Rounds wants to dismantle the Dept. of Education, but Trump may beat him to it
Mar 19, 2025
SIOUX FALLS, S.D. (KELO) -- In November of 2024, U.S. Senator Mike Rounds introduced legislation in Congress that would dismantle the U.S. Department of Education.
Rounds' vision for the end of the DOE would see programs of the department extracted an placed under the purview of other existing de
partments.
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"Student aid would go back in to the (Department of) Treasury, as an example," said Rounds, who says his team has taken a year and a half to look through the bill, gather feedback, and determine how best to dismantle the department while keeping needed services, such as special education programming, IDEA and protections for the deaf and blind.
But is he already too late?
In March of this year it was reported that President Donald Trump is expected to sign an order telling his DOE Secretary Linda McMahon, billionaire and wife of WWE pro wrestling co-founder Vince McMahon, to begin the process of dissolving the department. A timeline for that order has not been given.
In February, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), run by Special Government Employee, Trump campaign donor and world's richest man, Elon Musk, cut $900 million from the Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences, which tracks the educational progress of students in the United States.
The next day, the Education Department began making department-wide cuts, and on March 11, stated they had begun a "reduction in force" impacting nearly 50% of their workforce. On the day of Trumps inauguration, that workforce numbered 4,133 workers, according to the Department of Education.
We asked Rounds if these mass layoffs, cuts to funding and slashing of DOE contracts have accelerated the timeline to dismantle the department beyond what he had planned in order to ensure all needed programs were protected.
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"We'll know more here in the next couple weeks," said Rounds. "I can't say for sure that that's the case yet, because we haven't really had a chance to look at everything that they're doing."
Rounds added that there are public announcements expected within the next week, and that he plans to watch those, and hopes to be able to provide input. He also said he'd met with McMahon before she had been confirmed as Secretary of Education, and that he has a meeting scheduled with her in the next week to once again go through his own proposal.
This element of the unknown was a common thread in the full interview KELOLAND News conducted with Rounds, where he explained that despite meeting with Musk, Rounds and other senators are in the dark with regards to actions DOGE will take, or even actions it has already taken. ...read more read less
