The U.S. Department of Education Needs to Exist

The U.S. Department of Education (ED) is one of the smallest agencies in the federal government, in terms of staffing, but one of the most impactful on the lives of Americans. It touches the lives of millions of students every year from early childhood education through graduate school. Without the support provided by ED, we wouldn’t have adequately trained teachers in the classroom, highly-skilled nurses by our parent’s hospital beds, or computer scientists developing cutting edge AI.

While the U.S. Department of Education we know today was created in 1979 under President Jimmy Carter, it was actually first established in 1867 by President Andrew Johnson to gather information about schools and teaching to help states improve their school systems. It is ironic, therefore, that the first major action against ED from the so-called Department of Governmental Efficiency (DOGE) is the gutting of the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), the part of the Department that collects statistical information and evaluates promising educational practices. Without the data collected by NCES, we would not know how effective our educational system is or how it can be improved.

While calls to dismantle ED have focused on it’s bureaucracy, as a veteran ED public servant with many years of service to the American people, I know firsthand that its ED’s relatively small size and centralization of staff with deep educational knowledge and ties to state and local partners that allows it to be quick and nimble to best serve the needs of students across the country. There is no better illustration than when ED steps in during a national crisis. I share this example to empower others, like me, to share their own.

Lessons of Katrina

On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina struck the gulf coast of the United States leaving severe devastation in New Orleans and other communities spanning from Texas to Mississippi. As a result of the hurricane, the population of the city of New Orleans fell dramatically and has been slow to recover. The population fell by half from roughly 485,000 in 2000 to 230,000 in 2006 in the immediate aftermath of the storm.

Higher education institutions and the students they served were similarly devastated. In the fall of 2005, the 11 postsecondary institutions in New Orleans—community colleges, 4-year colleges and universities, and trade and technical schools—enrolled approximately 66,000 students. They all were largely forced to temporarily cease operations. Many of these institutions suffered significant physical damage—in some cases insured but in most not—and the city itself lacked basic services.

For the most part, the federal government was slow to respond to the urgent needs of the people and institutions in New Orleans and the broader gulf coast region. However, ED stood out for its timely and proactive response to the crisis.

All federal agencies had explicit direction to respond to the urgent needs of the region. Although President Bush was criticized for flying over New Orleans rather than landing to see what help was needed, he did call an emergency cabinet meeting upon returning to Washington. At that meeting, he urged all federal agencies to do whatever was necessary to restore the region.

So, why was ED able to respond more aggressively than other agencies that received the same instruction? The primary reason was that ED had many fewer management layers than other agencies. The relatively small size when compared to other federal agencies and lack of bureaucracy made it possible for ED to respond more quickly than nearly any other.

Ray Simon, then ED’s deputy secretary, attended the cabinet meeting on behalf of the agency. On the way back from the cabinet meeting, he called a meeting of senior political and career officials across ED, and they started to act immediately. In the case of higher education, the offices responsible for administering the federal student aid programs – the Office of Postsecondary Education, Federal Student Aid, and the Office of the General Counsel -- began making the adjustments necessary to smooth the path for students to take their federal aid with them to attend one of the many institutions of higher education that hosted them across the country for the fall semester.

To ensure the long-term viability of the institutions impacted by Hurricane Katrina and the broader community that depends on their existence for jobs and other economic activity, the Department’s leadership also took steps to:

• Allow the institutions to retain federal student aid funds that had already been provided.
• Seek additional flexibilities including the ability to transfer additional funds between campus-based aid programs, waive cost-sharing requirements, and secure additional campus-based funding from Congress.
• Disburse gifts made by foreign countries to help the rebuilding of educational systems and institutions.
• Allow students to receive financial aid without being enrolled as a “regular student” for the 2005 fall term as long as they returned to their impacted institution when it resumed operation.

All these steps could only be accomplished due to the Department's ability to act nimbly and to work collaboratively across the agency and with the institutions, states, and communities impacted. While the Office of Management and Budget and other agencies in the executive branch were involved in the broader and substantially more pressing recovery efforts, ED was able to focus on helping students and ensuring the survival of the colleges and universities in New Orleans.

Such a response would not have been possible if the functions of the Department of Education had been widely dispersed across multiple federal agencies as some are proposing. National emergencies that impact lives of students across the country have and will happen again. But hacking up ED and distributing it across the government, will not only make a central part of our Federal government less effective and add bureaucracy, it will cause an emergency that would be self-inflicted.

For more on New America's growing collection of posts and statements on defending the Department of Education, see here.