Trump keeping his promise to abolish Education Department 

The Trump administration signaled yesterday that it was moving forward on one of President Trump’s key election promises: shutting down the Department of Education. As someone who has advocated for this outcome for many, many years, I am personally thrilled it’s finally coming. 
 
The administration announced that the department’s core functions would be handed off to other agencies in anticipation of finally closing down. Actually abolishing the Education Department would take an act of Congress, though the Supreme Court has OK’d Trump’s move to fire many of the department’s bureaucrats, which is a good start. 
 
Frankly, it’s astonishing that this is actually happening.  

Republicans have been promising to shut down the Education Department for 50 years. Ronald Reagan ran on ending it in 1980, a decade before I was even born. Every Republican president and most GOP presidential candidates similarly vowed to shut it down, but then never took up the issue again when they had the chance. 
 
The Trump administration is keenly aware of this. Yesterday, the Education Department’s social platform X account posted an unusually honest video about GOP achievements on this front to date.  
 
If the day has finally come that a Republican administration is serious about fulfilling its promises and shutting down unnecessary federal bureaucracy, then great. To be clear, however, we should not merely shuffle all the existing functions of the department to other agencies: We should eliminate unnecessary, counterproductive and unconstitutional interference from the federal government into states’ education policies. 
 
Closing the Department of Education is one of those ideas that really spooks liberal Democrats, even though it’s far less radical an idea than they are willing to admit. For starters, the department is simply unconstitutional: The Constitution does not grant the federal government any power to regulate education. That’s reason enough to close down. 
 
Furthermore, the department doesn’t actually do what it appears to do. It doesn’t employ any teachers, or manage any classrooms, or interact with students in any direct ways. What it does is oversee grant money. For K-12, federal spending on education is small — only about 10 percent of what schools receive — because most of the money comes from the states themselves. We certainly don’t need a sprawling federal bureaucracy just to administer such a paltry amount of money. 
 
The Department of Education does play a larger role in the funding of higher education, in that the department oversees the student loan program. But that program needs to be scrapped anyway: We now have ample evidence that subsidizing student loans at the federal level is causing runaway tuition inflation and saddling countless Americans with unsustainable levels of debt. Get rid of it, now. 
 
After all, as Education Secretary Linda McMahon pointed out, most of the department was offline during the shutdown, and we hardly noticed. Schools kept running all across the country. 

She makes a good point. 

Robby Soave is co-host of The Hill’s commentary show “Rising” and a senior editor for Reason Magazine. This column is an edited transcription of his daily commentary.