Is the Department of Education the Ring of Power?

Why conservatives should eschew the burn-it-all-down impulse for an agenda of reform and improvement

A happy early St. Patrick’s Day to everyone who is Irish, or Irish at heart. If it’s Friday, it’s Family Matters:

• The Main Event: Rightsizing the Department of Education Doesn’t Mean Shuttering It

• It’s Me, Hi: Family Studies

• Parting Shots

The Main Event

After two years of enjoyable and even affectionate disagreement between co-hosts Ross Douthat, Carlos Lozada, and Michelle Cottle, the New York Times’ podcast “Matter of Opinion” recently closed its virtual doors. Like Sting post-The Police, Douthat will be going solo, with his own interview-based podcast coming soon to feeds everywhere. And as a teaser, the Times released a solo, long-form conversation with Douthat and anti-DEI activist

Christopher F. Rufo

, who can lay a convincing claim to being the most influential and effective policy entrepreneur of the Trump era.

Much of the conversation focuses on Rufo’s success in creating and sustaining Republican opposition to Critical Race Theory, influencing Gov. Ron DeSantis’ efforts to buttress parental rights in education and remake the New College of Florida, and other efforts to shift politics in a conservative direction. The last portion presages this week’s latest news from the Department of Education (Dept. of Ed., henceforth), that half its staff will be eliminated, starting next week.

Stock photo via Flickr

The Office of Education formerly operated under the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (and before that, the Department of the Interior) until the creation of the Department of Education in 1979. Ever since, closing down the Department has been a reliable rallying cry for conservatives ever since, from Ronald Reagan to John McCain to Pat Buchanan to Rick Perry (oops) to Vivek Ramaswamy to, now, both Trump-appointed Education Secretaries, Betsy DeVos and Linda McMahon.

Conservatives have every right to be fed up with some of the grants and efforts coming out of the Dept. of Ed. over the years. Criticizing, reforming, and ending those policies and approaches would be well worth the effort.

Instead, we are seeing the same impulse at the Dept. of Ed. that we’ve seen throughout the first couple months of the second Trump administration — chainsaw first, ask questions later. In their Times conversation, released prior to the announcement of the reduction in force, Rufo tells Douthat that “what should happen at the Department of Education is a U.S.A.I.D.-style dismantling,” allowing that programs that are “politically popular…are going to be very difficult to cut even if you wanted to do so.”

So student loans will (presumably) continue to be serviced; Title I dollars, which are authorized by Congress, will continue to flow. A full shuttering would require Congressional action.¹ but other high-salience areas of the department might be moved; in her confirmation hearing last month, Secretary McMahon suggested the Trump administration would look at moving civil rights enforcement to the Justice Department and services for disabled students to Health and Human Services. Of course, if the Dept. of Ed.’s major functions persist in other departments, it does raise the question of what substantive or political gains would come from largely shifting bodies around. And there are other things the Dept. of Ed. does that are not politically sensitive, but nevertheless productive, useful, and borderline essential.

Take the Institute of Education Sciences, which runs major research centers looking at everything from early childhood and special education to the What Works Clearinghouse and evaluation of career and technical education (occasionally referred to as vocational ed.) It wasn’t that long ago (2002) that a Republican administration created the IES because better data on student performance was seen as essential to improving education nationwide. From one perspective, you might think better data, available to all, would be at the top of an open-source “efficiency” agenda, particularly in an administration that rightly wants to put more power in parents’ hands. In 2018, long-time Brookings scholar Russ Whitehurst referred to the IES as a “model” for what federal research should look like.

Yet DOGE came in, guns blazing, and zeroed out contracts for the big, informative, longitudinal (that is, tracking the same cohort over time) studies of American high schoolers and other research efforts, surveys on topics of real-world interest like workforce readiness and crime in schools, as well as impact evaluations of D.C.’s scholarship program, Title I funding, and programs for students with disabilities. It’s hard to know how to spend money more efficiently if you are canceling the work product that is intended to tell you if you’re wasting money or not!

The latest reduction in headcount seems to have gone even further than cancelling contracts. Per the Hechinger Report’s Jill Barshay, “Nearly everyone at NCES [the National Center for Education Statistics] lost his/her job.” Reporting for NOTUS, Violet Jira cites sources claiming 98 percent of the NCES was eliminated, with more than 100 employees cut across IES. The NAEP assessment (“the nation’s report card”) and the College Scorecard, with its tracking of higher education costs and benefits, were reportedly spared the chopping block, though how that will work in practice with a beyond-decimated workforce remains unclear.

As Michael Petrelli, president of the Fordham Institute, suggested earlier this week:

“If there’s any part of the federal role that has enjoyed broad bipartisan support for basically forever, it’s research and data collection. Here’s hoping IES finds smart ways to boost efficiency and effectiveness so that crucial enterprise doesn’t suffer. Outside of IES, I don’t anticipate these staff cuts will make much of a difference in the real world of schools and classrooms.”

Petrelli is right about the broader impact on day-to-day schooling, but his remarks raise the obvious question — why wouldn’t DOGE (or its Dept. of Ed. equivalent) cordon off the basic statistical geekery of IES while trying to wring the woke out of the system? Maybe some of the answer is ignorance; a more concerning theory is that they see getting rid of these functions as a feature, not a bug. Here’s Rufo, gamely defending that territory in his conversation with Douthat:

Douthat: “Why wouldn’t you just say we’re going to have a Department of Education and it’s going to do the things that you yourself have described?…We’re going to continue to do educational research of various kinds, longitudinal research — I personally know more than a handful of center-right wonks who are very happy to do educational research that is not woke or progressive or ideological…Why wouldn’t you want to just run the actual bureaucracy?”

Rufo: “Here’s the problem, though: It’s very easy to cut external contracts. It’s very difficult to change the culture of an institution and the permanent bureaucracy of that institution…Conservatives cannot fully staff the Department of Education. Conservatives cannot fully compete for education grants, or university-level research programs. No, conservatives can’t do any of those things.

“So we have to figure out what we can do. Where can we have leverage? Where can we take over or recapture an institution? And if we can’t do those things, then what do we have to shut down? Shutting things down is actually a very effective strategy.”

I am open to a care from Rufo, or McMahon, or anyone involved in the downsizing effort at the Dept. of Ed. that the IES was running “woke” surveys, or using flawed methodological analysis, or using national surveys to subtly advance leftist priorities. Efforts to take certain left-leaning premises out of data collection are currently taking place at HHS.² And I have long been a source of annoyance to my peers by complaining that the intellectual right needs fewer Harvey Mansfield wannabes, and more aspiring James Q. Wilsons. In fact, I would argue the federal government actually does too little of the information gathering, descriptive statistics, and user-friendly dashboards that are available on the NCES website.

But those critiques are not what is being alleged. Rufo contends there simply aren’t enough true believers to staff even a stripped-down version of the Dept. of Ed.³ Thus, the presumption goes, it is better to eliminate these functions of the Dept. of Ed. altogether, rather than attempt to correct them, the better to prevent the forces of progressivism from maintaining a beachhead from which they might launch a counter-offensive somewhere down the line.

There is an intellectually consistent strain on the limited-government right that says there is no way to run a federal education agency that won’t end up captured by progressive activists. They would argue that trying to use the federal bureaucracy for conservative ends is like Isildur trying to wield the Ring of Power — it will only corrupt the user. But that’s a libertarian understanding of federal power, rather than a conservative one. There are plenty of conservative scholars who have written extensively about a helpful role for federal policy, supporting state experimentation and tracking what does and doesn’t work. As the example of Gov. DeSantis illustrates, an energetic executive with a focus on changing the direction of government institutions can use bureaucracy to advance conservative ends.

Losing longitudinal surveys and best-practices clearinghouses won’t set off the same alarm bells as would making it more difficult to access funds for disabled students or apply for financial aid. But they illustrate why the penny-wise, pound-foolish instinct to cut contracts based on keyword searches will have long-term consequences. The federal government has been tracking education data through the NCES and its predecessors since 1867. Cutting its capacity to monitor the American educational landscape — whether in a misguided hunt for pennies to pinch or an ideological push against the deep state — won’t improve America's schools or give parents better information. Re-hiring the IES staffers and undertaking a more careful assessment of what fat could be trimmed would be a start; anything but the DOGEist impulse to turn everything off and see what red lights start blinking.

It’s Me, Hi

For the Institute for Family Studies, I argue that advancing pro-family politics isn’t helped by ignoring basic economics or being too prescriptive about what family’s living situations ‘should’ look like:

“America is a nation that prizes individuality and choice. In our efforts to buttress family life, it’s important to identify the essentials—giving priority to policy choices that help more couples get married and more would-be parents have children—and allow for our nation’s rich diversity to put that into practice in more ways than central planners could ever imagine.”

Parting Shots

• The incomparable Richard Rubin reports that Senate Finance Committee Chairman Mike Crapo (R-Idaho) has at least some interest in adjusting the top-line value of Child Tax Credit for inflation as part of the upcoming reconciliation negations (Wall Street Journal)

• After the Biden adminstration developed a pilot program to rethink approaches to the the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program towards the end of 2024, the Trump administration has closed out that pilot program and says it will be issuing a new call for pilot proposals from states later this year (ACF)

• Céline Delacroix, a fellow with the Paul Ehrlich-aligned Population Institute, says policymakers should “embrace” a future of declining population, rather than try to fight it (The Conversation)

• Salim Furth provides some suggestive evidence that the relationship between urbanism and low fertility is about sorting, not causation (Market Urbanism)

• Richard Hanania
  recounts the failure of what he previously hailed as the “tech right,” and identifies Elon Musk’s reliance on sycophantic echo chambers as helping egg on his ill-informed political instincts (Unherd)

• In other Musk news: “My assigned sex at birth was a commodity that was bought and paid for. So when I was feminine as a child and then turned out to be transgender, I was going against the product that was sold.” (Buzzfeed)

• The American Principles Project released a scorecard in which they identify $128 million as having been spent by the Biden administration to advance a gender ideology approach to public policy

• A strong recommendation for

  Oren Cass
  ’ blunt truth-telling about the shady budget math some Republicans in Congress are trying to use to make $4.7 trillion to equal $0. (Financial Times)

• John Hopkins’ Ashley Rogers Berner is interviewed about the upcoming Oklahoma charter school case, and her vision of an authentically pluralist approach to education (The 74)

• Eamon Whalen pens a comprehensive profile of

  Richard V Reeves
  and the criticism he gets from the left for raising the question of how men in America are doing (The Nation)

• Members of Congress Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) and Brittany Pettersen (D-Colo.) are leading an effort to allow proxy voting on the House floor by new parents (Roll Call)

• Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine used his State of the State address to, among other things, highlight his push for a $1,000 state child tax credit, and to ban cell phones in K-12 schools (Cleveland.com)

• Utah lawmakers have voted to disband the state’s Women in the Economy Commission five years ahead of schedule (Salt Lake Tribune)

• Missouri lawmakers are considering a dollar-for-dollar, 100% tax credit for pregnancy resource centers, which would allow taxpayers to donate up to $50,000 each year in lieu of paying state income taxes (Fox News)

Comments and criticism both welcome, albeit not quite equally; send me a postcard, drop me a line, and then sign up for more content and analysis from EPPC scholars.

1. Closing the Dept. of Ed. would thrill conservative voters while likely losing some support from undecideds — a recent Quinnipiac poll found that 67 percent of Republicans supported the elimination of the Department of Education, while 64 percent of independents and 98 percent (lol) of Democrats opposed it.

2. For example, the CDC shuttered its Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System, a key source of data tracking risk factors in pregnancy — Josh Marshall reports the tool will (eventually) come back online without the questions that were added in 2023. It would have been nice to have a more transparent process and an explanation of how and why PRAMS was being taken offline, but focusing survey questions on essentials and scrubbing add-ons like wording about the social determinants of health is by no means out-of-bounds.

3. There is a long debate on the right over whether the talent gap in potential civil servants is due to discrimination in academia, lack of interest from young people, or something else. That said, I don’t actually think there aren’t enough conservative-leaning wonks to fill critical roles at the Dept. of Ed. And, as Douthat notes in their Times podcast, if there aren’t enough at the federal level, expecting enough high-quality conservatives to staff up state education agencies seems even more likely to disappoint.