Is This the Beginning of the End for the Department of Education?

On Tuesday, the Department of Education announced it was firing more than 1,300 workers as part of broader federal workforce cuts. The cuts reduce the agency’s employees by half, following 572 employees who took buyout offers and 63 provisional workers who were fired in February. 

“Today’s reduction in force reflects the Department of Education’s commitment to efficiency, accountability, and ensuring that resources are directed where they matter most: to students, parents, and teachers,” Secretary of Education Linda McMahon said in a Tuesday press release. “I appreciate the work of the dedicated public servants and their contributions to the Department. This is a significant step toward restoring the greatness of the United States education system.”

It’s unclear how the cuts will affect the department. McMahon framed the cuts as an attempt to increase efficiency and better serve students. However, considering that McMahon said last week that Trump plans to sign an executive order aimed at eventually shuttering the department, it’s hard not to see the layoffs as the first step in a plan to effectively abolish it. While it would take an act of Congress to formally scrap the Education Department, neutering its workforce might be the next best thing.

The announcement was almost immediately met with sharp criticism. “The real victims will be our most vulnerable students,” National Education Association President Becky Pringle said in a Tuesday statement. “Gutting the Department of Education will send class sizes soaring, cut job training programs, make higher education more expensive and out of reach for middle-class families.”

However, others noted that reducing the size of the Education Department—which hasn’t even existed for 50 years—could end up streamlining a large, ineffective bureaucracy.

“A 50 percent workforce reduction is sizeable and could very well be a good thing. We don’t know how many people are actually needed to execute [the education department's] jobs, and it’s time to find out if it’s been a bloated bureaucracy all along,” Neal McCluskey, director of the Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Freedom said Wednesday. “Of course, the unconstitutional Department should be eliminated, but that would take an act of Congress. For now, it will be good to see if taxpayers can save substantial money running the place.”

At the very least, since the vast majority of funding for U.S. public schools comes from local and state governments, there’s little reason to think that shrinking the Department of Education would affect K-12 students much. The department primarily focuses on administering the behemoth federal student loan program—though Trump also seems to have that in his sights as well. Last month, the Education Department froze applications for income-based loan repayment. And last week Trump signed an executive order limiting eligibility for Public Service Loan Forgiveness, targeting those who help break immigration laws or commit “the chemical and surgical castration or mutilation of children.” 

“I don’t think the Education [Department] should be handling the loans,” Trump said earlier this month. “That’s not their business.”

The post Is This the Beginning of the End for the Department of Education? appeared first on Reason.com.