A Senate Appropriations subcommittee voted Thursday to block the Trump administration from using federal funds to transfer core Education Department functions to other agencies, marking the first concrete legislative pushback against the president's long-promised effort to dismantle the department.
The vote fell along party lines. Every Democrat on the Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education Subcommittee supported the provision. Every Republican opposed it. The measure passed because two independents, Senators Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Angus King of Maine, sided with Democrats, as Breitbart reported.
The provision does not kill the broader reorganization effort outright. It targets one specific mechanism: the use of appropriated funds to carry out transfers of Education Department programs, personnel, or functions to other federal agencies. The language was embedded in a fiscal year 2026 spending bill for Labor, HHS, and Education.
President Trump signed an executive order in March 2025 directing the closure of the Department of Education "to the extent consistent with applicable law." The administration's strategy has centered on moving the department's remaining functions, including student loan servicing, Title IX enforcement, and grant administration, into other cabinet agencies such as the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Labor.
Linda McMahon, the Secretary of Education, has overseen a dramatic reduction in the department's workforce. The administration cut roughly half of the department's employees through a combination of layoffs and buyouts during the first months of Trump's second term. McMahon has described the streamlining as necessary to eliminate bureaucratic bloat and return education authority to states and families.
The department has also taken aggressive enforcement actions on policy fronts that conservatives have long championed. Federal officials recently ordered California and Washington to reveal plans for ending gender secrecy policies in schools, reflecting a broader push to reassert parental rights in public education.
Senator Patty Murray of Washington, the top Democrat on the subcommittee, introduced the funding restriction. Murray called the administration's reorganization effort an illegal attempt to abolish a cabinet agency without congressional authorization.
"Congress created the Department of Education. Only Congress can abolish it."
Murray's position reflects a straightforward constitutional argument: the power of the purse belongs to Congress, and so does the authority to create or dissolve federal departments. Democrats contend that the executive branch cannot unilaterally dismantle a statutory agency by simply reassigning its functions elsewhere.
Republicans on the subcommittee pushed back hard. Senator Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, who chairs the panel, opposed the restriction. Capito argued that the administration's reorganization falls within executive authority to manage the federal workforce and streamline operations. She characterized the Democratic provision as an attempt to preserve a failing bureaucracy.
The full Appropriations Committee must still vote on the spending bill before it reaches the Senate floor. Even if the provision survives committee, it faces steep odds in the full Senate, where Republicans hold the majority. And any spending bill must also pass the House, where Republican leadership has shown no appetite for blocking the president's education agenda.
The dispute exposes a genuine constitutional tension. The Department of Education was established by statute in 1979 under President Jimmy Carter. Federal law assigns specific duties to the Secretary of Education and directs how certain programs, from Pell Grants to Title IX compliance, must be administered.
The administration has not asked Congress to repeal the statute creating the department. Instead, it has pursued a strategy of transferring functions piecemeal to other agencies while reducing the department's headcount to a skeleton operation. Legal scholars are divided on whether this approach crosses the line from permissible executive reorganization into an unauthorized abolition of a congressionally created entity.
That legal question has already generated litigation. Several lawsuits challenging the administration's workforce reductions and program transfers are working through federal courts. No court has yet issued a definitive ruling on whether the overall reorganization strategy violates the separation of powers, though individual judges have temporarily blocked specific cuts.
The fight over the Education Department sits alongside other federal enforcement battles that have drawn conservative attention. A federal watchdog previously alleged that the Biden-era Education Department defied a federal court order on Title IX transgender policy, a claim that fueled conservative demands for structural reform of the agency.
Senate Republicans have largely backed the president's goal of shrinking the Education Department, though they differ on tactics. Some prefer a legislative path, introducing bills that would formally repeal the department's authorizing statute and redistribute its functions through new law. Others support the executive-action approach, viewing it as faster and less vulnerable to Democratic filibuster tactics.
Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, who chairs the full Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, has introduced legislation that would formally restructure the department. Cassidy's bill would move student loan servicing to the Treasury Department and shift civil rights enforcement functions to the Department of Justice. His approach seeks to accomplish the same end goal as the executive order but through the legislative process, potentially giving the reorganization stronger legal footing.
The tension between legislative and executive approaches matters beyond politics. If courts ultimately rule that the administration cannot transfer statutory functions without congressional approval, the executive-order strategy could collapse, and years of reorganization work could be reversed by judicial order.
Conservative frustration with the Education Department extends well beyond its organizational structure. Ongoing disputes over Title IX enforcement and transgender athlete policies in college sports have intensified calls from the right to strip the department of its enforcement authority entirely.
The Murray provision is narrow by design. It would prohibit the use of funds appropriated in the fiscal year 2026 bill to execute transfers of Education Department programs or personnel to other agencies. It would not prevent the administration from continuing to reduce the department's workforce through attrition, voluntary separation incentives, or reductions in force that do not involve transferring functions elsewhere.
It also would not affect executive orders or policy directives that do not require new spending. The administration could still issue guidance, revoke Biden-era regulations, and pursue enforcement priorities within the department's existing structure and budget.
Democrats framed the provision as a minimal safeguard. Republicans called it a poison pill designed to sink the broader spending bill. Both characterizations contain some truth. Spending riders have long served as leverage points in appropriations fights, and this one is no different.
The subcommittee vote is one skirmish in a much larger war over federal education policy. The Trump administration has moved aggressively on multiple fronts: cutting department staff, challenging DEI programs at universities, tightening Title IX enforcement around biological sex, and pressuring states to adopt transparency policies in K-12 schools.
Those enforcement actions have generated their own legal battles. Lawsuits over transgender policies in school sports continue to work through state and federal courts, testing the boundaries of Title IX and equal protection law.
The spending bill fight will likely drag into the fall. Congress faces a September 30 deadline to fund the government for fiscal year 2026, and education spending is only one of dozens of unresolved disputes. If lawmakers cannot reach agreement, a continuing resolution would freeze spending at current levels, potentially complicating the administration's transfer plans by denying new funding authority.
Meanwhile, watchdog groups have flagged educational institutions that continue pushing DEI programs despite federal crackdowns, reinforcing conservative arguments that the current department lacks the will or capacity to enforce the administration's priorities.
At its core, this is not just a policy disagreement. It is a separation-of-powers contest. Democrats say the president cannot erase a department that Congress built. Republicans say the president can reorganize the executive branch to serve the people who elected him. Both sides have constitutional text they can point to.
The courts will eventually weigh in. So will voters. But for now, the fight plays out in the procedural trenches of appropriations subcommittees, where a handful of senators can shape the boundaries of executive power one spending line at a time.
When Congress created the Department of Education, it claimed the authority to decide how the federal government handles schools. If the executive branch can hollow out that decision without a single repeal vote, the precedent reaches far beyond education.
