Collins and Murkowski team up with Tim Kaine to stop the dismantling of the federal education bureaucracy.
Here we go again. President Trump campaigned on a promise to eliminate the Department of Education, and the American people elected him to do exactly that. But the permanent establishment in Washington has other plans. On Thursday, the Senate HELP Committee approved a bill that would block the Trump administration from moving key education functions to other agencies, effectively preserving the bloated bureaucracy voters want gone.
Senators Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, both Republicans in name only, joined forces with Democrat Tim Kaine of Virginia to push through S. 5046 in a 13-9 vote. The bill specifically prohibits the Department of Education from transferring the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services, along with offices overseeing elementary, secondary, and Indian education, to other federal agencies. This is a direct attack on Education Secretary Linda McMahon’s efforts to streamline the department and prove that states can manage education without a massive federal apparatus.
McMahon has been working tirelessly to fulfill Trump’s promise, entering into interagency agreements that would transition education oversight to departments better equipped to handle specific functions. Her approach is methodical and transparent, designed to show Congress that the federal education bureaucracy is redundant and wasteful. But Collins called the administration’s efforts “entirely premature,” claiming the programs belong “where Congress specifically put them.” Murkowski, meanwhile, waxed poetic about children with special needs and Native students, as if transferring oversight to other agencies would somehow abandon them.
This is the same tired playbook we have seen for decades. Whenever a Republican tries to actually shrink government, the establishment trots out emotional arguments about the most vulnerable populations, hoping to guilt-trip conservatives into preserving the status quo. But the reality is that the Department of Education, created by Jimmy Carter 45 years ago, has been a disaster for American students. Test scores have stagnated or declined, while bureaucratic costs have exploded. The federal government has no constitutional authority over education, and every attempt to centralize control has made things worse.
The bill’s proponents claim they are protecting students, but what they are really protecting is their own power and the interests of the teachers unions that fund their campaigns. The Department of Education has become a jobs program for bureaucrats and a slush fund for progressive indoctrination programs. McMahon’s “proof of concept” approach threatens to expose just how unnecessary this entire department really is, and that terrifies the swamp creatures who profit from its existence.
What makes this particularly galling is the hypocrisy. These same senators who claim to care about efficiency and fiscal responsibility are fighting tooth and nail to preserve a department that duplicates functions already performed by other agencies. The Trump administration isn’t eliminating special education funding or abandoning Native students. It is simply moving oversight to agencies that can handle these programs more effectively. But for the Collins and Murkowski wing of the party, any challenge to the federal bureaucracy is a bridge too far.
The future of this bill remains uncertain, but its passage through committee sends a clear message: the Republican establishment is still more interested in preserving the administrative state than in fulfilling the promises they made to voters. Trump was elected to drain the swamp, but the swamp is fighting back with every tool at its disposal, including so-called Republicans who put their allegiance to bureaucracy ahead of their allegiance to the Constitution and the American people.
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