Frederick Hess dissects recent federal education cuts.
[T]he U.S. Department of Education launched historic, unprecedented layoffs. While the specifics remained murky at week’s end, reports suggest that the cuts will eliminate close to half of the department’s 4,000-odd positions. What to make of all this?
In principle, I’m supportive. There’s plenty of inefficiency, waste, and bloat at the department. During the 23 years I’ve been in Washington, there’s never been even a token effort to address that. (The old joke is that whole floors in ED’s seven-story headquarters at 400 Maryland Avenue could vanish and no one would know.) The cuts promise to make it a whole lot harder for federal officials to promote grandiose education agendas, which should offer solace to those who resisted Bush-Obama-Biden overreach as well as those who fear it from Team Trump.
The potential savings are far from earthshaking. We don’t have good numbers, but back-of-the-envelope, I’d put the savings in salary and benefits at something like $400 million. That’s terrific, but it’s also less than 1 percent of what Washington spends each year on education. Generally speaking, for good or ill, the cuts aren’t as big a deal as the dramatic headlines and pronouncements might make them seem. Even with fewer staff, all the rules and regulations (the proverbial “red tape”) will still be there. All the programs (like Title I, IDEA, and Pell) will still be there. Fewer staff will be sending press releases and writing rules, but it’s not clear how much this matters or why it’s a bad thing. As my EdNext colleague Mike Petrilli aptly put it, “I don’t anticipate these staff cuts will make much of a difference in the real world of schools and classrooms. I suspect it will be hard to notice much of a difference.”
Okay, now we get to the trickier stuff.
The case for these cuts assumes they’ve been made to address redundancy, waste, inefficiency, and unnecessary activity. The problem is there’s no way to assess that, because it’s not clear which positions have been eliminated or why they were selected.
