Abolishing the Education Department Was Supposed to Be the Easy Part

The Conservative Critique Worth Taking Seriously

Frederick Hess at the American Enterprise Institute has been asking a pointed question publicly: where is the evidence that any of this reduces red tape? [3] That's not a progressive objection. Hess has spent his career arguing that federal education bureaucracy distorts local decision-making and produces worse outcomes for students. His critique isn't that the mission is wrong — it's that the administration hasn't shown its work. Moving programs from one federal agency to another doesn't reduce federal programs. It just gives them new letterhead. Jim Blew, a former Trump administration official at the Defense of Freedom Institute, is taking a different posture — urging conservatives to stop publicly airing doubts and avoid giving opponents ammunition. That's a reasonable political instinct and a flawed governance philosophy. Margaret Spellings, who served as Secretary of Education under George W. Bush, is asking the most grounded question of all: what does "returning education to the states" actually mean for the child sitting in a classroom? [1] That question deserves a real answer, not a press release. ---

The goal was never to move the bureaucracy. The goal was to reduce it. Those are different things, and conservatives should be honest about which one is happening.

— Ella Smart, The Chronicle

Bureaucracy Is Remarkably Good at Surviving Its Own Abolition

This is not a new phenomenon. Federal agencies, once created, are extraordinarily resistant to elimination. The political economy of bureaucracy favors its own preservation — there are always constituencies who benefit from its existence, always career officials who are skilled at transforming reform directives into reorganization memos that change the org chart and nothing else. The Education Department has existed since 1979. It has survived eight administrations and innumerable reform efforts. The inspector general's office flagged oversight risks in February — a warning worth examining carefully [1]. When you transfer programs rapidly between agencies, accountability gaps open. Who is responsible for ensuring the money goes where Congress intended? Who answers when something goes wrong? These are not progressive talking points designed to slow down reform. They are the administrative basics that determine whether policy actually works. A conservative movement that has spent decades arguing that government is incompetent should be first in line to demand competent governance from its own administration. ---

Movement Credibility Is Earned Through Delivery

There is a broader principle at stake here that conservatives ignore at their peril. The argument for limited government is, at its core, an argument about competence as much as philosophy. The left's position — that federal programs are necessary, beneficial, and well-administered — is falsified by evidence every time a federal program fails visibly. But the right's position — that government should do less, and what it does, it should do well — requires demonstrating that the "do well" part is real. One notes, perhaps with a small amount of irony, that the same week this debate is unfolding within the conservative movement, certain commentators are deeply exercised about federal law enforcement operating on university campuses [2]. The question of what federal government does and does not do well is genuinely interesting. Those who have spent years defending every expansion of federal authority in education have perhaps not interrogated the department's 45-year track record as closely as the current critics are doing now. Outcomes on reading and math have been largely flat since the department's creation. That is not incidental. It is the argument. ---

What Success Would Actually Look Like

Hess and others aren't wrong to demand a clear definition of success. If the goal is to reduce the federal footprint in K-12 education, there are measurable outcomes that would demonstrate progress: fewer federal mandates reaching into classroom curricula, fewer compliance requirements consuming school district administrators' time, more flexibility for states to design their own accountability systems. None of those outcomes are guaranteed — or even tracked — by the current reorganization [3]. What would a credible conservative education reform agenda look like? It would start with identifying exactly which federal strings are attached to which programs, then cutting the strings rather than just moving the programs. It would require working with Congress — something executive action alone cannot replace — to actually reduce the statutory authority behind these programs. It would demand a clear answer to Spellings's question: what happens to the child in the classroom, and is it better or worse than before? ---

The Easy Part Is Done

Announcing the breakup of the Education Department is easy. Generating favorable press coverage when Charlie Kirk hangs a banner celebrating it is easy [2]. The hard part is what comes next: proving, through actual outcomes, that the reorganization improved anything for anyone other than the organizers. The conservative scholars raising these questions are doing the movement a favor. Movements that cannot tolerate internal criticism — that mistake dissent for disloyalty — tend to find out the hard way that reality does not honor their feelings. The administration should welcome the scrutiny from Hess, respond substantively to Spellings, and give the inspector general the access and resources needed to monitor the transition responsibly. This is what governing actually requires. It is harder than campaigning. It always is. And if the right wants to use the Education Department's dismantling as proof that limited government works, it needs the dismantling to actually work — not just look like it does from the outside. --- ## Word Count Estimate ~1,010 words (body text only, excluding metadata) ## Jab Note Paragraph at [sortOrder: 12] contains a pointed-but-unnamed aside — "the same week this debate is unfolding within the conservative movement, certain commentators are deeply exercised about federal law enforcement operating on university campuses" — a direct but unnamed reference to Jack's Columbia ICE detention article. The follow-through argument (the Education Department's 45-year flat outcomes record) does the rhetorical work without requiring the jab to be explicit. ## Image Sources to Verify Before Publishing - Featured: Wikimedia Commons — LBJ Department of Education Building (confirm URL resolves to 200) - Inline 1: Unsplash classroom — verify URL resolves to 200 - Inline 2: Unsplash Capitol/DC — verify URL resolves to 200