Education
Can Trump Really Abolish the Department of Education?
President Trump signed an executive order on Thursday that directs the federal Department of Education to come up with a plan for its own demise.
Only Congress can abolish a Cabinet-level agency, and it is not clear whether Mr. Trump has the votes in Congress to do so. But he has already begun to dismantle the department, firing about half of its staff, gutting its respected education-research arm, and vastly narrowing the focus of its civil rights division, which works to protect students from discrimination.
Mr. Trump’s long history of attacking the Department of Education represents a revival of a Reagan-era Republican talking point. It has unified Democrats in fiery opposition. But is shuttering the department possible? And if not, how has Mr. Trump begun to use the agency to achieve his policy goals?
What does the department do?
The Education Department was founded in 1979. Its main job is distributing money to college students through grants and loans. It also sends federal money to K-12 schools, targeted toward low-income and disabled students, and enforces anti-discrimination laws.
The money for schools has been set aside by Congress and is unlikely to be affected by Mr. Trump’s executive order. But oversight of the funds could be reduced and moved to other federal agencies.
Those federal dollars account for only about 10 percent of K-12 school funding nationwide. While Mr. Trump has said he wants to return power over education to the states, states and school districts already control K-12 education, which is mostly paid for with state and local tax dollars. The federal department does not control local learning standards or reading lists.
The agency does play a big role in funding and disseminating research on education, but those efforts have been significantly scaled back by the Trump administration.
It also administers tests that track whether American students are learning and how they compare with their peers in other states and countries. It is unclear whether those tests will continue to be delivered, given drastic reductions in the staff and funding necessary to manage them.
Still, closing the department would not likely have much of an immediate effect on how schools and colleges operate. The Trump administration has discussed tapping the Treasury Department to disburse student loans and grants, for instance, and Health and Human Services to administer funding for students with disabilities.
Can the Department of Education actually be closed?
Any effort to fully eliminate the department would have to go through Congress. Republican members would most likely hear opposition from superintendents, college presidents and other education leaders in their districts; schools in Republican regions rely on federal aid from the agency, just as schools in Democratic regions do.
“They are going to run into opposition,” said Jon Valant, an education expert at the Brookings Institution. “They have a laser-thin majority and a filibuster to confront in the Senate.”
Even if Congressional Republicans stuck together to support closing the agency, Dr. Valant predicted their constituents would protest, given the department’s role in distributing money from popular programs like Pell grants, which pay for college tuition, and I.D.E.A., which provides support to students with disabilities.
“It’s a very hard sell,” he said. “And I am very skeptical that is where this administration wants to spend its political capital.”
It’s worth noting that the attempt to abolish the agency is part of a larger conservative agenda to roll back the federal role in education and direct more money toward private-school vouchers and home-schooling. Trump allies have ambitions to cut the primary federal funding stream to K-12 schools, known as Title I — although doing that, too, would most likely require action from Congress.
How much power does the department have?
Even as Mr. Trump has vowed to close the department, he has begun to use the agency’s powers.
In January, the agency announced an investigation into Denver Public Schools for converting a girls’ bathroom into an all-gender facility. It is also investigating a series of conferences for students of color in the Ithaca, N.Y., public schools, and has created an “End D.E.I.” web page, encouraging individuals to report instances of “divisive ideologies and indoctrination” in schools.
In addition, Mr. Trump’s executive order on “ending radical indoctrination in K-12 schooling” directs the department to develop and disseminate “patriotic” learning materials.
It is unclear how much those orders will change practices in classrooms, given its small role in K-12 education.
The agency does issue regulations on how civil rights laws apply to various groups of students, including disabled students, L.G.B.T.Q. students, racial minorities and girls. One of the administration’s favored strategies is to argue that when schools allow transgender students to use the bathrooms or play on the sports teams of their choice, it is a violation of girls’ rights under Title IX, a law that protects students from sex discrimination.
Mr. Trump has shown less interest in other elements of civil rights law. He has fired government lawyers who investigate schools that fail to provide equal access and services to children with disabilities, for example.
Currently, more than 70 percent of the department’s $224 billion annual budget goes to the federal student aid program, which has also become a frequent Republican target. Mr. Trump is seeking to restrict public-sector loan forgiveness, and has said fewer students should attend four-year colleges.
The agency provides more than $90 billion in new loans to students annually, which are distributed by colleges and serviced by the federal government through private contractors. It also offers $39 billion in Pell Grants annually to low-income students, which generally do not need to be paid back. It administers the federal work-study program and gives grants to students who promise to work as teachers in hard-to-staff subjects or schools.
It has had opponents since the beginning.
Opposition to the Department of Education is today associated with Republicans. But the agency began its life with fierce opponents on both sides of the aisle.
President Jimmy Carter established the department, often known simply as Ed, in 1979, fulfilling a campaign promise to the nation’s largest teachers’ union, the National Education Association. He did so over the objections of his own presidential transition team and many in Congress — including fellow Democrats.
Some staunch liberals believed all of the issues affecting children — health care, cash welfare and education — should be handled by a single federal agency, then known as the Department of Health, Education and Welfare.
Still, over the next four decades, Ed became a part of the beltway firmament, popular with Democrats and many Republicans, too. Many of the programs Ed oversees are sources of bipartisan comity, such as funding for vocational education.
Gareth Davies, a historian who has written about the founding of the Department of Education, said the revival of conservative opposition to the agency shows “just how far the G.O.P. has moved in the past two decades, from compassionate conservatism to culture wars.”
Mike Petrilli, president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute think tank, and a former Department of Education staffer under President George W. Bush, called the gesture toward shuttering the agency a distraction from problems like the record-low reading scores of American students, released in January.
He suggested that Mr. Trump should host a governor’s summit in Washington to focus on the problem, particularly on the question of whether screen time is harming children’s academic abilities.
“If you wanted to solve this problem and show leadership,” he said, “you would talk about the real crisis.”
The president of Bard College, who has run the unorthodox liberal-arts school for more than a half century, announced his retirement on Friday, after the release of documents that showed he had a closer relationship with Jeffrey Epstein than previously known.
The president, Leon Botstein, was known for his fund-raising prowess and outsize personality, but came under scrutiny after the release of a trove of documents collected by the Justice Department related to Mr. Epstein. The files showed Dr. Botstein had exchanged messages and visits with Mr. Epstein for years, including after Mr. Epstein’s conviction on solicitation of a minor for prostitution.
In one 2013 note, Dr. Botstein signed off with “Miss you.” He spoke of his cherished “new friendship” with the financier, and wished him well after the publication of news article that detailed his abuse.
The college commissioned an independent review, conducted by the law firm WilmerHale, and the findings were released on Friday.
The review found that Dr. Botstein had done nothing illegal but that his relationship with Mr. Epstein raised concerns about his leadership. The review said that Dr. Botstein had ignored the concerns of a senior faculty member who advised him that Bard should avoid Mr. Epstein.
“President Botstein forcefully argues that Bard’s need for funds was paramount,” the review concluded. “His view was, ‘I would take money from Satan if it permitted me to do God’s work.’”
The review noted that Mr. Botstein had visited Mr. Epstein’s island, invited Mr. Epstein to stay at Bard and to visit a high school affiliated with Bard, and had taken payments from Mr. Epstein. Mr. Botstein said he had in turn funneled those payments to Bard under his own name.
Dr. Botstein has long maintained that his relationship with Mr. Epstein was entirely about coaxing him to give money to the school, which is about 100 miles north of New York City.
Dr. Botstein became president of Bard in 1975, when he was only 28 years old and the college was in dire financial shape. He earned a reputation as a talented fund-raiser, and is credited by his supporters with keeping Bard afloat at a time when many colleges are facing difficulties and some have closed.
In 2021, the billionaire George Soros pledged to donate $500 million to Bard’s endowment, which now tops $1 billion.
The new documents did not show any criminal wrongdoing on Dr. Botstein’s part, but Dr. Botstein is the latest powerful person to leave a top position after their communications with Mr. Epstein were revealed.
Dr. Botstein said in a statement Friday that he believed it was in the “best interest of Bard” to wait until the review was complete before he announced his retirement.
In the statement, he said that he would continue working as a professor and participating in music programs connected to Bard. Since 1992, Dr. Botstein has been the principal conductor and music director of the American Symphony Orchestra. In his statement, he said he would also live at Finberg House, an on-campus residence hall.
Billing itself as “a private college in the public interest,” Bard has long prided itself on bucking the conventions of higher education. The college doubled down on its bohemian sensibility under Dr. Botstein’s leadership.
The out-of-the-box thinking extended to college admissions. Bard applicants, for example, can skip the traditional process and instead submit three lengthy essays.
And Dr. Botstein has lampooned the U.S. News and World Report rankings, which many college leaders swear by.
He has also been a strong advocate for early college, creating some of the first programs that allow teenagers, often from underrepresented backgrounds, to earn college credit tuition-free while still in high school.
But when it came to another convention of modern higher education — the need to raise private money — Bard embraced the practice. Dr. Botstein said he hated raising money from the wealthy, describing it as a humiliating experience.
Still, in his statement Friday, he said that the college under his watch had secured nearly $3 billion in philanthropy. He said he would stay as president until the end of this academic year, June 30.
It was fund-raising that brought Dr. Botstein into contact with Mr. Epstein. Dr. Botstein has said that the relationship with Mr. Epstein began with a small, unsolicited donation by the sex offender in 2011. “A guy sent us money and we followed up,” Dr. Botstein told The New York Times in 2023. “It’s a simple story.”
But after the latest release of documents, Dr. Botstein’s explanations for various interactions with Mr. Epstein often left community members with even more questions.
For instance, after the documents showed that Dr. Botstein’s office had planned a trip to Mr. Epstein’s island in 2012, Dr. Botstein said he had become sick during the trip and wasn’t sure whether he actually stayed on the island. When The Times reported an email from Dr. Botstein from the day after that 2012 trip, in which the president thanked Mr. Epstein and wrote “the place is great,” Dr. Botstein, through a spokesman, said he was referring to “the overall environment of St. Thomas.”
The WilmerHale report said Dr. Botstein was not “fully accurate” in describing his relationship with Mr. Epstein in public statements.
The documents also showed that the two had worked together to buy an expensive watch. Dr. Botstein, a watch collector, explained that he was helping Mr. Epstein, who had expressed interest in a watch, buy one.
Dr. Botstein kept the timepiece for about a year before Mr. Epstein demanded Dr. Botstein return it or begin making payments to cover the $56,000 cost.
In one email, Mr. Epstein even excoriated Dr. Botstein, describing his purchase of the watch as “careless.”
The initial response to the news was subdued on the Bard campus, and it appeared many, including board members, were willing to stand by a leader viewed by some as central to the college’s success over the decades. But the pressure mounted after a slow drip of news coverage.
This spring, the board of trustees, headed by the billionaire James Cox Chambers, announced it had hired WilmerHale to investigate Mr. Epstein’s relationship with the president and Bard.
The faculty senate eventually weighed in on the matter, urging trustees to “plan for a transition in leadership.” The faculty statement also called for envisioning a Bard after the man who had led it for more than half a century.
The board on Friday thanked Dr. Botstein for “his countless accomplishments and the lasting impact of his leadership.” It said it will soon announce an interim leader and the details of a national search for the next president.
Students at Cornell University had gathered on Thursday for an evening of debate over the war in Gaza and the long-running conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. The debate rapidly escalated after the event, during a walk with the university president to the parking lot.
As students posed critical questions and surrounded his car, the university’s president, Michael Kotlikoff, said that the students banged on his vehicle when he tried to drive away, an accusation they deny and that video provided by the students does not show.
The confrontation on the Ithaca, N.Y., campus was a reminder of the lingering tensions over the war between Israel and Hamas and how universities responded to student protests, even as on-campus demonstrations have largely subsided.
The evening had been billed as a civil dialogue between supporters of Israel and backers of the Palestinian cause.
As night fell and the debate ended, Dr. Kotlikoff, who had spoken at the event, walked to his vehicle, a black Cadillac SUV. The video shows it slowly reversing, as a handful of students stand behind and around the vehicle recording the incident. The car stops in front of one student, brushing him. It then accelerates and bumps into the student, causing him to stumble.
A second student screamed that the car had run over his foot, though video does not show a clear angle of that happening.
“You’re running a student over? Am I allowed to stand here?” Hudson Athas, 21, the student who was bumped, said before the car lurched.
Dr. Kotlikoff continued backing up and left the parking lot. Emergency medical technicians arrived and checked the foot of the second student, Aiden Vallecillo, a 22-year-old senior, who was not seriously injured.
The students’ campus organization, Students for a Democratic Cornell, described Dr. Kotlikoff’s behavior as “reckless.” In a statement released by the university, Dr. Kotlikoff described himself as the victim of the incident, saying he had experienced “harassment and intimidation” that was aimed at “silencing speech.”
Dr. Kotlikoff said that he had been followed to his car by a group of students who were “loudly shouting questions” at him. In his telling, the students had been “banging on the windows” of his car and blocked his exit. The video does not show the students hitting his car.
The students who confronted Dr. Kotlikoff on Thursday said they were objecting to the suspension of student demonstrators and measures that they said stifle free speech on campus. Those include restrictions on protest, as part of the school’s “expressive activity policy,” which was adopted in March 2025.
It was not their intention to block his car, they said.
Dr. Kotlikoff said that he waited to back out until he saw space behind his car and was able to “slowly maneuver my car from the parking space.”
Like many universities in the United States, Cornell erupted with student protests in the spring of 2024 over the Israel-Hamas war. And since October 2023, when that war began, the university has issued more than 80 disciplinary actions, including suspensions, against students that it says have infringed on “the rights of others.”
The suspended students include the leader of the campus encampments movement, Momodou Taal, a Ph.D. student in Africana studies whom the Trump administration sought to deport. Immigration officials had taken similar action against students at other universities whom they had accused of antisemitism.
Mr. Taal and other Cornell students shut down a campus career fair in 2024 that included weapons manufacturers. Facing removal by immigration authorities, Mr. Taal left the United States last year.
The school says that its policies surrounding demonstrations was enacted to combat “harassment, intimidation, shutting down events and threats of violence.”
Dr. Kotlikoff, who is a veterinarian, was appointed president of Cornell in March 2025 after an eight-month interim appointment. He had been the university’s provost from 2015 to 2024.
Thursday’s roughly two-hour event was an installment in an ongoing Israel-Palestine debate series and began ordinarily enough, with Dr. Kotlikoff introducing the discussion, which featured Norman Finkelstein, an author and political scientist.
Dr. Finkelstein’s remarks centered around Israel’s response to the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks. Pro-Palestinian and pro-Israel students also debated over the university’s policies on free speech and expression.
As he was leaving Cornell’s Goldwin Smith Hall, where the debate took place, Mr. Vallecillo and another student, Sophia Arnold, also a senior, asked Dr. Kotlikoff how the university could be reporting some students for misconduct while also deciding the outcome of the disciplinary actions against them.
In one of the videos that were provided to The New York Times by the students, Dr. Kotlikoff said that the university “has the responsibility and the accountability to make sure everyone in this community is protected.”
In an interview, Mr. Athas, who is a junior, said that Dr. Kotlikoff had not given him enough warning that he was backing up. He was unsatisfied with the president’s responses to their questions.
“We want to see the reversal of these draconian policies,” Mr. Athas said.
Stephanie Saul contributed reporting.
U.S.A. at 250
Yale’s Bicentennial Schlock collection offers a window into the star-spangled commercialism that swept the country 50 years ago.
The Beinecke Library at Yale is home to countless treasures, including a Gutenberg Bible, an original printing of the Declaration of Independence and hand-drawn maps from the Lewis and Clark expedition.
But on a recent afternoon, in the basement reading room, Joshua Cochran, the library’s curator of American history, reached into one of a dozen archival boxes loaded on a cart and carefully unwrapped a humbler item — a paper cup imprinted with the image of Paul Revere’s lantern.
Also in the boxes were sugar packets with presidential portraits, a Bicentennial burger wrapper and, taped to an index card, a withered “all-American novelty condom,” emblazoned with the slogan “One Time for Old Glory.”
And then there was a rumpled piece of plastic, which on closer inspection turned out to be a “Ben Franklin kite” stamped with the words of the Declaration.
“History is not just about presidents and kings and diplomats, but a lived daily experience for people,” Cochran said. “Looking at this collection, it really reminds you of the everydayness of history.”
The Bicentennial Schlock collection, totaling just over 100 artifacts, is one of Yale’s quirkier holdings. Assembled in 1976 by the historian Jesse Lemisch, it endures as a lively (if a bit grungy) testament to the star-spangled commercialism that swept across the country in the run-up to the 200th anniversary of American independence.
Today, it can be hard to grasp the scale of the swag. By the time the confetti stopped falling, according to one estimate, more than 25,000 items had been produced, from a limited-edition replica of George Washington’s sword to independence-themed toilet paper.
This being the 1970s, the commercialism prompted a countercultural pushback, along with charges that “Buy-centennial” huckersterism had sold out the true radical spirit of ’76.
“You know damn well that we’re going to be inundated for two years with an attempt to sell a plastic image of America to sell cars and cornflakes,” the activist Jeremy Rifkin, a founder of the People’s Bicentennial Commission, an anti-corporate group, told The New York Times in 1974. “To me that’s treason.”
Lemisch, as a lifelong man of the left, was politically sympathetic. But as both a scholar and a self-described “terminal Bicentennial freak,” he also saw an opportunity.
“How many of us,” he wrote in The New Republic in 1976, “are lucky enough to see the central passion of our creative lives translated into the Disney version, and for sale, in this translation, in every supermarket?”
Lemisch, who died in 2018, was not the only one cataloging the goofier manifestations of the Bicentennial. The Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library and Museum in Grand Rapids, Mich., has a trove of memorabilia, including a can of “Bicentennial air.” And the University of Central Florida has a “Bicentennial Junk” collection. But Lemisch’s comes with an intellectual pedigree forged in the history wars of the ’60s and ’70s.
Lemisch, who got his doctorate from Yale in 1963, was part of a generation of social historians who challenged both the conservative bent of scholarship on early America and what they saw as the historical profession’s complacent, complicit relationship with American power.
In his influential 1967 essay “The American Revolution Seen From the Bottom Up,” he argued that the Revolution wasn’t just a top-down affair but also a genuinely democratic uprising driven by the aspirations of the artisan and working classes, which were ultimately thwarted by wealthy elites.
He also pushed for democratization of the archival record. In a 1971 essay called “The American Revolution Bicentennial and the Papers of Great White Men,” Lemisch lamented that the ambitious and well-funded scholarly editing projects undertaken for the anniversary neglected rabble-rousers like Thomas Paine and Sam Adams, to say nothing of women, Black Americans and Native Americans.
Those projects, he argued, reflected the “arrogant nationalism and elitism” of the 1950s that historians, like the nation itself, were already leaving behind.
The schlock collection had its origins in an undergraduate class Lemisch taught at the State University of New York, Buffalo, in the spring of 1976. The course included scholarly reading, but Lemisch also instructed the students to gather as much Bicentennial junk as they could find.
“We owe it to Those Who Will Come After Us to preserve and interpret these priceless relics,” he wrote in his syllabus. “Let us fill a time capsule with a deeply embarrassing heritage for 2076.”
Forget the quality commemorative items from the Franklin Mint and Colonial Williamsburg. He wanted “real schlock, available schlock, cheap schlock,” ideally costing less than a dollar. And it needed to be properly documented.
“Please,” he wrote, “do not bury me in unannotated schlock!”
Lemisch and his students organized a museum-style exhibition in Buffalo in October 1976. As news stories about this unlikely “Schlock Czar” spread, he started getting fan letters from people across the country, along with additional specimens.
A woman from Brooklyn sent “a piece of Bicentennial Patriotism good enough to eat.” A woman from Muncie, Ind., contributed stars-and-stripes paper surgical caps worn, to her surprise, by the team that had recently operated on her.
Two correspondents sent Lemisch the identical sanitary disposal bags, printed with the Liberty Bell, that had suddenly appeared in the women’s bathroom in their campus library.
“Although the Bicentennial has passed, I can still remember my amazement at being confronted with ‘200 Years of Freedom’ upon entering the toilet,” a student at Rutgers wrote.
At first Lemisch reveled in the public interest. But the attention — someone in San Jose, Calif., he claimed, had even named an omelet after him — left him feeling ambivalent.
“By the time I cut off the interviews,” he wrote in The New Republic that November, “I had become Bicentennial Schlock.”
Still, he staged a revival of the exhibition in New York City in August 1977, at the headquarters of a union. In 1981, he donated the collection to Yale.
“I believe that future researchers will find the material a distinctive collection for reconstructing Americans’ views of the past in 1976,” he wrote at the time.
Since then, Cochran said, it has seen use by classes and researchers. And an Uncle Sam Pez dispenser is currently on view in the Beinecke’s new exhibition, “Unfurling the Flag: Reflections on Patriotism,” alongside non-schlock like Yale’s first printing of the Declaration and a typescript draft of Langston Hughes’s poem “Let America Be America Again.”
“We want to prompt people to think about where their ideas about patriotism come from,” Cochran said. “The Bicentennial was a formative moment for a lot of people, when the iconography was inescapable.”
Today, you can find the same Pez dispenser on eBay, along with tens of thousands of Bicentennial listings running heavily to coins, stamps, plates and ersatz Paul Revere pewter. But Lemisch’s collection includes many items so lowly — wet wipes, dry-cleaning bags, plastic straws in patriotic sleeves — that they may survive nowhere else.
Patriotic Dixie cups and cereal boxes might seem to epitomize the kind of populist “history from below” that Lemisch championed. But he saw things differently.
Bicentennial schlock, Lemisch wrote in The New Republic, had “floated down from above, and responded to no popular longing to celebrate the Bicentennial.” It was “the Watergate of patriotism” — a “healthy demystification” that made Americans “wisely cynical” about the official history they were peddled.
“Since Schlock was the Bicentennial’s most pervasive manifestation and perhaps its most enduring heritage,” he wrote, “it almost seems, emotionally speaking, as if there was no Bicentennial at all.”
Today, historians take a more sanguine view. For all its tensions and contradictions, they argue, the Bicentennial added up a powerful cultural moment. It spawned both new scholarship and a boom in popular history, powered by a more emotional, personal way of relating to the past. And Lemisch’s deadpan museum — along with the delighted public response to it — was very much a part of it.
And this year’s Semiquincentennial? Then, as now, there has been debate over its focus and political meaning, which has intensified as President Trump has moved to put his own stamp on the anniversary. And while there are plenty of exhibitions and events on tap across the country, there has been much less investment and enthusiasm overall.
Which isn’t to say there is no merch. The websites for both America250, the nonpartisan federal planning group created by Congress in 2016, and Freedom 250, an alternate effort backed by President Trump, offer tasteful hats, mugs, playing cards and pickleball paddles. But so far, unapologetic 1976-style schlock appears thin on the ground.
You could chalk the schlock gap up to shifts in consumer culture, growing political polarization or the fact that schlock — or slop? — has moved online. But even back in 1976, Professor Lemisch struggled to draw definitive conclusions.
“What does Bicentennial Schlock mean?” he wrote. “I don’t exactly know. I find that deeply embarrassing.”
“More research,” he added, “is needed.”
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