The fate of the U.S. Department of Education is currently in limbo. President Donald Trump came into office promising—among other things—to rid us of this unnecessary federal bureaucracy. Democrats, closely aligned with teachers unions, vowed to prevent him from doing anything of the sort. The Trump administration has offloaded many of the department’s responsibilities and dismissed staff, but without a congressional vote to abolish the department, those decisions have been challenged in court. As it now stands, the bureaucratic behemoth has been hobbled but not yet disposed of.

Many Good Reasons To Dump the Department and None To Keep It Around

As I pointed out in March, there are good reasons to get rid of the Department of Education. Education remains primarily a responsibility for families and the groups and businesses with which they work, followed by local and state governments. The Department of Education admits its role is limited, conceding, “of an estimated $1.15 trillion being spent nationwide on education at all levels for school year 2012-2013, a substantial majority will come from State, local, and private sources. This is especially true at the elementary and secondary level, where about 92 percent of the funds will come from non-Federal sources.”

With most money and effort for teaching kids derived from families, schools, publishers, and agencies located far from Washington, D.C., there really isn’t a strong argument for keeping the department around. As Frederick Hess, the director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), wrote in January: “Calls to abolish the department aren’t nearly as radical or threatening as much of the media coverage suggests. The Department of Education doesn’t educate anyone or run any schools or colleges. It’s a collection of 4,000 bureaucrats who mostly manage student loans, write rules, oversee various grant programs, and generate paperwork.”

The Department Is Pointless, Unconstitutional, and Intrusive

Worse, the department really doesn’t have any constitutional legitimacy whatsoever. Writing in March, Thomas A. Berry, director of the Cato Institute’s Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies, noted that “the vast majority of functions carried out by the Department of Education are not authorized by the Constitution. That is because the Co

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