Dismantling the Department of Education: Ten Bills That Ask Zero Questions About What Happens to Kids
Ten bills up for a vote this week would give school districts four federal agencies to deal with instead of one and eliminate the only Cabinet seat focused on children.
Update: On July 15, 2026, the House Education and Workforce Committee passed this package of 10 bills on largely partisan votes (Republicans in favor and Democrats in opposition), with the one exception that Rep. Kevin Kiley (R-CA) voted against passage of H.R. 9610, which would shift a number of K-12 education programs from the Department of Education to the Department of Labor.
These bills now move to the House Rules Committee to potentially receive approval for House floor consideration.
Tomorrow, the House Education and Workforce Committee will mark up ten bills — H.R. 9602-9611 — that share a single purpose dressed up in ten different names. Each carries the same “Less Bureaucracy, Better [X]” branding. Each follows the same template: strip a program or set of programs out of the Department of Education and hand it, along with the staff, the money, and the legal authority that came with it, to another federal agency.
If you read past the branding, these bills do absolutely nothing to improve educational and developmental outcomes for children. Instead, Congress is being asked to ratify an administrative restructuring the Executive Branch has already begun — without any meaningful examination of what happens to the children these programs exist to serve.
Based on a Project 2025 proposal, it’s Congress seeking to legalize something the Administration has already been trying to do without authority. There is no analysis as to how this will or will not impact the children federal education programs exist to serve.
The children are being treated, once again, as a mere afterthought.
Congress Fails in Its Responsibility to Children
In January, the Department of Education announced six “interagency agreements” dispersing core ED functions to the Departments of Labor, Interior, Health and Human Services (HHS), and State — before Congress had authorized any of it.
Tomorrow, a House committee will attempt to codify moving K-12 and postsecondary programs to Labor, Tribal and Native American education programs to Interior, and other programs to HHS.
More specifically, H.R. 9610 hands the Secretary of Labor nearly the entire portfolio of Title I, Impact Aid, and the rest of the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education’s programs. H.R. 9604 sends Tribal, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian education programs to the Department of Interior. H.R. 9608 and H.R. 9606 route family engagement, school safety, and student-parent child care programs to HHS.
There is no evidence that any of this will improve education, operations, or services to children. None.
Based on a Project 2025 proposal, this is merely a congressional committee rubber-stamping the Administration’s adoption of this mechanism to further target cuts to children’s programs. At its core, the committee action is embracing a backdoor mechanism to authorize program-specific transfers rather than holding a single up-or-down vote to abolish the Department of Education itself.
Why?
First, no one has demonstrated that this is good for children. At best, Administration officials have argued it will do no harm. But the truth is, it will do harm.
Despite the bill titles attempting to characterize the legislation as offering “less bureaucracy,” families and school districts would need to interact with numerous different federal agencies with newly hired staff at agencies scattered across the government that lack history, relationships, or knowledge as to how to run education and child development programs. In light of the long history of federal agencies failing to coordinate with one another, these changes promise to be an unmitigated disaster.
Second, the public opposes the dismantling of the Department of Education. A Phi Delta Kappan (PDK) International poll released in August 2025 found, by nearly a 3-to-1 margin (66-22%), that adults overwhelmingly oppose plans to eliminate the U.S. Department of Education. By a 65-19% margin (over 3-to-1), they believe that its elimination would have a negative impact on the nation’s public schools.
That public’s opposition holds across the specific things the Department funds and protects. As the National Parents Union points out, Title I support for 26 million low-income students, IDEA services for 7.4 million students with disabilities, Title III instruction for 5 million English learners, and federal support for the 9.8 million students in rural schools who rely on it to fill gaps state and local budgets cannot.
This week’s House markup flies in the face of both the needs of our nation’s students and public sentiment. It engages in an attempted end-run by moving programs one-by-one instead of addressing the issue directly because they know an up-or-down vote on abolishing the Department of Education will fail miserably.
The Promise That’s Already Been Broken
Secretaries McMahon, Kennedy, and Chavez-DeRemer have repeatedly assured the public that these transfers change nothing that matters. The Department’s own materials on the interagency agreements state plainly that the agreements “do not change funding, eligibility, or legal protections for states and territories.” Secretary McMahon has said the goal is to “reduce the need for states to consult multiple federal agencies to effectively manage their programs.” Secretary Kennedy, announcing HHS’s role in school safety programs, said “nothing matters more than the safety of our children.”
These bills prove those promises are false.
A school district dealing with a bureaucratic transfer isn’t left with less bureaucracy — it’s left with more. Instead of working predominantly with the Department of Education, districts now have to navigate the remaining pieces of ED, plus HHS, plus the Department of Labor, plus the Department of Justice, depending on which program they’re trying to administer.
A single district running a Title I program, a family engagement grant, an Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) funded special education service, and a school safety initiative could now be coordinating across four separate federal agencies where one used to suffice. Every additional agency means another bureaucracy, another grant process, another legal office, potentially conflicting rules, and another delay when problems arise.
That is the literal the very opposite of “less bureaucracy.”
It is, by definition, more and less competent bureaucracy, more points of failure, and more opportunities for a check to arrive months late — exactly what already happened when career and technical education moved to the Department of Labor and the agency’s grant system didn’t even recognize state education agencies’ bank accounts.
Handing Children’s Futures to Agencies That Don’t Know Children
In the end, these bills take the one federal department built around the interests of children and hand its functions to agencies where children are not the focus and are, at best, an afterthought.
The Department of Labor exists to manage the American workforce. The Department of the Interior exists to manage public lands and resources. The Department of Health and Human Services is primarily focused on managing the infrastructure of our nation’s health and human services programs.
None of these agencies has the statutory mission, the institutional expertise, or the staff culture built around asking what a seven-year-old with a learning disability needs from her school. They were not built to hold that question, and nothing in these ten bills requires them to develop the capacity to hold it before the transfer takes effect. When children’s programs become side responsibilities inside agencies whose primary purpose is something else, children inevitably become secondary priorities.
Furthermore, dismantling the Department of Education would eliminate the one cabinet-level seat at the table whose entire job is to represent the interests of children and their education. This is important because Cabinet officials do more than administer programs. They participate in decisions across the federal government, advise the President, and advocate for their department’s priorities during budget and policy debates. Eliminating the Department of Education would remove the only Cabinet official whose primary responsibility is to speak for the interests of America’s children.
Once these programs are dispersed and that department is hollowed out, that seat disappears and with it, the one place in the highest levels of the federal government where a decision-maker’s job description requires them to ask whether a policy is good for kids.
Children are already among the most politically invisible constituencies in this country: no vote, no PAC, no lobbyists, no seat at this week’s markup table. Eliminating their one seat in the Cabinet doesn’t correct that invisibility. It cements it.
The Question the Committee Is Failing to Ask
We’ve made this argument before, and here it is again: the debate over eliminating the Department of Education has been conducted almost entirely in terms of partisanship and adult preferences, including states’ rights theory, parental control, and the long-standing goal of shrinking federal education spending. What’s missing, yet again, is any accounting of and attention to what these transfers mean for the millions of children ED’s programs actually serve.
Consider what’s tucked into H.R. 9604, the bill moving Tribal education programs to Interior. Buried in its list of transferred authorities are the IDEA Special Education Grants to States and the IDEA infants-and-families program, but only as they apply to American Indian children. This funding would now be split apart from the rest of IDEA, administered by a different agency with a different mission, and placed on a different timeline than the special education services the same child receives at the same school.
That is not a bureaucratic footnote. It is a fracture running straight through a disabled child’s right to a free appropriate public education, based on nothing more than which program line their services happen to fall under.
Every one of these bills follows the same procedural pattern beyond that: OMB is handed broad authority to make “incidental” determinations about what counts as transferred, with no requirement to consult the families affected. Most bills take effect six months after enactment, but nearly all also contain an “early implementation” clause letting the transfer begin immediately on enactment, well before the receiving agency has any obligation to show it’s ready.
The Tribal education bill is the sole exception, requiring consultation with Indian Tribes before transfer — a protection that should tell the committee something about which children it did not think to protect in the other nine bills: Title I students, English learners, homeless students, disabled students, student parents.
A Simple Test or Question
There’s a simple test or question that should be asked: “Is it good for the children?”
What children deserve during consideration of these bills is a plain accounting of which children are served, how the receiving agency’s mission and expertise compare to the Department of Education’s, and what continuity of services looks like for a kid mid-school-year when the transfer takes effect.
Children have no vote on this committee. They have no PAC, no lobbyists, no seat at the markup table — and if these bills find their way to the President’s desk for signature, one fewer seat at the President’s Cabinet table as well. That is exactly why someone has to ask the one question this process keeps skipping.
Fortunately, the groups that signed the letter to “strongly oppose” this package of bills have asked and answered that question. Here is their conclusion:
We urge the Committee to reject these misguided bills and to instead exercise their oversight authority over the executive branch, and align with Congressional majorities in rejecting the dismantlement of the Department of Education. The American people support public education and want their leaders to focus on improving educational opportunity, not dissolving the agency tasked with that very mission.
What You Can Do
The public overwhelmingly opposes the dismantling of the U.S. Department of Education (only 22% support its elimination), and so the House committee is attempting to move this package of bills with as little attention as possible. Let’s change that.
If you agree that these bills should be opposed, please consider:
Calling your Member of Congress and urging them to oppose the package of bills from H.R. 9602-9611.
Sharing this post with others to alert them to what the House Education and the Workforce Committee is trying to do.
Becoming a paid subscriber to this newsletter, which supports our work in trying to give voice and attention to the critical public policy issues facing our nation’s children.
There are whole systems and economies built around the current structure- not saying they are sacred, but they have evolved for reasons. Under researching the cost effects of these changes is a typical rumpian move. It is selfish.