Education Secretary Linda McMahon appeared before the House Education and Workforce Committee on Thursday to defend the Trump administration’s budget and the ongoing restructuring of the Department of Education. The department’s staff has been reduced by approximately 45% — from around 4,200 employees in 2024 to roughly 2,300 today — with more than 100 programmes transferred to other agencies. Elementary and secondary education programmes have moved to the Department of Labour; family engagement programmes to Health and Human Services; the federal student loan portfolio to the Treasury. The department’s headquarters is being vacated by August. McMahon told the committee that “the American people elected President Trump with a clear mandate: to sunset a 46-year-old, $3 trillion failed federal education bureaucracy in Washington, D.C., and return authority to where it belongs, to parents, teachers and local leaders.” Republicans on the panel thanked her; one told her, as a compliment, that he hoped she was “the last secretary of education.” Democrats raised alarm about the gutting of the Office for Civil Rights and the proposed new caps on student loans in the “One Big Beautiful Bill.”
The received wisdom
The progressive case against McMahon’s project is forceful and well-evidenced in places. The Office for Civil Rights, which enforces anti-discrimination law in schools and universities, has seen approximately half its staff removed. The impact is measurable: in 2025, under Trump’s second term, the OCR resolved just two racial harassment agreements, compared with more than thirty in 2017 during Trump’s first term; zero sexual harassment and zero sexual assault cases were resolved, compared with dozens in previous years. Meanwhile, 247 OCR staff are sitting on paid administrative leave — costing taxpayers an estimated $28-38 million — because courts blocked their dismissal. The proposed 35% cut to OCR’s budget would make this trajectory permanent rather than transitional. On student loans, the “One Big Beautiful Bill” caps graduate borrowing at $20,500 per year and $100,000 total for most programmes — well below the actual cost of many graduate and professional degrees. Critics argue that capping loans will not force universities to lower prices so much as it will simply exclude middle-income students from graduate education while wealthy students proceed unaffected.
A different read
Here is what the progressive critique mostly sidesteps: the Department of Education, as currently constituted, has spectacularly failed on its own metrics. McMahon cited a new Education Scorecard showing that US schools have been in a “learning recession” since approximately 2013 — before the pandemic, before Trump’s first term, and through multiple changes in federal education policy. Student achievement has been declining, or stagnating, or recovering unevenly, for over a decade — during which the Department of Education has grown, the federal student loan portfolio has ballooned past $1.7 trillion, and the administrative apparatus of American higher education has metastasised at a rate that would astonish anyone who actually pays tuition.
The federal student loan programme, as designed, has functioned primarily as a mechanism for enabling universities to raise prices without accountability, by ensuring that any price increase — however unjustified — can be financed through subsidised federal credit. The result is an American higher education system with some of the most expensive undergraduate and graduate tuition in the developed world, an enormous non-teaching administrative workforce, and graduate employment outcomes that are, for many programmes, genuinely poor relative to the debt incurred. The loan cap proposal — however clumsily designed — is at least addressing the right question: whether the federal government should be an unlimited underwriter of unlimited price increases at institutions that bear no risk for poor outcomes.
McMahon’s argument that price caps will force universities to lower costs has a logic. Economists are sceptical that it will produce widespread price cuts — and they may well be right that some institutions will simply become more selective rather than cheaper. But the alternative — unlimited federal lending — has had thirty years to prove its virtues, and the evidence is not encouraging.
The harder question is the civil rights one, and here the right needs to be honest rather than evasive. The Office for Civil Rights exists because, historically, schools and universities did not voluntarily protect students from racial harassment, sexual assault, or disability discrimination — and they will not do so voluntarily in the future if there is no enforcement mechanism with teeth. The case resolution numbers are genuinely alarming. Zero sexual assault cases resolved in a full year is not a sign of reduced sexual assault; it is a sign of a collapsed enforcement infrastructure. McMahon’s claim that she supports OCR’s mission while simultaneously proposing a 35% cut to its budget is a contradiction, not a policy.
The irony McMahon might not want to dwell on is this: the most visible evidence of the department’s dysfunction appeared in her own testimony, when she acknowledged that the Office of Federal Student Aid — cut by roughly half in layoffs last year — is now hiring 334 new staff to restore capacity that the administration itself destroyed. That is not reform; that is the administrative cycle of disruption and repair that produces neither efficiency nor improved outcomes, only turnover and wasted institutional knowledge.
The principle that education policy should be closer to the classroom than to Washington is a sound one. The principle that a $1.7 trillion loan portfolio can be transferred to the Treasury while maintaining the same oversight capacity is not.
What to watch
Watch what happens to the IDEA — the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act — whose transfer destination remains undecided. The disability-rights community’s pushback has been unusually effective at slowing the administration, and the decision on where IDEA lands will indicate how much that pressure has actually been absorbed. Watch whether the proposed 35% OCR budget cut survives the appropriations process; it is likely to face resistance even from some Republicans whose constituents depend on OCR enforcement. Watch the loan cap provisions in the “One Big Beautiful Bill” as they move through the Senate, where healthcare professional concerns about the $200,000 professional-school cap may attract bipartisan opposition. And watch the University of California system, which has reportedly been modelling the loan cap’s effect on enrollment — an early indicator of whether the price-discipline argument or the access-restriction argument wins in practice.
— J