Sen. Rand Paul, following in the footsteps of his father, is reintroducing a one-sentence bill to eliminate the federal Department of Education, but the legislation may have more traction now as President Trump has already taken steps to dismantle the agency.
GOP lawmakers have been mostly supportive of Mr. Trump’s executive order to begin slashing the department’s workforce and limiting its authority over states’ control of schools. But many have said that only Congress has the authority to fully eliminate the Education Department, as the president has made clear is his goal.
Mr. Paul, Kentucky Republican, said in an interview with The Washington Times that the one-line bill to terminate the department he reintroduced on Wednesday has been floating around Congress since the 1980s. His father, former Texas Rep. Ron Paul, regularly introduced it during his on-and-off tenure in the House.
More recently, Kentucky GOP Rep. Thomas Massie has picked up the mantle in the lower chamber, while the younger Mr. Paul has continued the push in the Senate.
Asked if he expects the bill to have more traction now after Mr. Trump’s executive order, the senator said, “We’ll see.”
“The idea of being for local controls of schools is a very mainstream Republican position,” Mr. Paul said, citing its inclusion in several GOP presidential platforms.
“It’s like anything else: Some will support it rhetorically, some won’t support it at all,” he said. “But when push comes to shove, will you actually support a bill to do it? People lack courage and they fall away.”
The bill is subject to the filibuster in the Senate, so even if Mr. Paul’s GOP colleagues were to find the courage to support the measure, it would require Democratic support to become law.
Still, Republicans are showing more interest in legislation to eliminate the Department of Education than they had before Mr. Trump returned to the White House.
Mr. Massie’s companion bill in the House, introduced at the end of January, started with a larger cohort of cosponsors this Congress, 27, compared to the eight he introduced the bill with last Congress when President Biden was in office.
His bill ended the previous Congress with 33 cosponsors, a number he has already matched not even three full months into the new one.
Mr. Massie has promoted his bill on social media in the wake of Mr. Trump’s executive order. He has also suggested Republicans consider alternative legislative procedures, like a rescission request from the president or the budget reconciliation process, to defund the DOE without the threat of a Senate filibuster.
In an interview with The Times, Mr. Massie expressed his frustration that the GOP-controlled Congress has not yet codified any part of Mr. Trump’s agenda and at times contradicted it, like with a recent stopgap government funding bill that fully funds the Department of Education.
“A week later, Trump signs an executive order to end the Department of Education or wind it down,” he said. “The reason he’s going to have problems in court is Congress spends the money and he signs those checks that we write. And he just signed a check for the Department of Education. Now he’s trying to shut it down. There’s cognitive dissonance there.”
That will only increase the need for congressional action, Mr. Massie argued.
“The only way, really, to make his agenda stick — especially to make it stick past his four years, but maybe even to make it stick at all — is to pass this stuff in Congress,” he said.
