The Trump Administration has begun to shift critical Department of Education (ED) functions to outside agencies, including moving the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education (OESE) and Office of Postsecondary Education (OPE) to the Department of Labor (DOL). Transferring responsibilities from the Department of Education to the Department of Labor undermines the very purpose of public education. Created by Congress, the Department of Education’s role cannot be erased or reassigned through executive action alone. Any attempt to do so is unconstitutional.
This move also fundamentally shifts the purpose of public education from one that prepares creators, innovators, and dreamers to one that merely turns children into factory workers. While our schools must prepare children to thrive in the workforce, they are equally responsible for developing curious learners with the fundamental social skills and critical thinking skills to thrive in society.
OESE manages the largest federal K-12 grant programs and oversees state compliance with the Every Student Succeeds Act. This includes managing Title I-A grants for low-income students, Title III grants for English Learners, rural education, and other fiscal and technical support for states. OESE is the bridge between the federal government and state education agencies, ensuring schools are held accountable and students are supported.
OPE oversees federal postsecondary policy and grant programs, including Higher Education Act (HEA) programs like TRIO and GEAR UP, accreditation oversight, teacher preparation, financial aid policy, and oversight of predatory colleges. OPE seeks to make college accessible, safe, and accountable, particularly for students who need additional support.
The Department of Labor is responsible for enforcing labor laws, administering employment and training programs, collecting labor market data, and regulating workplace conditions. The Department of Labor protects workers, ensures workplaces are safe and fair, and runs programs that help people find job s and build careers.
The Department of Labor is led by:
Notably, the DOL has no Assistant Secretary of office dedicated to elementary, secondary, or higher education and no internal infrastructure or expertise regarding these specialties.
1. Mission misalignment: The Department of Education’s core mission is to promote student achievement and ensure equal access to education, including civil rights enforcement, academic accountability, and federal financial aid. DOL focuses on jobs, wages, and workplace safety–not children’s learning or school quality. Running the federal education system demands a student-first approach, not one that reduces children to future laborers whose value is measured only by their economic output.
2. Lack of expertise: DOL staff and leadership primarily consist of labor economists, workplace regulators, employment and training specialists, and enforcement personnel. They do not have experts in K-12 accountability systems, civil rights enforcement, teacher quality or certification, or higher education finance.
For instance, ESSA requires states to report student-level data, maintain accountability systems, identify low-performing schools, and implement school improvement strategies. No office within DOL monitors academic achievement, growth, or subgroup performance, which are all foundational to OESE’s work. Further, DOL enforcement offices like OSHA and Wage and Hour are designed for regulatory compliance in workplaces, not for continuous improvement and partnerships with state education agencies.
Additionally, OESE and OPE oversee programs tightly linked to civil rights protections for students, including English Learners, students with disabilities, and first-generation college students. DOL has no civil rights enforcement authority for education, and its staff are not trained to interpret key protections such as Title VI or Title IX in school contexts or equity provisions tied to HEA. This lack of experience and expertise would directly weaken protections for vulnerable students.
3. Lack of capacity: DOL does not have an existing youth or education office to manage the massive education portfolios of OESE and OPE. This leaves two likely paths. First, the Education and Training Administration (ETA) may be responsible for the education portfolio, due to its alignment with the youth and apprenticeship programs that ETA already manages. However, ETA only has four full-time employees (FTE), compared to the nearly 500 federal employees that ran OESE and OPE in 2024 (approximately 200 of which have been laid off in the past year). This is outlandishly insufficient to distribute and monitor the complex, large-scale grants that OESE and OPE administer each year. Alternatively, DOL could create a new office to manage educational programs, which would render the entire IAA useless and cause unnecessary confusion.
Meanwhile, several other education offices are being moved to the Department of the Interior, Department of State, and Department of Health and Human Services. This creates total chaos for state and district leaders, who will only see an increase in bureaucratic barriers as they navigate which agencies to call in a system that was once coherent and unified.
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