The 'Remarkable' Efforts to Shrink the Department of Education

At the start of President Donald Trump’s second term, he signed an Executive Order to kickstart the process of eliminating the federal Department of Education under Secretary Linda McMahon. 

A year and a half into the administration, significant progress has been made, and the department has made key reforms ranging from the scope of bureaucracy to student loan changes, Undersecretary of Education Nicholas Kent explained to Townhall on Tuesday. 

“We have shrunk the federal Department of Education by almost 50% since the secretary came in,” Kent said, describing it as “remarkable.”

“And it would probably be even slightly higher than that if the federal courts had not intervened in some of our civil rights work. So we've shrunk the department by nearly 50% in terms of FTE or headcount,” he continued.

Kent noted that “services have still went on” regardless of the downsizing, saying that under the Biden administration, “double the staff weren't able to do core functions like getting out the FAFSA on time.”

“It doesn't matter how many people you have, it matters the talent that you have within those people,” he said, adding that some services have been offloaded to better suited departments, such as an agreement to move over the Office of Career, Technical, and Adult Education to the Department of Labor, and starting to pivot over the federal student loan portfolio to the Treasury Department. 

Kent noted that a primary challenge is that “federal bureaucracy is not welcoming of change.”

“People like the status quo,” he said. 

“These interagency agreements are proofs of concept,” Kent added. “And we're showing people that money can flow from other agencies. Students are still protected with the support of other agencies.”

His comments come at a time of year when those pursuing higher education are evaluating student loan options, which have also had major changes since Trump and McMahon have taken charge.

Most notably, the department created a borrowing cap on many types of graduate school loans, and limiting what programs can be allowed for higher caps. The move was enabled by the passage of the "One Big Beautiful Bill Act" signed by the president last year. 

“The number of schools that we have seen over the last several months come out publicly in very big ways to say that they were cutting tuition is remarkable,” Kent said. “And they're doing that because of the loan limits that we instituted with the help of Congressional Republicans on July 1 of this year.”

"There's a joke that's been out there that I've heard for years, which is if you have a law school and they wanna charge you a million dollars for your law degree, you could technically take out that million dollars, prior to July 1 of this year," he said, noting that schools have sometimes taken advantage of government subsidies to inflate tuition costs. 

Last week, a group of education unions announced a lawsuit against the parameters of the cap rule, with American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten arguing in a statement that "one of the most cynical, cruel components of the Trump tax bill was the cuts to the higher education student loan program."

In terms of what’s on the horizon for the department, Kent said that the department is now pushing an “accountability framework” to ensure that degree programs will actually lead to higher earning potential beyond just a high school diploma.

“There’s going to be many programs out there that fail that earnings test,” he said. 

“We know that students choose higher education for a variety of reasons, and they choose a college for a variety of reasons […] But we know the number one reason why a student enrolls in higher education is to earn a good living,” Kent continued. “And so what we were saying here is that our accountability framework is built on that premise, that schools should leave students better off financially than where they found them.”

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