‘Giving up on our future’: Trump’s Department of Education dismantlement proposal is slammed by the department itself

The dismantling of the Department of Education represents more than administrative restructuring—it’s the culmination of what Jon Valant of the Brookings Institution calls “a complete violation of our laws—and what people want.”

When NEA President Becky Pringle declared Trump’s plan amounts to “giving up on our future,” she warned it would “steal resources for our most vulnerable students, explode class sizes, cut job training programs, make higher education more expensive… and gut student civil rights protections.”

Project 2025 makes its aims explicit: “Federal education policy should be limited and, ultimately, the federal Department of Education should be eliminated.” This radical manifesto pairs perfectly with Trump’s recent executive order demanding funding cuts from schools teaching about systemic racism and gender identity.

“If you want to control people, you interfere with their access to information,” warns Deborah Caldwell-Stone, director of the Office for Intellectual Freedom at the American Library Association. The ALA has documented 414 censorship attempts affecting over 1,100 titles in just eight months of 2024.

“This isn’t just about banning books—it’s about controlling education and access to information,” Caldwell-Stone adds. “And it’s getting worse.”

As Columbia University education expert Jeffrey R. Henig notes, “This administration is likely to use federal funding to pressure schools into restricting discussions on race, history, and systemic inequalities—taking the Florida model and expanding it nationally.” The funding goes toward books, school meals, special education services, school safety, teacher training, health services, and data collection on civil rights adherence.

The stakes couldn’t be higher. Nearly every school district receives federal funding, with southeastern states that supported Trump relying heavily on these resources. “The people who will hurt the most are Trump’s base,” explains Will Ragland from the Center for American Progress. “This will impact low-income white folks in the Southeastern part of the United States.”

“Without IDEA funding, special education programs go down the drain, fewer teachers are hired, and it would create a cascading effect,” Ragland continues. “Schools would have to move funds around and cut programs — maybe it would be band or science club or the football program.”

Author Ibram X. Kendi draws a stark historical parallel: “During Jim Crow, segregationists banned civil rights literature because they didn’t want people to see how unjust segregation was. Today, those trying to conserve racism are banning anti-racist books to keep people from understanding that racism still exists—and still harms people.” The core concept here is that if you can push books out of classrooms, the business of repeating the dark history in the books would come with less effort, fewer questions, and little moral inquisition.

This isn’t about fiscal responsibility or local control—it’s about imposing a specific religious and ideological worldview through government machinery. As Pringle emphasizes, “Americans did not vote for, and do not support, ending the federal government’s commitment to ensuring equal educational opportunities for every child.”

The elimination of the Department of Education would remove the primary federal defender of educational equity and civil rights protection, exposing already marginalized young learners vulnerable to discrimination without recourse—in other words, sanctioning cruel and cyclical punishment of vulnerable children. Remember when Robert Kennedy Jr. essentially said Black kids would need to just accept racism? It is because he meant it. After all, the plan appears to run the clock back to some semblance of Jim Crow. It would defund programs serving our most vulnerable students while accelerating the transformation of public education into a vehicle for religious indoctrination and historical revisionism.

The battle lines are drawn. At stake is not just an agency but the very concept of education as a force for equity and opportunity in American life. The question now is whether we’ll allow decades of progress toward educational justice to be sacrificed on the altar of religious extremism and political expediency.