Trump Wants To Dismantle the Education Department. What Would That Mean for Harvard?

Since his first term in the White House, President Donald Trump has set his sights on shuttering the Department of Education. Now, as the administration has cut hundreds of millions of dollars in its funding and fired more than half of its workforce, he is getting closer to his goal.

Professors and legal experts agree that the department’s wholesale closure is unlikely, as it would require a congressional supermajority. But they warn that continued funding cuts and departmental restructuring could prove detrimental to Harvard’s education research and federal student aid — as well as complicating the federal investigations into antisemitism on college campuses.

“We’ve already seen assaults on education in Massachusetts, but we’ve got a strong backbone in terms of our leadership,” Paul Reville, former Massachusetts Secretary of Education and Harvard professor, said.

“But it’s going to be a stormy and turbulent period,” he added. “There’s going to be a lot of collateral damage along the way.”

Waiting for Congress

Eliminating the Department of Education in its entirety will likely be an uphill battle for the Trump administration — one that many experts do not believe will come to pass.

Reville, the Harvard Graduate School of Education professor, noted that since the Department was formed in 1979 by an act of Congress, “the only thing that can eliminate the Department is another act of Congress.”

“They’re probably trying to figure out whether they have sufficient support of Congress to eliminate the department, and they may not,” Reville said.

Paul E. Peterson, a Harvard government professor and director of the University’s Program on Education Policy and Governance, said such an act would require a “supermajority in the Senate.”

“That means you’ve got to get support from across the political aisle, and that’s going to be difficult to do with any piece of education legislation that contemplates closing a department,” he added.

Though closing the doors of the Department of Education would be cumbersome, the Trump administration could weaken the Department by shifting some of its responsibilities to other federal agencies.

“They’re going to have difficulty in eliminating the department, which doesn’t mean they can’t downsize it,” Reville said.

Reville added that potential reorganizations could harm universities depending on whether “the successor entities were to administer the grants.”

“You have to differentiate between eliminating the agency or eliminating the grants or the programs that the agency administers,” he added. “The question will be: are the funds going to still keep coming, but just originate in a different department of the federal government, or are they going to use this as a pretext for reducing or eliminating the funding?”

Peterson said that some of the Department’s programs could be turned into block grants sent to states that allows “the states to spend it as they prefer,” rather than establishing federal spending guidelines.

Reville said that turning categorical grants into block grants, spent at the discretion of states, would “be a disaster for those populations who these grants were designed to serve.”

It “would take an act of Congress to change the intent of that line in the budget,” Reville said. “But nonetheless, I expect they’ll try to do that.”

He added that any changes to the structure of the Department are likely to have a “disproportionate effect” on Massachusetts, because of its high concentration of universities and colleges.

“We have a high concentration of elite higher education institutions, which seem to be particularly targeted by this administration,” he added.

‘Back on the States’

The Office for Civil Rights, one of the 17 offices of the Department of Education, currently enforces and investigates allegations of discrimination against federal law. But if the department is closed or reconfigured, the OCR’s existing standards to determine discrimination could be left to the interpretation of individual states — even as the standards take center stage into federal investigations of antisemitism on university campuses.

Regina M. Federico, a civil litigator specializing in Higher Education Disciplinary Misconduct and Due Process, said that decisions on how to interpret federal laws preventing discrimination could be given to the states, rather than the federal government, if the department is shuttered.

“Maybe in the future, the DOE would say, ‘We’re only going to handle these specific things, and then everything else goes to the states,’” she said. “I can also just see them putting everything back on the states, saying ‘It’s up to all of you to figure out how you want to interpret these federal laws.’”

Federico added that if the federal government delegated this power to the states, the decentralization would quickly catalyze disputes in court.

“Those cases will be the next hot-button area that come up,” Federico said. “Just because certain initiatives may not be occurring, there are still state and federal laws that make discrimination against the law and prevent that from happening.”

Massachusetts is one of the states with more robust protections for discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, or sex. State law prevents employers, including universities, from firing or preventing employment based on these factors.

Peterson said that he expects the federal OCR “to continue, but it’s going to be pursuing policies that are about 180 percent turnaround from those of the Biden administration.”

Last month, the Trump administration formed a federal task force on combating antisemitism, which included representatives from the Department of Education. The task force has set out to investigate 10 colleges and universities, including Harvard.

The OCR itself has also taken action against multiple universities — including a recent letter sent to Harvard and 59 other schools informing them they could be penalized for allowing “antisemitic harassment and discrimination.”

Even as the OCR’s stability is threatened by the potential dismantling of the Department of Education, Kenneth K. Wong, a professor of education policy at Brown University and a former advisor to the U.S. Secretary of Education, said that the Trump administration is moving to use the OCR “more aggressively” to monitor universities like Harvard for potential antisemitism violations.

“They are now sending a very strong signal to the universities that: ‘Okay, if you are not stepping up, if you are not visibly engaging in stopping and addressing some of these antisemitic activities, then we are going to come in and do the job for you,’” Wong said.

‘More Difficult for Researchers’

Education research funded by the Department has already been reduced by Trump’s funding cuts, but professors said that the potential closure could worsen the situation.

The Institute of Education Sciences currently provides millions of dollars in grants and statistical data for research projects that focus on education-related issues. Since 2005, research projects led by Harvard faculty have received a total of nearly $60 million in grants from the IES, as well as funding for Harvard’s Center for Education Policy Research.

Joshua S. Goodman ’00, a professor of education and economics at Boston University and a former professor at the Harvard Kennedy School, said that the IES works “to figure out which policies work so that we don’t waste money on the policies that don't work.”

“So the net effect of cutting that IES budget is likely to mean that we’re going to waste a lot of future dollars pursuing education policies,” Goodman added.

Last month, the Trump administration cut nearly $900 million in IES contracts. As a part of these cuts, contracts with the IES’ Regional Education Laboratories, which help education stakeholders apply and understand research findings, were terminated.

Christopher Dede, a senior research fellow and former professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, said the Regional Education Laboratories “were very valuable in terms of implementation and support for innovative parts of education.”

“It will be more difficult for researchers to bridge to having an impact on practice and being able to scale their findings into practice,” Dede added.

Dede, who has led education research projects funded by the IES, said it is “a dangerous time to be cutting back on national investments in education, and in particular in research.”

Cuts to IES funding comes amidst larger federal funding cuts to higher education — prompting Harvard to freeze faculty hiring and reduce Ph.D admissions offers.

In addition to the contract cuts, the review of IES grant awards have also stopped — impacting higher education research projects and training grants for doctoral students.

Wong, the professor at Brown, said “we'll have to really worry about the next generation of strong education researchers that are being trained around the country in higher education.”

Goodman said that it’s “been really hard to watch” some of his colleagues’ research projects, which previously depended on federal funds, get canceled.

“Arguably the most short sighted form of is that there are projects that are partially complete that are now not going to ever be completed,” Goodman said.

‘Devastating Effects’

The Department of Education also controls federal student aid programs, including Pell grants, student loans, and work-study opportunities. While Trump’s attempts to dismantle the department would reclassify the programs under alternative federal departments, experts predict that the aid will largely remain untouched.

Trump told reporters on March 6 that the student loan program “would be brought into either” the Department of the Treasury, the Small Business Administration, or the Department of Commerce.

“We actually had that discussion today,” Trump said. “I don’t think the Education should be handling the loans. That’s not their business.”

Peterson, the government professor, said that he has not “seen any actions taken by the Trump administration that would affect” student loan and grant programs.

Wong said that the wholesale elimination of these programs is “unlikely” considering “the popularity of the programs across all 50 states.”

“There’s a substantial percentage of college students in Ivy League institutions, as well as in other institutions, that really depend on Pell Grants,” Wong said. “Eliminating those programs would have devastating effects on educational opportunities of these students.”

According to the University’s Financial Aid Fact Sheet, 20 percent of Harvard’s undergraduate class receives Pell Grants, around 2,500 undergraduate and graduate students participate in the University’s Federal Work-Study Program, and 3 percent of undergraduates borrowed federal loans.

But grants and loans from the Department of Education only contribute to the 6 percent of Harvard’s financial aid, according to the University’s FY 2023 fiscal overview.

“The people who want to eliminate these programs would have to make an extremely compelling argument,” Wong said.

—Staff writer Annabel M. Yu can be reached at annabel.yu@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @annabelmyu.

—Staff writer Sheerea X. Yu can be reached at sheerea.yu@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @_shuhree_.