In 1979, the year Jimmy Carter created the Department of Education, average student debt was a shade above $1,000. Today, 43 million Americans owe $37,000 on average. In the same time span, inflation-adjusted spending per pupil in the U.S. rose from $9,600 to over $17,000, or 77%.

In signing the bill enacting the agency, Carter said, “The Department of Education bill will allow the federal government to meet its responsibilities in education more effectively, more efficiently, and more responsively.”

Forty-six years later, there is no other conclusion to reach than that the Education Department has been a total failure, and that’s putting it kindly.

The department’s budget has risen from $53 billion to $238 billion, with total outlays surpassing $3 trillion. Yet test scores, both the SAT for college-bound students and as measured by the National Assessment of Educational Progress, have been largely stagnant or shown minimal improvement.

To spend over $3 trillion on anything and not realize any measurable benefit is a far ghastlier exhibit of government waste and failure than anything yet unearthed by Elon Musk’s team at DOGE. It is more than sufficient cause to shut down the entire operation.

Far from just an inefficient government agency, the department has been actively working against students and educational opportunities. Over the past 15 years, the department has been hijacked by leftist bureaucrats committed to institutionalizing radical social agendas, not student success.

Education Department bureaucrats supported university administrators in turning campuses into toxic breeding grounds of indoctrination for intersectional victim-based grievances, where education took a back seat to identifying the oppressed and their oppressors. These deeply entrenched activists further transformed the agency into a cudgel against schools that do not conform to their woke mandates to drive them into the ground, cornering students into conventional public, private, and state-run schools, regardless of students’ career goals.

Under Biden’s Education Secretary, Miguel Cardona, the Education Department further waged an assault on career colleges, online programs, and faith-based schools that few could have imagined. Using the Office of Enforcement—an obscure division of the Federal Student Aid office created under President Obama, “deprioritized” during President Trump’s first term, and later resurrected by the Biden administration—the agency weaponized the student loan process to bring non-traditional schools to heel.

At the same time, the Biden Education Department was implementing a backdoor debt-cancellation strategy, it was also working to drive career colleges out of business via executive fiat. Selective regulations, like the department’s 90/10 and Gainful Employment rules, were applied exclusively to career-education schools, which were (and still are) growing in popularity among students who want to learn a high-skill trade that offers high pay and long-term job security, and which our growing economy desperately needs.

The department’s efforts were never about protecting students, but propping up public and private universities, which were (and still are) hemorrhaging students. Even the Harvard Business Review acknowledges that this higher ed model is failing to give “students what employers need” and “simply no longer works.”

Sec. McMahon has ample reason and opportunity to shut down an agency doing far more to block educational opportunity than support it, but a complete elimination requires congressional action. In the meantime, she can begin gutting its more nefarious operations, starting with the FSA Office of Enforcement, where 70% of actions were directed at Christian and career colleges, despite these schools representing less than 10% of students.

Likewise, Sec. McMahon should rescind biased regulations that have been applied exclusively against career colleges, like the 90/10 and Gainful Employment rules. McMahon would be wise to convene negotiated rulemaking committees to apply rules deemed necessary to all colleges and universities equally. This alone would rock the ivory towers, given a recent study that found 40% of programs at traditional four-year universities would not meet the current Gainful Employment standard.

President Trump gave Sec. McMahon a directive to “work herself out of a job” by dismantling her department, an entirely necessary order given how corrupt, wasteful, and politicized the Education Department has become. We must demand that Congress likewise side with students and against the entrenched left-wing education establishment by passing the legislation necessary to make this happen.

Gerard Scimeca is an attorney and vice president of CASE, Consumer Action for a Strong Economy, a free-market consumer advocacy organization.

Views expressed by guest contributors to Issues & Insights are their own and don’t necessarily reflect the views of the I&I Editorial Board.