A dozen bright, very sad Minnesota students sat with me in a U.S. Department of Education (ED) conference room eight years ago. Under the Obama administration, the TRIO program staff had summarily rejected their application for a new grant. Their school had been in the program for decades, but the funding was about to end.
What happened? ED was strictly enforcing rules about such technicalities as the line spacing in a table. By the time their case came to me, the deputy assistant secretary responsible for TRIO, it was far too late for me to help.
TRIO is a set of college preparatory programs that have long been plagued by special-interest lobbying. For example, “prior participation points” for existing grantees prevent new applicants from winning grants unless Congress allocates additional money. The federal TRIO programs get about $1.2 billion per year. Laugh and cry: The TRIO lobby succeeded with legislation to prevent TRIO dollars from being used in any randomized controlled study to determine whether TRIO programs actually work.
Under Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, I successfully advocated that we make irrelevant technical details like font size merely recommended, not mandatory. Yet even such minor efforts against bureaucratic mindlessness rarely prevail. The administrative state includes not just deep-state obstructionists but also, more maddeningly, a thicket—a minefield—a behemoth of poorly designed and poorly operating processes that divert energy and funds into a DC bureaucracy that’s far removed from real people with real challenges.
In short, DC bureaucrats have little incentive to make good choices for other people with yet other people’s money. It’s at the root of the failures of the “creative federalism” by which successive administrations beginning with President Johnson have centralized power at the expense of the states.
That’s why it’s amazing, smart, and honorable that Secretary Linda McMahon’s ED is successfully dismantling itself. Streamlining the bureaucracy and giving programs such as TRIO and GEAR UP (another college prep program) a fresh start in new agencies, subject to ED’s final authority, is an outstanding move.
Even better, just about the entire range of programs at the Office of Postsecondary Education will move into the Department of Labor under contractual arrangements. (The Hispanic-Serving Institutions programs, in litigation over their likely unconstitutional ethnic quotas, are probably remaining at ED to avoid complications.)
Substantively, the point of the moves ED announced this week is to integrate the nation’s education and workforce agendas. Will that lead to even more centralization of power? Time may tell. Even if it does, a fresh start with a new remit to consider America’s workforce will be salutary for these programs.
The greater value will come when Congress and ED finally return education to the states. Imagine how Minnesota would have handled its own funds when a dozen crying kids appealed for a measure of humanity and reason. Unfortunately, though, Ronald Reagan’s famous 1964 line resonates: “A government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we’ll ever see on this earth.”
Ultimately, federal redistribution of wealth from taxpayers back to the states via education funding should not exist in the first place. Too much money drops into bureaucracy even with block grants. But ending all federal funding is crazy talk; that’s politically infeasible for now.
