Speaker 1: The Department of Education handled about $229 billion of the $9.7 trillion that Congress allocated for federal agencies in 2024. That comes to about 2.4 percent. Despite the department's small size, it's taken on an outsized role in political rhetoric.

Speaker 2: We will ultimately eliminate the Federal Department of Education and send education back to Wisconsin and back to the states.

Speaker 3: We're seeing sort of broader attacks on public education and an extension of that is that we see attacks on the most visible symbol of public education, which is the U.S.

Speaker 1: Department of Education. Where someone lands on this issue may come down to whether they believe regulation from the federal government is onerous on state governments or if federal regulation serves as oversight that provides protection to children.

Speaker 4: The Department of Education has often been described as a gargantuan bank with a third rate policy shop attached because the biggest chunk of the money they manage there is over a trillion dollars in federal student loans. I don't know that folks who work for the Washington, D.C. Department of Education are necessarily the folks best equipped to oversee and manage a portfolio of that size.

Speaker 5: What I'm concerned about is how these billionaires who want tax cuts are going to take funding away from kids with special needs and kids who are poor and kids who are going to college for the first time. So when you take a sledgehammer to these kind of programs that the federal government pays for, but most of them are actually implemented in states and localities all throughout America, that's a problem.

Speaker 6: These are programs that are put in place by laws. A Congress's job is to create laws. The executive branch job is to enforce the laws. It takes a lot of political capital to get them done. And the question, I think, is do Republicans actually want to spend the political capital on the education department? And as a congressional reporter, the answer to me seems like a very obvious no.

Speaker 4: This entire debate about whether to abolish the department or not is symbolic. The real question is, what is it that we want the federal government to do?

Speaker 1: Here's what the Department of Education does and what the future of education could look like in the U.S. The federal Department of Education has existed in some form since 1867, initially created to gather information to help states develop effective school systems. The modern department was established as a cabinet level agency in 1979 after Jimmy Carter ran on separating the agency from what is now the Department of Health and Human Services. Some Republicans have been calling for the department to be closed since it was first established. The calls don't seem to be slowing down. In 2024, 64 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning Americans have a negative view of the Department of Education.

Speaker 2: I'm going to close the Department of Education and move education back to the states.

Speaker 1: The fight over the future of the Department of Education is symbolic of an ideological divide regarding how involved the federal government should be in regulating education.

Speaker 3: The tone of the talking point has changed. Sometimes it's been about just sort of pulling the federal government out of education entirely. Sometimes it has felt like it's a bit more antagonistic toward public schools in general. And I think now we're in an era where it feels like it's more antagonistic and not just about reducing costs.

Speaker 4: The Department of Education is offensive to anybody who's kind of a small government conservative because it creates a permanent infrastructure in Washington that's always trying to weigh in on what states and communities and colleges should be doing for their part.

Speaker 3: The U.S. Department of Education has become a symbol of public education and public schools across the country. And what we've seen in polling ever since the COVID shutdowns is Americans, and particularly Republicans, have lost a lot of trust in U.S. public schools. And there's now a big division in how Democrats feel about public schools versus how Republicans feel about public schools. And I think the department has become a symbol of that.

Speaker 6: In reality, states and localities already have immense power when it comes to educating the students in their state and in their district. They already get to sort of set the rules on what they're teaching curriculum wise.

Speaker 4: I don't think we need the Department of Education. I'd be fine if it didn't exist. But I can also count to 60. And to dismantle a federal department, you need an act of Congress.

Speaker 1: One of the Republican Party's platforms in 2024 is to rein in wasteful federal spending. But abolishing a federal agency doesn't automatically turn off the spending tap.

Speaker 4: All the money the Department of Education has really is the money that's authorized by Congress. All of these programs will continue to exist and get money unless Congress voted to stop funding them. The debate about the future of the department is symbolic. What really matters is what we decide to do about the staffing and funding of these assorted programs.

Speaker 1: When asked for comment, a Trump fans transition spokesperson wrote in part in a statement to CNBC, President Trump believes that school choice is the civil rights issue of our time. By returning education back to the states where it belongs, President Trump will improve academic excellence for all students. The Department of Education did not respond to CNBC's request for comment. One of the department's biggest responsibilities is dispersing federal student loans and managing loan forgiveness programs.

Speaker 3: The U.S. Department of Education, in a lot of ways, it operates like a bank. If you're looking at a full portfolio of loans and all the money that flows through the department, it is quite large. If you're looking in terms of what is the size of the department staff, it's about 4,400 employees. It's small relative to other agencies in the federal government. So it has kind of a small staffing footprint.

Speaker 1: More than $114 billion of the $229 billion that passes through the department goes toward the federal direct student loan program, according to USAspending.gov. The department is also responsible for issuing Pell Grants, which are usually granted to undergraduate students on a needs basis and typically do not have to be repaid. It also manages Title I funds, a federal aid program for K-12 schools serving low-income students. In the fiscal year 2024, Congress allocated $18.4 billion to the program.

Speaker 3: It is a program that provides funds particularly to students who live in concentrated poverty. And part of the reason for that is that if we were to have education systems that relied purely on local and state funding, you would see these kind of vast inequalities in how much funding is available to schools. And so the federal government plays this role of kind of offsetting.

Speaker 1: The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, or IDEA, is a federal law that ensures services to children with disabilities and provides funding to states for additional services. Congress funded IDEA to the tune of $15.4 billion in 2024. But the department's job goes beyond managing money.

Speaker 5: The Department of Education, not the Department of Justice, is the one who deal with ensuring that kids have equal access to schools.

Speaker 1: The Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights, or OCR, is responsible for ensuring that students are not subjected to discrimination. It fields complaints, oversees compliance reviews and works with schools to develop and implement corrective actions to bring them into compliance. The OCR was given $140 million in 2024 by Congress. But ultimately, it's the White House that gets to decide what the OCR prioritizes.

Speaker 5: When somebody says we're going to strip it all away and just give it to the states, then how do you protect poor kids? The implementers, the ones who actually get that check to somebody, they become more important than the pontificators because that's what makes it real.

Speaker 1: Title IX is a high-profile federal law that the Department of Education is responsible for enforcing. It prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex in any education program or activity that receives federal financial assistance.

Speaker 3: When it comes to something like the regulations that relate to Title IX, the Trump administration can do a lot unilaterally in that space. I think they very likely will. The Biden administration has tried to expand our understanding of sex-based discrimination to also include discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. And I think it's it's basically a foregone conclusion that the Trump administration will revert back to the prior understanding there.

Speaker 1: While eliminating the Department of Education has been a talking point for President-elect Trump, it would take an act of Congress to make it happen.

Speaker 6: When you hear House Majority Leader Steve Scalise talk about the first 100 days under the Trump administration, you hear a lot of things about border security, about immigration, about energy. You don't hear a lot about eliminating the Education Department.

Speaker 4: In Trump's first term, there was not a lot of appetite among Republicans for cutting spending for IDEA or for Title I or for Pell Grants. So if you're a low-income student or you're a family of a child with special needs, I think the idea that there's going to be substantial cuts to those programs is pretty unlikely.

Speaker 5: I know a soundbite when I see it. The real issue is how are you going to help kids? And if you make this a mess, you're not helping kids. They are trying to shift what was created in America by the New Deal. They want winners and losers.

Speaker 1: Abolishing the Department of Education appears to be only one aspect of the broader reforms outlined in Project 2025, a collection of policy plans developed by conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation in collaboration with more than 100 other right-leaning organizations.

Speaker 3: It is important to acknowledge that Project 2025, it's not clear how the Trump administration will feel about that document. And there are some indications that Trump just isn't all that interested in education in the first place. So with that with that caveat that we really genuinely don't know how seriously they're going to take this.

Speaker 1: Trump distanced himself from the document while he was campaigning, but has been taking suggestions for potential hires from the personnel database created by Project 2025 during his transition into the White House.

Speaker 3: Project 2025 basically frames a discussion of big changes in federal education policy around the idea that American schools are underperforming. There's a kind of culture war piece to this that has a lot to do with gender and sexuality and race. And then there are some potentially big structural changes when it comes to the federal role in education.

Speaker 1: Experts say another one of the structural changes that Project 2025 suggests could be reducing the number of requirements attached to the funding provided to disabled students through IDEA.

Speaker 4: This is what wonks tend to call block granting, giving the money to states or school districts with more freedom to spend it. And you could do that with a lot fewer bureaucrats, but somebody would do it. And if there weren't a Department of Education, presumably they would be attached to some other federal entity, whether that was Department of Labor or Department of Health and Human Services.

Speaker 3: The problem with that, in my view, is that those strings that are attached actually really matter because it's the strings that are attached that help to ensure that the funds are getting to the students with disabilities and getting them the services they need and ensuring that they have the opportunities that they should have.

Speaker 1: Project 2025 also proposes block grants for federal funds to low-income students that are allocated through Title I. Under the plan, the block grants would be available for a 10-year period after which the federal role would be phased out entirely, leaving the states to decide whether to provide that funding to schools.

Speaker 3: One lesson we've had from what a lot of states have done when they've had more of that kind of flexibility is that we've seen that some states just don't fund that kind of thing. And so if we actually were to eliminate Title I funding, it would be really problematic for a lot of students across the country.

Speaker 4: Superintendents, school principals, school boards are accountable to their communities. People can see what schools are doing. People can choose to vote in school board elections. Superintendents can be replaced. When federal officials, whether in Congress or the Department of Education, are trying to write rules for schools, they're trying to write rules for 14,000 school districts that encompass about 100,000 schools in 50 states. That is a huge ask of anybody, given the variability. And so what you wind up with is lots of rules that have to be exquisitely interpreted. And it winds up making life really difficult for lots of teachers and principals working in classrooms.

Speaker 3: I think a lot of us are a bit in wait and see mode because we honestly don't know how much of this Trump is going to want to adopt and how high of a priority is when I think a lot of us think that immigration and the tax bill are going to be much higher priorities than anything that has to do with education.

Speaker 1: Student loans and loan forgiveness are contentious issues. President Biden made student debt relief a focus of his administration and used the Department of Education to carry out his plan.

Speaker 3: I think they're skeptical of what the Biden administration has done, both from the perspective of is that legal? And then also, I think there's a lot of skepticism that maybe it was too generous. I think it's very clear that we'll see a lot of those initiatives stop. Project 2025 starts to go a couple of steps further, and here it's kind of not clear exactly what will happen. But there's some language in the direction of privatizing the student loan portfolio, for example, and potentially consolidating a lot of different loan programs, which actually Trump made some moves in the direction of doing that in his first term.

Speaker 4: The Biden Department of Education continued a temporary pandemic repayment pause for a couple of years after everybody agreed the pandemic was over. It has also continually told borrowers that they don't need to start making repayments yet. The new secretary of education is going to face an unprecedented challenge in that they will have to restart the machinery of repayment. They will have to deal with the frustration of borrowers who were told and they thought in good faith that they wouldn't have to repay their loans. They're going to have to try to collect funds that were promised to taxpayers that are not coming in.

Speaker 5: I've heard them talk about getting rid of loan forgiveness for people in the public service. So how are we going to get people to go to the public service? How are we going to get people to become firefighters and police officers and go into the army and go into teaching if the cost of college is too much and we don't have a way to pay people more? The whole issues around affordability of college are huge. And this is another indication about people who want winners and losers instead of the promise of America for everybody.

Speaker 3: I think a lot of us are a bit in wait and see mode because we honestly don't know how much of this Trump is going to want to adopt and how high of a priority is when I think a lot of us think that immigration and the tax bill are going to be much higher priorities than anything that has to do with education. So like there is a lot of uncertainty and then there is also some uncertainty that comes to like we all have our understanding of what they're able to do based on our sort of current understanding of how of American law and norms. And there is this sort of looming caveat with everything, which is if they just violate a bunch of those norms and violate a bunch of those laws and everything goes to court and we sort of see what happens in courts, then a lot of what seems impossible now might not be so impossible. If they really decide to push down that path.