More than 100 programs run by the U.S. Department of Education are shifting to other agencies, and that number could grow in the coming months.
The Trump administration has framed these program shifts, along with laying off scores of staffers and canceling hundreds of ongoing competitive grants, as steps toward the ultimate goal of closing the Education Department.
But in some respects, that elimination goal remains far off. Top administration officials have acknowledged they need lawmakers to sign off on shuttering the department altogether. Congress supplied the agency with essentially level funding for this fiscal year. More than 2,000 employees remain on the job, with schools and state governments still expecting them to send out billions of dollars according to federal law.
Even so, dozens of programs—many of them decades-old—have either begun moving or are poised to move soon.
What exactly does it mean to move a program? Where is the institutional knowledge going? Will funding be delayed or unaffected? And will these shifts cause long-lasting substantive changes or merely cosmetic ones that can be easily undone?
Education Week posed these questions and more to current and former Education Department staffers, as well as education advocates. Here’s what they said.
Use the links below to navigate between questions.
What has the Department of Education announced so far?
As of March 20, the department has published 10 separate interagency agreements to transfer day-to-day management of more than 100 grant programs and related functions to one of five separate agencies.
The first agreement, from last June, moved the Education Department’s office of career, technical, and adult education to the Department of Labor.
Then, in November, the department announced six new agreements shifting most K-12 programs as well as many higher education programs to the departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, Interior, and State.
On Feb. 23, the department announced two additional agreements: one moving school safety and mental health grants to HHS, and another moving foreign gift tracking for higher education to the State Department.
Most recently, on March 19, the department announced that it would shift its student loan portfolio to the Treasury Department.
What is an interagency agreement?
Interagency agreements (IAAs) allow a federal agency to sign a contract with another agency to procure its services. Separately, “detail” agreements allow for agencies to temporarily assign employees to other agencies.
These agreements haven’t previously been used to transfer entire programs from one agency to another.
In 2013, for instance, the Department of Transportation signed an interagency agreement with the Department of Commerce to collaborate on efforts to establish a domestic supply base for public transit construction. In 2022, the Justice Department tapped the Department of Labor for help carrying out a grant program for formerly incarcerated workers.
Angela Hanks worked on the latter IAA while she was overseeing the Labor Department’s Employment and Training Administration (ETA) during the Biden administration.
“They are very complicated, they’re very legally tricky, and even with a lot of thought and attention to how to proceed, it’s not as simple as signing over one part of government to another,” Hanks said.
From 2021 to 2022, Hanks led the office in Labor that will now house dozens of education grant programs. The Employment and Training Administration’s main responsibilities include administering unemployment benefits and federal programs for job training and dislocated workers.
“I [was] the person who was qualified to run this part of the Department of Labor. I just don’t know the Department of Education,” Hanks said. “They’re just different programs with different goals and authorities.”
Federal agencies in the past have used the detail mechanism to give workers an opportunity to temporarily contribute their expertise to ongoing projects at another agency.
Detail agreements historically haven’t been in place long-term. But legal experts say there doesn’t appear to be any legal barrier to an agency repeatedly renewing detail agreements for staff.
Why is all this happening?
President Donald Trump signed an executive order last March calling on Secretary of Education Linda McMahon to “facilitate” the closure of the U.S. Department of Education while ensuring its services continued “uninterrupted.” While his administration has advocated for maintaining critical funding that the agency sends to schools, it has pushed to put those programs in different agencies.
McMahon has said she plans to use the IAAs to help build the case for skeptical lawmakers that they should support abolishing the Department of Education as an independent agency.
But members of Congress across both parties appear reluctant to affirmatively endorse this plan. During the most recent federal appropriations cycle, the Trump administration proposed to consolidate grant programs and formalize staff reductions—but lawmakers rejected those suggestions, instead offering level year-over-year funding for Department of Education programs.
Is this legal?
A bipartisan coalition of congressional appropriators expressed concern in recently approved budget legislation about the department’s use of IAAs. They established a new requirement for Education Department officials to brief lawmakers twice a month on the IAAs’ status.
But the legislation doesn’t unwind the IAAs the department has already signed. And it doesn’t prevent the department from signing more.
The nonpartisan Congressional Research Service in February published a legal analysis of the Education Department’s interagency agreements. The report’s authors wrote they were unable to find court rulings clarifying interpretations of the federal statutes the Trump administration has cited to justify its IAAs.
“There is scant legislative history concerning such provisions,” Jared P. Cole and Sean Stiff wrote.
That could change, though—plaintiffs in two lawsuits challenging the Trump administration’s efforts to close the Education Department updated their filings in recent months to contest the IAAs on legal grounds as well.
Native American tribal leaders have raised a different set of legal concerns. Dozens of them met with federal officials last month to emphasize that the department may have violated longstanding agreements by failing to consult them before announcing plans to move programs affecting their constituents to the Interior Department. Attendees urged the department to halt transfer efforts and engage in a more deliberate effort to collect feedback.
Who will work on programs once they’ve moved to their new agencies?
Administration officials have said programs will continue to be managed by Education Department staff operating out of other agencies’ buildings and using those agencies’ technological systems.
That means, for now, the core responsibilities of each program won’t shift to current employees at agencies other than the Education Department.
Some observers, however, are concerned the department will eventually move to lay off staffers with expertise in education programs.
Alternatively, “If their intention is just to move staff from one building to another, what’s the point?” Hanks, the former Employment and Training Administration leader, said.
The Education Department’s inspector general’s office expressed concern in a February report about the complexities of involving two agencies in efforts to carry out programs that were previously carried out by one.
“It will be critically important for the Department to ensure that program expertise is transferred and that there is continuous communication between the agencies to avoid any gaps in grantee oversight and monitoring or duplication of effort,” the report said.
When is all this going to happen?
Some Federal Student Aid staff had already begun working at the Treasury Department as of April 2025, long before the Education Department announced its agreement with the agency. Education officials said at the time the staffers were helping Treasury restart a delinquent debt collection program.
Some Education Department staff working on career-and-technical education, higher education, and elementary and secondary education programs have in recent months been detailed to the Department of Labor.
Even before those programs began moving, the number of people working on them at the Education Department had been shrinking. As of November 2025, those three offices collectively employed 224 fewer people than they did a year earlier, according to a New York Times analysis of federal workforce data.
As of March 20, there has been no public indication that detail agreements are in motion for transferring staff to the other three agencies that have signed IAAs with the Education Department.
How has the CTE transition to Labor gone so far?
Every state was due to receive an allocation of Perkins formula funds for career-and-technical education on Oct. 1.
Education Week asked each state education agency when it gained access to its Oct. 1 allocation of formula funds through the Perkins funds this past fall. Roughly half of states responded—and they shared a wide range of experiences.
Eight states reported access delays of more than a month—including one (South Dakota) where funds weren’t available until January, and one (Wyoming) where funds weren’t available until February.
Meanwhile, some states—including Arizona, Idaho, Iowa, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nebraska, Nevada, New Jersey, and West Virginia—reported business as usual, with funds becoming available on Oct. 1, 2, or 3.
Many states experienced modest delays: Oct. 7 for North Carolina, Oct. 15 for Massachusetts, Oct. 20 for Utah, Oct. 22 for Maine, and Oct. 23 for Delaware and Vermont.
Illinois gained access to its formula funds on Nov. 5. Kansas, Kentucky, Missouri, and New Mexico gained access in mid-November. Wisconsin got in on Dec. 11.
Typically, states can access those Oct. 1 funds almost immediately through the Education Department’s G5 grants portal. This year, the federal government told states they’d access the funds instead through the Department of Labor’s separate grants management system.
Meanwhile, an internal Education Department memo reported in November by the news publication GovExec warned that “larger formula grants and competitive grants are going to be much more difficult to migrate.”
Back in November, one state chief anonymously told Watershed Advisers, a school finance consulting firm, “Right now, I’m having trouble getting my money from one federal agency. I’m not sure how I’m supposed to get money from four.”
How has the Education Department decided which agencies will take its programs?
The department hasn’t publicly shared details about how it’s making these decisions.
Several of the announced moves appear in Project 2025, the conservative presidential policy document co-authored by several current Trump administration officials and coordinated by the Heritage Foundation think tank.
The agency hasn’t held to all of its pronouncements about where programs should move. Last March, President Donald Trump said student loans had begun moving to the Small Business Administration, rather than the Treasury Department where they’re now headed.
More recently, the department quietly amended its already-published agreement with Labor to remove four K-12 grant programs it instead has placed at HHS, a spokesperson for the Education Department told Education Week.
The Feb. 23 amendment came three months after the initial agreement to transfer those four programs—Full-Service Community Schools, Promise Neighborhoods, Ready to Learn, and Statewide Family Engagement Centers—to Labor.
That means Education Department employees who run those programs will no longer work alongside agency colleagues who run other K-12 education programs. Staff overseeing Statewide Family Engagement Centers, which helps schools and states strengthen connections between parents and educator, might struggle to coordinate with Title programs, said Vito Borrello, executive director of the National Association for Family, School, and Community Engagement.
“What we are hearing are political talking points about bureaucracy, but we have yet to see any substantive details about how this shift will improve outcomes for students or strengthen programs that are already delivering results,” he said.
How might states and districts feel the effects of these changes?
States’ experiences drawing down funds from Labor and HHS grant portals could be more or less rocky depending on whether their education agencies already have experience using those systems, said Catherine Pozniak, a school finance consultant who previously served as Louisiana’s assistant secretary of education.
For instance, in Louisiana, the state’s community and technical colleges agency has always been in charge of drawing down Perkins funds, while the state education department handles Title funds for school districts.
The community college agency is now set up in the Labor grants platform, and accessed its Oct. 1 Perkins funds on Oct. 2.
But, once Title funds start flowing through the U.S. Department of Labor, Louisiana’s education department will have to start using a new system it hadn’t previously used.
In other states, the education agency handles Perkins funds and sometimes early childhood funds from HHS, and already has experience accessing the Labor and HHS grants systems. The switch to account for the program transfers to those agencies could be less onerous in those states.
Smaller districts that routinely struggle with tight cash flow could struggle to meet payroll obligations if efforts to secure reimbursements from states slow down due to any state-level delays. “We could see a big cash crunch happening,” Pozniak said.
Sending closely related programs to different agencies could also cause confusion for states and districts looking for consistent interpretations of the rules. For instance, some formula grant programs moving to Interior make calculations using the Title I formula and regulations. (Title I is moving to Labor.)
“A grantee could get dinged for something that they were told by a different agency was the correct interpretation,” said Josie Skinner, an education lawyer who worked in the Education Department’s office of general counsel from 2014 until last March, when the Trump administration laid her off.
Early delays have already popped up for competitive grant programs like TRIO, which supports low-income middle and high school students’ efforts to prepare for postsecondary opportunities.
Senators from both parties publicly called for two new TRIO competitions to begin by March 1. The Department of Labor published one call for applications on March 17; the other has yet to materialize as of March 20.
How have conservatives reacted to the Trump administration’s Education Department moves?
Several prominent conservative education policy experts—including proponents of shrinking the Education Department—have expressed doubts that the moves will accomplish the administration’s stated goals.
“Mostly, it seems, this is all for show—the illusion of carrying out a campaign promise while burdening states and districts with more doors to knock on in Washington and different bureaucracies to satisfy in order to obtain the funds and services that the White House says will continue to flow,” wrote Chester E. Finn, who led the department’s research arm during the Reagan administration.
Vic Klatt, who served in an undersecretary role in the department under President George H.W. Bush, criticized the Trump administration for claiming broadly to reject the influence of unions while shifting many education programs to an agency tasked with upholding labor-friendly policies.
“Only out of touch Washington insiders could possibly think that shifting education programs to the Labor Department dominated by labor union politics and policies will reduce the influence of organized labor,” Klatt wrote in December.
Others remain supportive of the moves, with the end goal of eliminating the Education Department in mind, while acknowledging the transition hasn’t been seamless.
“We don’t want the current inefficiencies and duplications to distract us from the long term benefits of returning power to the states,” Jim Blew, who served as assistant secretary for planning, evaluation, and policy development at the Education Department during the first Trump administration, recently told Politico.
Will there be more interagency agreements?
Education Department officials have repeatedly said they’d like to move special education to the Department of Health and Human Services. So far, that move hasn’t happened—in part, because advocates for students with disabilities have signaled they’ll aggressively oppose efforts to disrupt those programs.
A Trump administration official told Bloomberg News last month that the Department of Justice “will do a great job administering” the responsibilities of the Education Department’s office for civil rights.
Meanwhile, advocates for the Education Department’s data collection efforts have speculated the agency might move those functions to the Census Bureau within the Department of Commerce. Indeed, Project 2025 contemplates such a move.
2026-03-20 20:26:57
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