Eliminating DoEd could impact the state’s elementary and secondary education funding

• Columnist Sid Salter writes that substantive public policy change is an exercise that produces winners and losers.

Regardless of one’s partisan affiliation, Republicans and Democrats alike have to acknowledge that American voters handed former President Donald Trump a decisive victory – winning both the popular and electoral vote, winning every crucial battleground state, his party taking control of the Senate and holding control of the House – and with those wins a mandate for substantive public policy change.

Substantive public policy change is an exercise that produces winners and losers. Explaining that requires a look at the fact that there are so-called “donor” states and so-called “subsidized” states – meaning that some “donor” states pay far more in federal taxes than they receive in federal spending. In contrast “subsidized” states receive more government funds than they pay in federal taxes.

Mississippi is, by definition, a “subsidized” state; therefore, it makes sense that reductions in current federal support to the states will impact state and local programs through program reductions, higher state and local taxes to support the current program, or a combination of both.

During the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump said in an August 13 interview with Elon Musk on X (the social media platform formerly known as Twitter): “I want to close up the Department of Education, move education back to the states.”

In retrospect, that statement roughly mirrors what the current president-elect said eight years ago as a candidate leading up to his first term in the White House. During that first term as president – even with a Republican Congress – Trump did not press that issue. Frankly, Congress had insufficient support to close the federal agency during that first Trump term.

For the president-elect to make good on that pledge to shutter the Department of Education, the full-throated support of both houses of Congress will be necessary. The DoEd was created as a cabinet-level agency by an act of Congress in 1979 during the administration of former President Jimmy Carter.

The agency began operating in 1980 during the final year of the Carter administration, but incoming Republican President Ronald Reagan pledged as a candidate to dismantle the agency. A Democratic House of Representatives intervened. By the end of Reagan’s two terms, he changed his tactics and in 1989 advocated raising the agency’s budget to over $20 billion.

But for Trump, getting Congress to dismantle DoEd may not be as far-fetched a proposition in 2024 as it was during his first term. Republican U.S. Sen. Mike Rounds of South Dakota has already rolled out what he’s calling the “Return Education to the States Act” that expressly abolishes the agency.

Despite the Rounds legislation, abolishing a cabinet-level agency would require a 60-vote super-majority of the Senate to be successful. With that effort as a pretext, Trump’s decision to nominate former World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) co-founder Linda McMahon as his Secretary of Education presents some interesting potential impacts both for the state’s approximately 490,000 elementary and secondary school students (public and private) and the state’s taxpayers.

The latest numbers available from the National Center for Education Statistics digest for the school year 2020-21 show that U.S. elementary and secondary education revenues from that school year totaled $837.3 billion from federal, state, local and private sources. Federal revenues were $88.4 billion or 10.6%, state revenues were $383.8 billion or 45.8%, and local revenues were $365.1 billion or 43.6% (with $301.5 billion of that segment coming from property taxes). Private sources accounted for $5.4 billion or 0.6 percent of the nation’s education tab.

That same year, Mississippi had total elementary and secondary education revenues of $5.37 billion with $1.03 billion of 19.3% coming from federal revenues, $2.49 billion or 46.4% from state revenues, and $1.84 billion or 34.4% from local revenues.

The federal government pays 8.7 percent more in Mississippi than the national average for K-12 education expenditures, which is $467.81 million.

Despite her past WWE affiliation, sources like The Washington Post praised McMahon’s tenure as head of the Small Business Administration during Trump’s first term. So, her nomination is not where the nation’s focus should be.

The focus, particularly in states like Mississippi, should be on the future of K-12 education finance and how eliminating DoEd impacts the delivery of those services in our state.