McMahon Says “Clock Is Ticking” on Education Department

Education Secretary Linda McMahon indicated Tuesday that she’s planning to take the major next step in fulfilling President Trump’s campaign promise to dismantle the Department of Education.

The secretary posted an ominous video of a ticking clock followed by President Ronald Reagan urging Congress to dissolve the Department of Education. The video ended with a flickering screen that read, “The Final Mission,” an echo of her first letter to Education Department staff, in which she outlined how she would put herself out of a job. All the post itself said was “The clock is ticking …”

McMahon is expected to sign multiple interagency agreements at 2 p.m. Tuesday that could ship the responsibilities of key offices including Civil Rights, Postsecondary Education, Special Education and Rehabilitative Services, and Elementary and Secondary Education off to other departments, according to multiple sources familiar with the talks. However, it remains unclear which offices and programs will be offloaded to which agencies—or how many offices will ultimately be moved.

Some plans for dismantling the Education Department called for moving OCR to the Department of Justice and having the Health and Human Services take over some special ed services.

A department spokesperson told The Washington Post, which also reported Tuesday on the plans, that some details about the agreements were wrong but didn’t provide more information. Inside Higher Ed has not heard back from the department.

The rumored plans could mirror the department’s May agreement to move Career, Technical and Adult Education to the Department of Labor. McMahon has said that the effort was essentially a test run to see how other agencies could handle the department’s responsibilities. Democrats in Congress have decried the plan to move CTE to Labor as illegal.

The announcement comes just a day after McMahon published an op-ed in USA Today arguing that the recent 43-day government shutdown “proved just how little the Department of Education will be missed.”

“This administration is aggressively reducing and reforming the federal education bureaucracy to prove that there is a smarter way to deliver quality education at every level,” McMahon wrote. “Our reforms are more than a proof of concept; they are the first step toward congressional legislation that will make these changes permanent.”

Many of the department’s offices have already experienced dramatic disruptions this year, as McMahon used two reductions in force to cut the head count of her staff by more than 50 percent. The latest mass layoff, which took place during the government shutdown, has since been enjoined by a federal court. President Trump also agreed to return affected employees to “employment status” with the administration when he signed a stopgap bill to temporarily end the shutdown.

But it remains unclear whether those staff members have or will ever return to work. Multiple sources told Inside Higher Ed that the language of the bill may allow Trump to leave employees on paid administrative leave until the bill is no longer effective on Jan. 30 and then re-administer the pink slips.

Prior to Tuesday’s announcement, many higher education experts as well as current and former ED employees were hesitant to declare the department dead. Some said as long as the department and its functions remain codified, it will still be alive. But one former staff member put it this way: “If you take the major organs out of a human, do you still have a human or do you have a corpse?”

Amy Laitinen, senior director of the higher education program at New America, a left-leaning think tank, said moving the offices to other federal agencies would not save tax dollars.

“It fractures and weakens oversight of those dollars, it’s duplicative, and it’s wasteful,” she said. “How are you tracking student outcomes to ensure taxpayer dollars are well spent when all of the entities responsible are scattered to the wind? For example, separating the agency in charge of financial aid policy (OPE) from the entity responsible for financial aid implementation (FSA) makes no sense.”