When the U.S. Department of Education (ED) quietly signed six interagency agreements on Nov 18, transferring major functions to agencies including the Department of Labor (DOL), the Department of the Interior (DOI), the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), and the Department of State (State), the move didn’t come with a congressional vote. Nor did it come with a stakeholder comment period, public hearings, or broad consultation.
For Texas, a state where public education already straddles deep inequities, patchy funding, and shifting policy winds, the change represents far more than bureaucratic shuffling. It threatens stability, consistency, and the federal safety net many students and districts rely on.
What’s Moving & to Where
Under the agreement:
- The DOL takes over day-to-day management of K-12 and many postsecondary grant programs formerly administered by ED’s Elementary & Secondary Education and Office of Postsecondary Education.
- The DOI inherits administration of Native/tribal education programs, including funds for tribal colleges and schools.
- HHS will run certain support programs, such as on-campus childcare for students who are parents, as well as some foreign–medical school accreditation tasks.
- States will manage international-education grants and foreign-language/foreign-studies programs previously housed at ED.
Taken together, these agreements represent the largest dispersal of ED’s portfolio since its creation in 1979. This shifts not just a handful of niche programs, but the backbone of federal K–12 and post-secondary grant administration.
Why This Is Happening
The official rationale: break up big bureaucracy, cut red tape, streamline grant delivery, and give states and parents more control. In announcing the agreements, ED and DOL emphasized that partner agencies are “best positioned” to deliver programs efficiently, and that the goal is to refocus efforts on students and taxpayers rather than bureaucratic layers in Washington.
According to the DOL news release, its agreement aims to create a more unified “education and workforce system,” merging grant management with the labor and career-training infrastructure already overseen by DOL.
But a closer look may reveal deeper motives: the interagency agreements follow a March 2025 executive order by President Donald Trump instructing Education Secretary Linda McMahon to “facilitate closure of the Department … and return authority over education to the states and local communities.”
The fragmentation of ED into separate agencies — each with a different mission, history, and priority — may not be solely about efficiency after all. It may be about dismantling one of the few consistent national guarantors of equity and accountability in public education.
Issuing these agreements instead of putting forward legislation to formally disband ED lets the administration bypass Congress entirely. That means decisions about the structure of federal education can be made with zero public input, zero hearings, and zero transparency. For vulnerable communities — including rural districts, tribal nations, low-income neighborhoods, and English language learners — this is particularly troubling:
- Tribal colleges and Native-serving institutions are rightly worried that DOI may not prioritize education the same way ED did. Many tribal leaders argue the transfer violates treaty and trust responsibilities.
- School districts that rely heavily on Title I, after-school, enrichment, and other formula grants anticipate disruptions, funding delays, or shifting priorities under DOL. These grants have long supported schools in high-poverty areas, often the ones least able to absorb dips in funding or administrative confusion.
- Special education, civil-rights enforcement, English-learner supports, and other protections may be at risk of reduced oversight, inconsistent implementation, or outright funding disruptions under a department with no dedicated education mission. Though not all offices have been transferred yet, the pattern raises concern that nothing is safe.
In short: the move replaces a centralized institution solely focused on education with a patchwork of siloed federal agencies, each with its own culture, priorities, and agenda. Stable oversight, once guaranteed by a dedicated department, becomes dependant on agencies that have competing priorities for education.
What Does This Mean for Texas?
Texas already works under tight funding constraints to support both dramatic demographic diversity and geographically large rural and under-resourced districts. The unique nature of our state’s public-school landscape makes federal support all the more critical. Now, with these interagency agreements, federal assistance becomes less predictable. Texas has already lived through the consequences of weak federal oversight — and the results were devastating. For years, the state capped special-education enrollment at 8.5%, denying tens of thousands of children the services they were entitled to under federal law. That happened in an environment where federal monitoring was limited, and it took a multi-year investigation to force corrective action.
The fallout is still being felt today: districts continue to face backlogs, compliance challenges, and uneven access to evaluations and support. This history shows how quickly inequities widen when federal guardrails fall away, and why any shift in oversight raises real concern for Texas families.