Trump’s Lying or Dreaming: The Department of Education Is Here to Stay

In the seven swing states that will decide the election (Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin), state and local officials would have to increase taxes permanently by 3 percent to make up for the money lost in federal grants—or cut programs that everyone likes. The tax hikes would range from 3.6 percent in Georgia to 2.3 percent in Pennsylvania, according to calculations I’ve made from the General Services Administration’s USASpending.gov website.

And if the department’s aid goes completely away, states would have to figure out whether they’re going to cut college students off from aid. They could turn their backs on the crushing costs of student loans once the federal government leaves the scene—or they could step in to make up the difference. That would double the tax increases. Aid to state and local schools is half; aid to college students is the other half. How about savings from eliminating the administrative costs of running the department? That’s just 0.42 percent of the department’s entire budget, so that’s less than a tiny drop in a very large bucket. It’s hard to see any of that happening.

The third argument is that Trump supporters claim that the states would be able to save lots of money from ridding the system of “suffocating bureaucratic red tape,” as Project 2025 puts it. But that’s not the way it works. In general, states spend about 10 percent of their Department of Education grants on administration and the rest gets passed along in subgrants to local schools. By way of comparison, nonprofits tend to spend about a third of their budgets on administrative costs, a rate more than three times higher than state governments. State administration is already pretty lean, and there isn’t much fat to be trimmed from operations. States won’t be able to keep their educational operations afloat if they lose the federal cash.