South Dakota Senator Mike Rounds, who introduced the legislation last month To get rid of the Department of Education, he told ABC News that closing the agency could take “a couple of years.”
“We want to do it right,” Rounds said, and it’s unlikely the department will see major changes on Day 1 of the next administration. “This is not just a ‘making noise’ bill. This (bill) is serious. It took us a year and a half to write this bill.”
Senator Mike Rounds is seen at the US Capitol on December 4, 2024.
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Rounds’ “Bringing Education Back to Our States” invoice It’s based on one of President-elect Donald Trump’s main campaign promises. It has a roadmap for repeal, sending block grants to states and redistributing significant federal funding to other agencies, but it needs 60 votes in the Senate to pass and then become law.
“We’ve tried to set this up so that some of it can be done as part of reconciliation. Sometimes we’ll have to get consensus through executive order, and some of those could very well get 60 votes. So we might not get everything we want,” Rounds acknowledged.
Rounds said it has not been met or discussed invoice With Linda McMahon, Trump to elect the secretary of education. Meanwhile, Rounds stressed that federal programs that affect vulnerable students and those with special needs will not be dismantled.
Linda McMahon meets with Senator Tommy Tuberville in his office in the Russell Senate Office Building on December 9, 2024 in Washington.
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“We don’t want to lose specific offices that provide certain funds directed by Congress, such as special education, IDEA, etc.,” Rounds said, referring to the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. “All of that goes into the redirection to other locations, but all those offices still continue to divert that money back (to the states).”
Earlier this week, Alabama Sen. Tommy Tuberville, a member of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, told ABC News that getting the 60-vote threshold to pass legislation dismantling the agency would be “very difficult.”
“We have to downsize,” Tuberville said. “More money needs to go back to the states, all the states, and you know, we can have a group here, supposedly it could be the Department of Education, but having (4,000) or 5,000 people here makes a difference. I don’t mean to say, we need to take as much money as we can that we have, put them back in the states, put them in schools and give these students a chance.”
Senator Tommy Tuberville in his office in the Russell Senate Office Building on December 9, 2024 in Washington.
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Augustus Mays, vice president of partnerships and engagement at The Education Trust, said the grants could disproportionately affect marginalized students.
“If you were to remove or block funding that goes to IDEA, you’re going to have a situation that the law requires that students with disabilities not get the support they need for a free and appropriate public education,” Mays told ABC News.
“There could be $34 billion from the federal government going to all the states to help with those needs, and the states would pick up that bill…(Legislators) need to understand what that would really mean if they were to take away the Department of Ed,” he warned.
However, if the president-elect and his cabinet picks begin laying off federal workers, education experts suggest it would be too much work for a shrunken department to administer Education Department funds to states and distribute them to school districts. American University’s Clare McCann said skilled workers at the Department of Education would be prepared to do so.
“There’s a reason the Department of Education was created, and it was to have this kind of expertise and policy around these (education) issues,” McCann told ABC News. “The officials who work in the Department of Education are real experts in that field.”
Sen. Ted Budd, a Republican from North Carolina, said he disagreed with McCann’s position.
“The goal is more education, right?” he said “And do you need a massive government bureaucracy to do that? Probably not.”
Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky told ABC News that he will also introduce legislation to eliminate the Department of Education in the “early weeks” of the 119th Congress.
“There will be a sentence – the only thing that will change is the date: the Department of Education will end on December 31, 2026,” Massie told ABC News.
However, experts told ABC News Massie’s one-sentence bill may not be realistic, as all funding currently going to the department will have to be redirected.
“The Department of Education administers a lot of laws,” said Neal McCluskey, an education analyst at the libertarian Cato Institute think tank. “Those laws need to be changed in terms of who directs student aid and makes decisions about student debt cancellation and who decides or administers Title I and many of these other federal programs.”
