Can Ed's toothpaste go back in the tube?
A lot is riding on the Education-DOL merger, which is far from permanent in its construction.
The issue.
The second Trump Administration has stuffed a whole lot of the Department of Education into the Department of Labor. Success is harder than it looks for an arrangement that is more easily undoable than you might think.
Explain.
Here’s what I think you should keep in mind about the second Trump Administration’s efforts to pour much of the Department of Education into the Department of Labor:
It’s tentative. In all directions.
Granted, nothing is tentative about all the people the Trump Administration has fired to “dismantle” Ed—or the pains that might be felt by program grantees and beneficiaries if the Ed-to-DOL transition goes awry. That said, on paper, the infrastructure of the Department of Education is still there. In the appropriations bill passed at the top of the month, a very Trump-friendly Congress barely cut the agency, including largely preserving the staffing budget for an agency that has dumped half of its staff. The legal means of reversing the moves is much speedier than I think many folks assume. The programs—and likely the staff loaned to Labor—could be pulled back to Ed within a quarter.
Of course, just because it’s easier to roll back than leaders here in Washington think doesn’t mean they’ll actually try to do it. For a year, I have heard folks across the political spectrum say they aren’t opposed to merging Ed and DOL’s workforce programs under one set of management, just the Trump Administration’s handling of it. One Senate Democrat opined as much late last year.
A lot of the next few years of American workforce policy will turn on how the Ed-DOL marriage pans out. To set the table, today I’m taking a closer look at the legal means of the move, where it could go badly, and the pressures on the Trump Administration—and its critics—to produce results.
90 days.
Something folks have asked me a lot since last summer is how quickly the executive branch could undo the Ed-DOL marriage. On paper, the answer is 90 days—which can be kind of dumbfounding considering the conceptual hugeness of untangling the two agencies’ programs.
To understand why, and how relatively thin the legal underpinnings are for the Ed-DOL arrangement, let’s get to know the toolbox the Trump Administration is using to “dismantle” Ed, a long-held goal of the conservative thinktanks that flavor the Administration’s policy, but not so much the Congress that can actually dismantle Ed.1
Something I did a lot in the federal government was negotiating and building out what are called “interagency agreements.” For the uninitiated, the federal government is legally considered one entity, but the law allows different parts of it to “contract” with one another—sometimes to save money, sometimes because it doesn’t make sense to go outside the government to get something. To offer a rough strawman for the latter scenario, if the Treasury Department needs weather information to run a program, it makes sense it would enter an agreement with NOAA, which is under the Commerce Department, to get that information.
It’s also not unheard of for an agency that has money but doesn’t have subject-matter expertise to effectively contract out the operation of the program to an agency that does. So, to extend the above example, say Congress gives Treasury a grant program to harness atmospheric conditions to literally make it rain money. Treasury knows money and its ability to fall from high-up places to down-low places, but it doesn’t know atmospheric conditions. It could use an interagency agreement to buy NOAA’s expertise to help run the money-raining grant program.
In a rough sense, Trump II has taken a similar approach to its “dismantling” of the Education Department. Ed is largely a blanket made of dozens of funding programs that Congress has aimed in the direction of American schools and colleges. So, like my strawman money-raining program, Trump II has used interagency agreements to split Ed’s programs and move them to agencies around the government to run them instead, with a great many of them now under the umbrella of the Department of Labor.2 Ed’s workforce programs came over in an agreement that became enforceable last summer in a move pitched as doing the workforce things better by moving the programs to DOL, the federal government’s chief workforce agency. Last fall, the two agencies struck similar, but far less cohesive agreements to carry out the on-paper migration of Ed’s preschool, K-12, and postsecondary programs to DOL.
Thing is, interagency agreements are, again, like contracts, not a statute. Most statutes don’t have get-out clauses. Interagency agreements do.
The Trump Administration’s get-out clause for the Ed-DOL agreement sets a short timeframe for the getting out. Here’s the text duplicated across the Ed-DOL agreements:
There is no statutory or regulatory backstop to Trump II’s moves. From a legal perspective, ending these agreements means ending the migration of Ed programs to DOL.3
Meaning that, on paper, yes, these programs could go home in 90 days.
The people and money things that probably would take more than 90 days to undo.
“On paper” isn’t real life,4 which requires deploying people and systems to see through this kind of move. While I don’t have all the specifics on the people front, typical federal practice suggests that the migration of Ed to DOL is far from irrevocable. The systems side would present a trickier, but not insurmountable, challenge.
At least some the staffing of the Ed-DOL move is being done through the detailing, or interagency loan, of Ed staff to DOL. For example, Ed’s higher education staff moved to DOL on detail announced in January. Generally, federal staff on detail don’t really “move” agencies. For example, in 2017, I was detailed to DOL’s Office of Apprenticeship from DOL’s Solicitor’s Office. What that meant is that I was still a Solicitor’s Office employee, and the Solicitor’s Office still accounted for my salary out of its budget. Absent some circumstances that I understand to be rare, I would be shocked if that wasn’t the case with the Ed staff who are now part of the DOL team, particularly since these agencies were funded at pre-Trump levels in recent appropriations.
Details require agreements between the agencies, too. Those agreements typically allow for termination if, say, the point of the detail no longer exists. I would be curious to see what is in the detail agreements for the Ed-to-DOL staff moves, including if they also have a 90-day termination clause tied to the interagency agreements. I also wonder how much Trump II has interpolated DOL staff into Ed programs, something I imagine is a work in progress. Because if Ed staff that worked on Ed programs before the move to DOL are just doing most of the same things but at DOL, then there’s much less work needed to unwind the staffing side of the Ed-DOL marriage if it goes away.
Not so easily unwound? The changes made by Ed and DOL in how Ed money gets to grantees, as well as an ongoing effort to merge Ed and DOL planning processes key to dollars meted out by formula to states. Not to diminish the Smucker’s Goober-like impact of administratively injecting Ed’s career and technical education jelly stripes into DOL’s federal workforce system peanut butter jar, but the payment system migration is where Ed grantees are feeling the most potential peril at the moment.
Ed previously had its own, custom-built system for delivering cash to grantees. Its grants money is moving to the anonymously named “Payment Management System,” or PMS. DOL has used that system, operated by the Department of Health and Human Services, for delivering grant dollars. Prior to the move, PMS already handled 70 percent of the federal government’s grant payouts. Ed was, in some sense, an outlier in having its own system, but Ed also has programs that don’t necessarily run like a “typical” grant project.
I don’t want to hand-wave how difficult this part of the move would be to unwind, especially since Ed’s internal documents suggest the move to PMS hasn’t exactly been the easiest of processes and found DOL’s systems to be “limited.” But if Ed programs were moved back in, say, 2029, the hardest and most chaotic work of the systems shift would already be done.
Theoretically.
The pressure on the Trump Administration.
For what it’s worth to some of you, I do think that Trump DOL and Ed officials genuinely believe this move is a good idea and will do everything they can to make it a success. They have indicated that they see the Ed-DOL marriage as an opportunity to show proof of concept to Congress for making the arrangement a permanent one. I think “proof of concept” is hard to generate under the circumstances, even with the best of intentions.5
Trump messaging materials haven’t really helped things in how they set the goalposts. For example, a fact sheet on the move of postsecondary programs to DOL said that the change is meant to “create a better coordinated Federal approach to postsecondary education and workforce development to help more Americans achieve career success.” In other words, make the Ed programs workforce-y and get more people into jobs.
One challenge in doing that? Ed’s programs, like many of DOL’s, are legislated into phone booths by the Hill, and the ways the Administration will pick grantees will be flavored by statutes that don’t necessarily consider “career success” the end goal. That statutory framing does makes sense because some of these programs are for people who likely aren’t looking for jobs in the near future, like preschoolers.
Digging into the pilings of some of these programs, there is room to add some workforce-y components, even where it seems outlandish. For example, a preschool grant program could ask applicants to show that their project will include activities like showing preschoolers construction workers reading safety instructions to show them what you can do by learning the alphabet. On the other hand, a program focused on lower-income students’ “continued enrollment . . . in graduate study and the attainment of doctoral degrees” seems to set the goal posts pretty clearly (and doesn’t exactly mesh with Trump II’s persistent attacks on “college for all”).
Another challenge: there’s less value than you think in just putting the agencies under one roof. I’ve encountered thinking that “jobs stuff” will seep into Ed programs like background radiation based on their mere presence inside the Department of Labor. Often, the reasons why folks feel that way are understandable, including past experiences trying to get education and labor programs to coordinate. But sometimes this thinking gets a little too reductive, to the extent that it sounds like folks think that things automatically will be coordinated because education and workforce staff are using the same conference rooms and complaining about the same poorly restocked vending machines and grappling with the same horrifying cockroach problems.
Let’s be clear: chain of command definitely matters, but it requires leadership committed to making sure workforce and education aren’t treated as mutually exclusive things and that there is policy overlap between them. That’s hard in general, but it’s especially hard for the current Employment and Training Administration, the subagency now housing the Ed programs. Prior to the Ed-DOL marriage, the arrangement of ETA already split its leaders’ time making decisions about apprenticeship, immigration, and unemployment insurance. Now the same leaders are making calls on those wildly varying programs and Ed’s wildly varying programs, meaning they have even less time and more decisions to make.
Or to put all this into one sentence: the circumstances make the Ed-DOL marriage hard to succeed and easy to mess up, especially once you add the complicating factors of Trumpian impatience and inattention to detail.
Democrats tried to negotiate an appropriations requirement defunding the Ed-DOL marriage a month ago, and they could gain control of at least one chamber of Congress next year. A big failure could cut the time and tools the Administration has for “proof of concept” from the merger.
The pressure on those against the Trump Administration.
That said, the other side of this argument—the people who want Ed programs to stay at Ed—face a different kind of pressure. They have to show both that the Ed-DOL marriage is not working and moving things back to Ed would be better.
The simplicity of “Do all the workforce and education stuff under the same roof so everyone can bond about the elevator outage and get more kids jobs” has bipartisan appeal. Many of Ed and DOL’s constituents found their programs hard to navigate and not as coordinated or creative as they should be, making it less desirable to them to simply revert to the old way of doing things. Some folks on the left and center-left were quietly excited about the first Ed-DOL merger when it emerged in court documents last spring. Even if the Ed-DOL marriage goes poorly, I could see them arguing that the Trump Administration was the problem, not the idea.
At least one Democratic senator has suggested as much. At a December hearing, Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine said he was “a little bit agnostic” on moving Ed programs into DOL, but complained about the Trump Administration’s approach.
"I don't mind reform efforts, but I don't like chaos,” Kaine said at the hearing. “If you're going to do reform, do it carefully and thoughtfully, not chaotically."
Kaine is one of seven Senate Democrats who broke with the party to end last fall’s government shutdown without a deal to extend healthcare subsidies, Democrats’ stated reason for not originally reaching a budget deal. Many of those senators are retiring or not up for re-election in 2026, and some indicated that they wanted to find bipartisan solutions with the Trump Administration. “Bipartisan” is pretty much the main driver for Democrats in Congress on workforce funding policy.
One more tension: staffing.
I don’t see a universe in which Trump II doesn’t hyper-veto an appropriations bill requiring Ed programs shift back to Ed. We’re likely in some form of here until 2029. While “tentative” is the best word to describe the underpinnings of the arrangement, “awkward” is a better one for the situation facing people and organizations who run the grant dollars flowing out of Ed-DOL, many of whom don’t care for the merger.
Speaking from experience, I think the more dedicated and specialized federal staff you have working on a workforce or education program the more likely the advocates and beneficiaries of the program are going to get the results they need. That’s particularly so if you’re going through a transition that some Ed officials described in writing as “rebuilding the grants” in a new place.
My opinion is that DOL had 20 percent too few staff to run its programs before it lost people to DOGE-initiated cuts. Now it’s handling DOL and Ed programs. Until at least 2029, the most likely scenario for ensuring that failure doesn’t happen is hiring more staff to carry out the migration.6
If you’re also an advocate for these programs staying at Ed, though, supporting the hiring of more staff to go work at Labor could seem like legitimizing moves that you can’t stand, even if you have a vested interest in their success. But if more staff is needed to avoid these programs cratering on the way to an attempt to unwind the merger, something will have to give.
Card subject to change.
Well, that sure was a fun way to wrap February. March is going to be a very different month in this space because I have two things I haven’t done here before, including highlighting a workforce tool and unpacking some solutions for a big lingering issue in workforce.
THE MONEY will persist. On Thursday, I’ll have highlights from another congressional hearing on workforce things, as well as a little analysis on what’s really shifted in workforce funding in Trump II.
In researching this piece, it occurred to me that the conservative thinktank case for eliminating Ed—the one I heard years ago reporting on politics in Alabama and Tennessee—was not just for ending the agency called “Department of Education,” but also killing all of Ed’s funding programs.
That’s a neat idea to call for from a thinktank conference room, less so if you’re the senator of a rural state really needs Ed’s money. Notably, then, last March’s thin-on-specifics executive order on “dismantling” Ed complained about Ed’s spending, but its view of closure included “uninterrupted delivery of services, programs, and benefits on which Americans rely.” In other words, not getting rid of the money
The executive order is a fascinating document upon closer inspection. In one part, it kinda makes an argument for increasing hiring and resources at the Department of Education:
The Department of Education currently manages a student loan debt portfolio of more than $1.6 trillion. This means the Federal student aid program is roughly the size of one of the Nation’s largest banks, Wells Fargo. But although Wells Fargo has more than 200,000 employees, the Department of Education has fewer than 1,500 in its Office of Federal Student Aid. The Department of Education is not a bank, and it must return bank functions to an entity equipped to serve America’s students.
Other programs landed at the Departments of Health and Human Services, Interior, and State. I’m focusing only on the DOL programs for this piece, but my understanding is that Ed staff previously working in the same office moved to different agencies as a result of the interagency agreements. Making sense of who goes where also is an obvious barrier to undoing the mergers.
Many Ed advocates argue that these agreements aren’t legal by law and the Ed programs must be run by Ed staff. My read is the appropriations language shared with me by those advocates doesn’t appear to prohibit the Ed-DOL agreement, and to the extent there is a requirement of Ed signoff on a DOL move, there are legal workarounds for doing it. On that last point, I do wonder if, say, a 2027 Democratic House of Representatives committee might identify one of those signoff requirements and seek evidence on how they’re being fulfilled.
In spite of an innovative simulation pursued by the synthesizer-armed scientists of A-ha.
The Trump White House will inevitably claim victory here, but the time horizon makes any successes difficult to really identify and measure in this administration. To draw upon historical criticisms of Ed, one measure would be improved test scores, but absent a flood of sixth graders saying the synergies created by the Ed-DOL marriage was what inspired them to read better, it will take time to build evidence and connect the dots between changes and outcomes.
While civil service rules frown upon it a good deal, conceivably you could hire someone as an Ed employee then immediately shuttle them across the Mall on a detail. And if any administration would try it en masse, it sure is this one.