Abolishing the Education Department Is the First Honest Thing Anyone Has Done for Students in Thirty Years

The Department That Ate a Generation

The U.S. Department of Education was established in 1979 under Jimmy Carter. At the time, advocates promised it would improve educational outcomes, direct federal resources more effectively, and provide national coordination for a school system that was struggling. Here is what happened instead: student loan debt went from approximately $90 billion in 1999 to over $1.7 trillion today. Reading and math scores have been essentially flat for forty years despite enormous increases in per-pupil spending. And the administrative apparatus that manages all of this has grown from a few hundred employees to over four thousand, consuming billions in overhead that never touches a classroom.

The Department didn't fail. It performed exactly as federal bureaucracies perform: it grew, it entrenched, and it served the interests of the institutions it was supposed to regulate rather than the students it was supposed to help.

Trump's push to abolish it — including transferring the student loan portfolio, which represents over $1.7 trillion in outstanding debt, out of Education Secretary Linda McMahon's purview — is not radical. It is overdue.

The Student Loan Machine

The student loan program is the clearest case study in how federal intervention in a market produces the opposite of its stated goals. The government made college debt easily available and federally guaranteed, removing risk from lenders and disconnecting borrowing decisions from repayment reality. Universities responded rationally: they raised tuition at rates that consistently outpaced inflation, knowing that federally-backed loans would cover the gap regardless of whether the degree produced value for the student.

Between 1980 and 2020, college tuition increased by approximately 1,200 percent — more than four times the rate of general inflation. That number is not disputed. What is disputed is the cause. Universities blame declining state funding. The honest analysis points at the federal loan machine that gave every institution permission to expand cost without consequence.

The students who borrowed $80,000 to study fields with $35,000 starting salaries weren't stupid. They were responding to incentives a federal system created. Fixing the system means changing the incentives — which requires structural reform that cannot happen as long as the Education Department remains the administrative home of a $1.7 trillion loan portfolio it has every institutional reason to protect.

What Happens When Washington Steps Back

The argument against abolishing the Education Department relies on the claim that federal oversight protects vulnerable students and ensures quality. Show me the evidence. Test scores have not improved. Graduation rates at many federal loan-recipient institutions are scandalously low. The department's own data shows that borrowers from for-profit colleges — institutions the department was supposed to regulate — defaulted at rates exceeding 40 percent.

My brother-in-law is a high school principal in rural Texas. He'll tell you that federal education mandates consume administrative time and resources that could go to instruction, while producing compliance paperwork that no teacher finds useful and no student benefits from. He's been saying this for fifteen years. Nobody in Washington has listened because the bureaucracy that generates the mandates also employs the people who enforce them.

Transferring the student loan portfolio is a mechanism for reform, not an abandonment of students. The loans exist regardless. The question is what administrative structure best serves borrowers' interests — and the answer is almost certainly not the same agency that oversaw the explosion of that debt in the first place.