Opinion: Moving Education Programs Around Washington Is Bad Policy

0:00Hey there. Welcome to the College Investor audio show. We are so glad you're here today. We're taking a look at an article from thecollegeinvestor.com which you can always find more details. Everything you could possibly want to know about every topic we talk about on the podcast. It's all right there at the website, thecollegeinvestor.com. You can also like us and follow us all over social media. We're pretty much anywhere you are. Just search for us, the college investor, and you'll find us. All right, this is an opinion. It's an opinion. This is not fact or anything like that. We're just throwing this out there. Moving education programs around Washington is actually pretty bad policy. We'll take a look at it. The US Department of Education has announced two new interagency agreements. Handing off selected responsibilities to the Department of States, to the departments rather of state and health and human services. The stated goal here, break up federal education bureaucracy, improve efficiency,

1:00and return education to the states. Now, as someone and as a company who believes deeply in higher education and in the value of federal student aid programs that expand opportunity for that, I also believe in an efficient government where tax dollars are spent purposefully to achieve specific goals. That's why these interagency agreements do deserve a closer look here. Just shifting and moving around programs from one federal agency to another doesn't necessarily make government smaller and makes it more complex in my opinion. Now, if we're not careful, it may reduce accountability while ignoring the structural reforms that education policy actually needs. Here's what the Department of Education is doing. So the DOE has been implementing a set of interagency agreements where functions that have traditionally belonged to the department are signed over to just another government agency. Last year, the administration moved six programs out of the DOE

2:05to other agencies and these interagency agreements or IAAs sent six programs to the following four agencies. The U.S. Department of Labor, DOL, elementary and secondary education partnership, and post-secondary education partnership, DOL will be responsible for grants relating to HBCUs or historically black colleges and universities and minority serving institutes, MSIs, as well as grants focused on improving student success for college students. The U.S. Department of the Interior, the DOI, Indian Education Partnership, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, gets foreign medical accreditation partnership and child care access means parents in school, sea campus. That's a mouthful to say, but anyway, the HHS gets that and the U.S. Department of State, the DOS, gets international education in foreign language studies partnership, including programs administered under the Fulbright Hayes Grant. The DOE staff who manage these programs will be transferred to those

3:13four federal agencies. Okay. And then this week, the DOE is moving to additional categories of responsibility. First, the Department of State will take on a larger role in managing Section 117 foreign gift reporting under the Higher Education Act. Colleges and universities must disclose foreign gifts and contracts totaling 250K or more annually. Under the new agreement, state will help manage the reporting portal, assess compliance, share data with national security stakeholders, all that stuff, and this will go along with the new foreign funding higher ed.gov website. Just explaining this makes it feel a lot more complicated. And the second thing, this will be like the sixth total different thing they're moving. The Department of Health and Human Services, HHS, will take on administration of several K-12 support programs. These include school emergency response to violence, project serve, school safety

4:15national activities, ready to learn programming, full service community schools, promise neighborhoods, and statewide family engagement centers. Wow, HHS through its administration for children and families will manage grant competitions and technical assistance. So there's the context. I know that was hard to follow. It was hard for me to follow. But now comes the even harder question. So does this actually improve how education policy works for students and taxpayers? Moving responsibilities isn't the same as reform. Again, this is the college investor's humble opinion. If you want a simple analogy, it's this. When your mom tells you to clean your room and you shove everything into the closet or under your bed, then they're done that. You haven't cleaned your room. You just hid the mess. That's kind of what's happening here. Nobody is actually shutting down or closing the programs at the Department of Education. The bureaucracy, the spending, all the programs,

5:22they still exist. It's just being shoved into other agencies. That's really not what we want. The federal government's education footprint is not defined by which building it houses. It's defined by the statutes Congress has passed Title I, IDEA, Pell Grants, Federal student loans and all that. If the same programs, funding levels, regulations, compliance requirements continue, just under different agency letterhead, then government hasn't been reduced. Just redistributed. Redistribution can add more friction, especially when it's done via inner agency agreements and air quotes. State education agencies, colleges, school districts now may have to interact with multiple federal departments instead of just one. A superintendent, dealing with school safety grants, has to coordinate with HHS now. A university compliance officer handling foreign gift disclosures, now you gotta go to the education and state.

6:27Both of them. Workforce development officials? Yeah, they already have to juggle between education and labor. Each additional agency means different systems, guidance documents, oversight structures, internal cultures, all that. That doesn't automatically mean it's worse, right? But it does mean more coordination and complexity is required here. And that also usually means more money, not less. Accountability becomes harder to track too. I think most Americans have concerns about how our government is operating, right? I do. And one of the big arguments for having one single department overseeing one area is accountability. When something goes wrong in federal student lending, you know the DOE is responsible. When special education compliance fails, you know which office oversees IDEA. When programs are scattered across different departments, this all becomes less obvious. Who ultimately answers when a school safety grant is mismanaged? Education, which retains oversight.

7:32HHS was runs the competition, the Office of Management and Budget, which sets the funding parameters, maybe it's congressional committees overseeing different agencies. Okay, so if interagency agreements blur the oversight or dilute institutional knowledge, then accountability may weaken rather than strengthen. We as taxpayers and voters want to be able to hold our government officials accountable. At least I sure hope you do. So what about structural change here? There's a larger issue being sidesteped. Even apart from all of that, if the current administration and lawmakers actually want to dismantle the DOE, then the honest approach is legislative reform. Not to say it should be dismantled at all. We're not really going that way. I can totally get that side of the argument too, just dismantle the whole thing. But there's a correct way to go about it if that's the approach legislators do want to work toward. That means you got to revisit statutes. You got to

8:34refine federal roles. You got to openly debate which programs should still exist, which programs should be consolidated and be returned to the states. And that is hard work. It requires Congress, the people we elected, and it requires political risk. I am all for eliminating as much bureaucracy and unelected people as possible. It's got to be done the right way though. Interagency agreements by contrast operate within existing law. They move existing administrative responsibility without even changing the underlying obligations. Title one still exists. IDEA still exists. Federal loan programs. Yeah, they still operate under all the federal rules. True reform would examine whether federal involvement in certain areas is achieving measurable results relative to the cost. It would evaluate overlap across agencies. It would ask whether outcomes justified administrative layers. So just transferring administration

9:37may streamline some processes, I know, but it also introduces new ones. Without structural reform, all we're doing is just playing a bureaucratic shell game for social media headlines. Efficiency should mean results, not just headlines. I support fully without a shadow of it out, efficient government, wasteful spending, redundant oversight, bureaucratic sprawl, undermined my trust and your trust. Just look at the mess with the PSLF buyback backlog. I mean, even with more accountability and oversight, nothing's being done to fix the administrative breakdown impacting American student loan borrowers. It's harming all of the trust in the entire system. If we had any, we were clinging to anyway. Efficiency is measured in outcomes and cost savings, not press releases. So if interagency agreements reduce duplicative back office functions,

10:40improve data sharing and clarify compliance pathways, that may prove beneficial. If they instead add new layers of coordination while leaving statutory complexity untouched, taxpayers may see little in the form of returns. Government should be organized around mission clarity. Education policy affects more than 50 million K through 12 students and roughly 17 million college students nationwide. It involves hundreds of billions of dollars annually. That scale demands careful oversight and potentially, I think hopefully, a reform, true reform. Breaking apart an agency without addressing the legal framework underneath it risks confusion and likely just cost more. Not less, it can also make it harder for voters to understand who is actually responsible for success or failure. And whether or not we can even vote for these people, right? So if the goal is truly to return education to the states, Congress must

11:44revisit federal statutes and funding conditions directly. If the goal is efficiency, well, you should publish measurable benchmarks, administrative cost reductions, processing times, compliance accuracy, grant turnaround metrics, etc. If you actually want departmental efficiency, show us the metrics. Bottom line here, I believe in higher education. I believe federal student aid has, indeed, opened doors for millions of families who otherwise wouldn't be able to access college. I also believe government should be lean, accountable, and focused on results. Cut the fat judiciously, moving programs from the Department of Education to state or HHS doesn't automatically shrink the government. Just complicates it. It blurs accountability. And it distracts from the pressing administrative needs Americans have today. Cleaning the room means organizing what stays, throwing out what doesn't, and making it easier to

12:48function going forward. Anything less is just pushing things into the closet. Hoping mom doesn't find out. Maybe the DOE just needs to be grounded. For a couple of weeks, work for me. You do all your chores. All right. That is our show for today. Now, it was an opinion. So you're entitled to your own opinion, and we'd love to hear it. Do what do you think? You can comment on this post at the collegeinvestor.com. You can also follow us on social media, comment there, get to know us, because we'd love to help you wherever you are in your money journey and just learn from each other. You can find us just by searching for the words the college investor. We're pretty much anywhere you are. Thanks again for stopping by today, and we'll talk to you again real soon.