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PODCAST: | “Freedom to Learn:” How is the Trump Administration “Returning Education to the States”?

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Lindsey Burke, ED’s deputy chief of staff for policy and programs, explains the recent interagency agreements (IAAs) and responds to concerns.

We’re in the midst of a rare opportunity to rethink our country’s approach to education governance. The Federal Scholarship Tax Credit will empower communities, parents, and students, and we hope Freedom to Learn listeners are responding to the Treasury Department’s request for comments on the tax credit’s implementation.

The other opportunity that we regularly explore on the podcast is the Trump administration’s plans to “return education to the states.” Lindsey Burke, Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy and Programs at the U.S. Department of Education, returns to Freedom to Learn to discuss the Department’s origin story, what it does and does not do, and the administration’s plans to streamline federal bureaucracy through RIFs, waivers, and bureaucratic consolidation. Lindsey explains the recently announced interagency agreements (IAAs) that shift programs and staff to four federal agencies and responds to concerns, including how students with disabilities will be impacted.

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Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Let’s remind our listeners that the Department of Education has not been around forever.

Lindsey Burke: That’s right, the Department of Education as a cabinet-level agency came on the scene in 1979. It was the product of a promise made by Jimmy Carter to the teachers union as he was running for election to president. And he got elected and made good on that promise, and quickly got signed into law what is now the federal Department of Education. Its history is short, 45 years relatively speaking. But it has certainly created a lot of paperwork, a lot of red tape, and not had the outcomes that proponents had promised when Carter made his pitch.

In reading what people have to say about plans to return education to the states, there doesn’t seem to be a clear sense of what the U.S. Department of Education does versus what it does not do. People seem to think, “the sky will fall, and teachers will be fired.” And they seem to think that the Department of Education runs schools. Do you have a way that you describe what it does and what it does not do?

Lindsey Burke: Look, I think one could be forgiven for believing that because the unions do make it sound like this is what the agency does. But you’re exactly right.

The Department of Education does not educate a single child. It does not pay a single teacher salary. It does not run a single school.

And we saw that very clearly during the Democrat-induced government shutdown a few months ago, or I guess a month ago now, where everything continued, status quo in terms of funding flowing to schools in terms of teachers being paid, athletics for kids, extracurriculars, everything went on as it always does, even as this agency’s doors were shut for the longest in history government shutdown. I think that’s a really good demonstration of how little the department does to affect the day-to-day lives of children.

What it does do is it acts as a pass-through agency for federal funding that is authorized and appropriated by Congress. But beyond that, it has no involvement in curriculum or really academics to speak of. Again, I think you see that in the outcomes. We’ve spent $3 trillion, give or take, since the department was created. And yet, we have math and reading outcomes that should concern every family in America. When only a third of kids can read and do math proficiently, you have to wonder what the ROI has really been of this.

The mission was “to promote student achievement and preparation for global competitiveness,” and the outcomes have indicated it has not really succeeded in that mission.

Lindsey Burke: Yeah, we’re still middle of the pack. When Jimmy Carter made the pitch, you have to think about it historically. This was a decade and a half or so removed from the War on Poverty that Lyndon Johnson had initiated, where we did for the first time have significant federal involvement, federal intervention in K-12 and higher ed, and early ed. And you had programs that weren’t working great. They were sort of scattered around. And so part of what Carter said was that this will create more efficiencies. It will make management better for these programs. It will make it easier for schools and states to engage with federal programs and spending, but that hasn’t been the case either. Schools and districts routinely have to engage currently with multiple federal agencies. If you’re getting WIOA funding, you’re dealing with Labor and ED. If you’re participating in Head Start, you’re dealing with HHS. If you’re getting school nutrition programs, you’re dealing with the Department of Agriculture. So, LEAs and SEAs – school districts and states – already have to deal with all of these federal agencies. So I think part of what we’ve been thinking about here at the department is how do we actually create some of those efficiencies and streamline access to funding and grants for grantees to hopefully correct course and make things work a little bit better as we engage in this process of downsizing this behemoth federal agency.

I’m tempted to encourage listeners to go back and listen to a conversation that we recorded earlier this year after we testified before Congress about some of the problems that the U.S. Department of Education has created – the bureaucratic morass, this giant overhead machine that exerts top-down federal influence. Let’s recap, though. When you’re talking about returning education to the states, what is specifically the problem that you’re trying to solve?

Lindsey Burke: Well, there are myriad problems that we’re trying to solve, but first, having a federal department of education is not an enumerated power of the federal government. Just from a first principles perspective, from a good governance and constitutional perspective, this is about getting back to the purpose of education, which was to have dollars flow locally so that parents can determine what works best for their children. So, situating dollars, situating decisions as close to families as possible by getting it out of Washington, out of this agency where there is no authority constitutionally for it to exist, and putting it closer to schools and to districts, makes a lot of sense. So the first order of business is how do we get these dollars closer to the children and the families, and the students in the case of higher ed, that they will ultimately affect.

And then, the second component of that is thinking about the taxpayer experience. We always forget about the poor taxpayer, but they are somebody who will also benefit from starting to right-size and downsize federal intervention in education. Just to give you an idea, we have spent billions upon billions of dollars in grant funding that is perpetuating what has been an extremely pernicious, in some cases, ideology when it comes to things like diversity, equity, and inclusion or radical gender ideology. Prior administrations had been spending billions on this. The Department of Education under the Trump administration has terminated at least $2 billion in funding for hundreds of grants that were funding those pernicious ideologies. And so, not only is that a benefit to the taxpayer, which is just a good additional benefit, but it is ensuring that we are not perpetuating these ideologies in classrooms across America. And so it’s not only right-sizing the agency, but it’s right-sizing and reorienting the focus of how those taxpayer dollars are spent when they are spent.

So those were some of the early actions that we saw from the administration taking a look at what the grants were going to and re-competing in some cases, canceling in others. Do I have that right?

Lindsey Burke: Depends on the grant, re-competing or canceling; but I think overall, it is just a matter of these grants not being on autopilot anymore, which they were in a lot of cases prior to this administration. Money was just going out the door. Money was going out the door to fund a doctoral dissertation on the experience of transgender individuals in Bogota, Colombia. These are the types of grants that are no longer being funded by American taxpayers because we have taken a really fine tooth comb and we have looked through all of these various grants. And again, we’re just not on autopilot anymore.

Secretary McMahon joined the podcast earlier this year, right after a big reduction-in-force announcement, so we don’t need to dig into that. And then Hayley Sanon, who is with the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education, talked about waivers. Let’s dig into a more recent announcement: the interagency agreements. I’ve never heard the acronym IAAs as much as I have over the last month or so. Can you walk us through those announcements?

Lindsey Burke: Sure, you get us on for all the big announcements – the RIFs and the waivers and now the IAAs. So, IAAs sound in the weeds and complicated, but as you know, these are interagency agreements. This is a very frequently used tool of the federal government. Federal agencies contract with other federal agencies all the time. We have hundreds of IAAs on smaller matters with other federal agencies, even the Biden administration had entered into an interagency agreement with DOJ, I believe it was, on the First Step Act. So, this is a tool that the federal government uses frequently. And the tool enables us to procure the services of other federal agencies to co-manage programs and get money out the door. We retain at ED statutory authority over the policy of these programs, but our partner agencies in this case are able to manage those programs, get funding out the door.

We announced, as part of our effort to return education to the states, six interagency agreements a couple of weeks ago. We announced with four federal agencies, the Department of Labor, the Department of Health and Human Services, the State Department, and the Department of the Interior, these six interagency agreements.

With the Department of Labor, we’ve entered into an IAA with them on our Office of Elementary and Secondary Education programs. Most of our K-12 education programs will now be managed by Labor. We entered into an IAA with DOL for OPE – you really got to be on your acronyms – an agreement with the Department of Labor for our Office of Postsecondary Education programs. These are just the grant programs. We’re not talking about student loans and grants. These are just institution-based grants. So we’ve entered into an IAA with DOL to manage those grants as well.

We entered into an IAA with the Department of Health and Human Services on something called CCAMPIS, which is not college on a yacht, as nice as that sounds. It’s actually the Child Care Access Means Parents in Schools program.

[For] our international and foreign language education programs, IFLE, we entered into an IAA with the Department of State, which makes complete sense if you think about the mission of the State Department to help oversee some of these international education programs.

And then, foreign medical accreditation, we have an IAA with HHS to make sure, if you’re attending a foreign medical school, that you’re getting effectively a substantially equivalent (for accreditation purposes) medical education if you’re going to be a doctor in the US (for purposes of Title IV).

And then finally, Indian education programs, we have entered into an IAA with the Department of the Interior to help us co-manage these Indian education programs.

So those six were just signed. We also have a seventh: OCTAE, our Office of Career, Technical, and Adult Education. That was signed back in May; that first IAA has now been fully executed. We had staff from the Department of ED detail over to the Department of Labor to manage our career and technical education and adult education programs at Labor. So that one is already in effect, going swimmingly, and has really been a proof of concept.

So now we have these six additional agreements that we have just announced, that we have signed. I like to say the signing of an IAA is the engagement, it’s not the marriage. So we’re in the wedding planning process part of these IAAs right now. But it’s pretty exciting. I think it serves a lot of purposes. It primarily serves the purpose of narrowing the size and scope of this agency by procuring the services of other agencies to manage programs and getting some of those programs over to those other agencies. But it also serves the purpose of better streamlining services for grantees. You know, we talked about at the top where SEAs and LEAs frequently already have to go to multiple federal agencies. Well, now you can imagine a scenario in which if you are working on a career and technical education grant program and you’re the state of Alabama, now you can just go to the Department of Labor for that. You’re getting one set of feedback from DOL rather than getting feedback on a grant from Labor and the Department of Ed. So, really streamlining those services as well.

Overall, I think this is just a great development. It is a proof of concept, though. We do ultimately need Congress if we’re going to fully wind down this agency. We need Congress to make these changes durable legislatively for the long haul, but these we believe are great proofs of concept to start that process.

I want to dig in a little bit more on your point that you’re making that LEAs, SEAs – districts, states – already know how to manage bureaucratic navigation across different agencies. They seem to say that they don’t when you read about responses to this. There does seem to be a lot of hand-wringing around the idea that somebody at the Department of Labor is not going to be able to provide technical assistance or answers to grant questions. Title I, the big block of funding that goes out the door. They won’t know the history and implementation challenges of Title I. So how do you respond to that?

Lindsey Burke: The response is this is why there is a detail agreement in place with these interagency agreements, and the detail agreements pertain to staff. So our staff at the Department of Ed who have expertise in homelessness or Title I or any of the various programs that would fall under OESE or any of the articulated IAAs, those experts will be part of a detail agreement to head over to the appropriate receiving agency. There will be no loss of expertise. If anything, this is a consolidation of expertise at the receiving agency between, in the case of Labor, those Labor employees who have – and if we think about Labor or about Education as preparation to enter the workforce — in part, not in all, but as preparation to the workforce — they of course have great expertise in workforce programs. And so also having the experts at the Department of Ed detail over to the Department of Labor, it’s really, I think, going to bring a new level of expertise that will provide better services to grantees in the long run.

There’s a lot of drama around who’s going to sit where, which I don’t think reflects the reality that the Department of Education at 400 Maryland Avenue was an empty building during the Biden administration. Nobody cared where the staff members were sitting for four years.

Lindsey Burke: Yes, that is a very good point. Whether they’re sitting here at the main Department of Ed building, or maybe they’re a remote worker, or maybe now they have an office over at Labor, right? The point is, we are getting the experts who are needed, who manage these programs to work more closely with partner agencies who are better positioned to actually get dollars out the door to the grantees who know these grantees better. When we talk about CCAMPIS, the university on a yacht program, the Child Care Means Access for Parents in Schools program, this is a child care program, and having HHS partner with us to manage that when HHS already does two of the largest child care programs in the country, the Child Care Development Block Grant and Head Start, makes infinite sense. Having the State Department manage our international and foreign language education programs when that is their area of expertise, or certainly having HHS manage our foreign medical accreditation when they have far more expertise in what it means to accredit a medical school. All of this makes great sense, we believe, and again, we’ll ultimately provide better services for the grantees while at the same time narrowing the size and scope of this agency.

I hear you saying that this is an opportunity for proof of concept. Some say, “This is just shifting around the deck chairs; they might shift again in the next administration.” What are you looking to do to codify this to ensure that this lasts across administrations?

Lindsey Burke: The IAA effort is just one piece of the puzzle. It’s a big piece, but it’s one piece of the puzzle. You mentioned the reduction in force at the top of the hour. We’ve had a 47% reduction in the number of personnel since March here at the department. That’s a significant reduction. The secretary is engaging in a 50-state tour right now to go around the country to hear from state and local leaders and educators and families about what works well for them to gather those best practices.

We have waivers, you mentioned the waivers at the top as well, where we are working to provide states much more flexibility that we are allowed to provide them under ESEA. And to also, I should add, work with the Treasury Department to move forward on the Trump administration’s new federal tax credit scholarship program.

And at the end of the day, this is something that is pushing dollars in decision-making back down to the students, where we want every single dollar, in an ideal world, to be directed by families, not somebody like me sitting here in Washington. And so, all of these components are part of the puzzle. They’re a piece of the puzzle of returning education to the states.

Would block grants play into that list as well?

Lindsey Burke: This is something that I think fits under that congressional column where we need Congress to work with us and to codify some of the administration’s priorities, including things like block-granting dollars back to the state so that states can have the maximum amount of flexibility possible.

Lindsey, I have so many more questions. I know we’re about out of time, but I feel like I’d be remiss if we didn’t mention students with disabilities. We’ve just celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, which originally had a different name. There is a lot of concern, I would say, among disability activists, who then stir up emotionally vulnerable parents, that changes that are being proposed and are being put into action are going to negatively impact students with disabilities. What’s your response to that?

Lindsey Burke: There has been no IAA signed on OSERS, the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services; so nothing has been signed. As we are for all of the other constituent parts of this agency, we are in early conversations, figuring out what makes the most sense long term, but we’ve signed nothing on that. The other thing I would say on that, two other things, the Secretary is immensely committed to funding IDEA, to working with Congress to make sure that that is funded, to getting those dollars out the door to students with disabilities and their families. And, in the case of IDEA, and I would also add OCR, the Office for Civil Rights, these are two components of ED that predated ED’s existence. The Education for All Handicapped Children Act [of 1974], which predated IDEA, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, both of these laws pre-existed the Department of Education being established in 1979. So, of course, that will continue. Those programs will be protected. But nothing to report on that yet.

I would say from the perspective of a parent who’s been through the IEP process and as I’ve mentioned on the podcast, cried in my car after every single meeting, we’re talking about a very broken system and anything that can be put on the table that serves families and these students who deserve the best when it comes to their education, their education options, their accommodations, their services, I’m ready to engage in those conversations. So change is not necessarily bad. There are a lot of really hurting families and students out there right now as the system currently exists.

How can people stay up to date on the administration’s plans?

Lindsey Burke: We have an amazing comms department. They put out press releases like 10 times a day. So I would go to our website at ed.gov and go to the comms page of the website because you can get almost real-time information about everything that’s happening here at the department. But, also, I think just in general, if you’re an advocate of limited government and putting dollars closer to families and students, be an advocate for these reforms. This is a long time coming. It has been a perennial conservative goal to right-size or downsize or even further this agency, and return education to the states. We’ve been having these conversations since Ronald Reagan took office in 1980. And so we’re here, right? We’re at the point where we are beginning a process that could affect that goal. And so it’s an exciting time to be a part of this agency. And we just appreciate everybody’s support as we move forward.

Lindsey Burke, thank you for your career-long commitment to education freedom and your commitment to returning education to the states, and thank you for joining Freedom to Learn.

Lindsey Burke: Thank you, Ginny.

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