Statement from All4Ed on the Dismantling of the U.S. Department of Education
“This reckless reshuffle risks students’ rights, resources, and results.”
Date: Tuesday, November 18, 2025
Contact: Enrique A. Chaurand
Email: echaurand@all4ed.org
Washington, D.C. – All4Ed strongly condemns Secretary Linda McMahon and the Trump administration for continuing their illegal, reckless, and destabilizing plan to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education and outsource critical responsibilities to the Departments of Labor, Interior, Health and Human Services, and the State Department—agencies that lack the expertise, capacity, and mandate to serve our nation’s students.
Interagency agreements are common for discrete initiatives — not for the wholesale transfer of statutory responsibilities and entire offices from one agency to another. Appropriations law specifically prohibits the transfer of funding among departments. Earlier this year, the Senate Appropriations Committee passed bipartisan legislation preventing the transfer of functions related to Title I and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act away from the Department of Education.
The six new interagency agreements released today effectively transfer significant programs and funding out of the Department of Education, reducing the offices impacted—the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education and the Office of Postsecondary Education—to skeletal statutorily-required functions and positions.
This is not restructuring. This is an intentional effort to gut federal directives and protections and abandon millions of students, particularly those in low-income communities, students of color, English learners, Native students, and first-generation college-goers.
It’s tragic that the administration is carrying out its illegal and misguided plan to dismantle the Department of Education against the wishes of the American people. And let’s be clear: only Congress has the power to abolish the Education Department — and Congress must act decisively to protect it. The administration’s attempt to shift programs across the federal government by meeting the bare minimum of the law while transferring the vast bulk of the work of these offices is a blatant effort to maneuver around that authority.
The dismantling of the Department of Education is illegal. The offices being gutted have specific responsibilities delegated to them by Congress — responsibilities that cannot simply be transferred at will. Under the administration’s plan, billions of dollars in education funding — including programs supporting English learners, college access, teacher preparation, and disadvantaged youth — will be scattered across four other federal agencies with competing missions and no accountability to our students and their affected families.
One of the offices being transferred is the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education, which implements the nation’s primary law supporting K–12 education and oversees more than $18 billion in Title I funding for low-income students. The administration is shifting this responsibility to the Department of Labor — an agency whose mission is to train adult workers with barriers to employment and place them in jobs, not to educate young people or ensure they lead choice-filled lives. In addition to Title I, the Labor Department will now have responsibility for administering funding that supports after school programs, highly mobile students, mental health services, students experiencing homelessness, literacy, and more in K12 education—as well as the majority of programs in postsecondary education. Each of these programs falls well outside the expertise and legal purview of the Department of Labor.
The Department of Education has already illegally transferred the Office of Career, Technical, and Adult Education to the Department of Labor. The result? More bureaucracy, not less. States are struggling to draw down funds, communication with the field has been constrained, and the Labor Department has been delayed in issuing notices, trainings, information sessions, and routine guidance on how taxpayer dollars are being used to support students.
This is not reform — it is sabotage.
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