda McMahon, who described the layoffs as the “first step on the road to total shutdown.” That phrase has a certain candor to it; there’s no pretense that this is just restructuring. The administration has been shipping other programs to the State Department, the Labor Department, and Health and Human Services, while transferring student loan portfolios to the Treasury Department. Dispersal is its method of dismantling. To put it kindly, it’s still unclear if any of those organizations are capable of handling these duties.

The president of the union that represents department workers, Rachel Gittleman, says she continues to support reconstruction. People may continue to show up because of their beliefs. However, even she admits that there is no definitive answer to the question of how and when. More succinctly, Democracy Forward’s Rachel Homer, who is involved in the ongoing litigation, stated that it becomes more difficult to reconstruct something that has been broken. That’s just physics, not pessimism.

The fact that both sides’ arguments aren’t wholly incorrect is what makes this situation truly complex. For decades, federal spending on education has increased without significantly improving student outcomes. In math, the United States was ranked 28th out of 37 countries by the OECD in 2022. It’s obvious that not everyone finds success with the current system. However, it takes more than an executive order and a press release to address the question of whether doing away with the department resolves that issue or just removes the scaffolding while the building remains intact.

Regardless of party, 58% of Americans opposed this. That is not a fringe viewpoint. For the most part, that’s the nation—observing something being disassembled and speculating about what might happen next.