President Trump announced Friday that the Education Department would no longer manage the nation’s $1.6 trillion student loan portfolio or oversee special education services in a major shake-up of an agency he has sought to eliminate.
Student loans will move under the Small Business Administration, while special education services, along with nutrition programs, will move under the Department of Health and Human Services, Mr. Trump said.
Mr. Trump told reporters gathered in the Oval Office that the moves would take place “immediately,” adding that he believed the restructuring would “work out very well.”
“You’re going to have great education, much better than it is now, at half the cost,” he added.
Mr. Trump laid the groundwork for his announcement on Thursday, with an executive order aimed at closing the Department of Education. The department cannot be closed without the approval of Congress, which created it. But since Mr. Trump took office, his administration has slashed the department’s work force by more than half and eliminated $600 million in grants. Reassigning its primary functions will further hollow out the agency.
In the order, the president compared the size of the federal student loan portfolio to that of Wells Fargo, the bank — noting that Wells Fargo had over 200,000 employees, while only 1,500 people worked in the Education Department’s Office of Federal Student Aid.
“The Department of Education is not a bank, and it must return bank functions to an entity equipped to serve America’s students,” the order said.
The moves would transfer some of the largest programs handled by the Education Department into agencies that have had minimal involvement with schools and are going through staffing reductions themselves.
The Small Business Administration, headed by Kelly Loeffler, announced Thursday that it would cut 43 percent of its approximately 6,500 workers, while the Department of Health and Human Services, led by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has offered buyouts to most of its approximately 80,000 employees.
Mr. Kennedy has campaigned for improving nutrition and removing ultra-processed food from school lunches.
But he has also made a number of polarizing statements blaming environmental toxins and a broken food system for the “epidemic” of chronic disease that has left America’s children among the sickest in the developed world.
He has also espoused fringe theories about the role that diet can play in preventing diseases such as measles, while casting doubt on the efficacy and safety of proven vaccines, arguing that they cause autism.
