Abolishing the Department of Education has been a major promise of President-elect Donald Trump’s campaign. It’s also a key plank in the far-right wing Project 2025 agenda. The Project 2025 manual, coauthored by leading right-wing activists including many staffers from the first Trump administration, aims to end multiple Department of Education initiatives—including ending student loan forgiveness plans, which will disproportionately affect Black, Brown and low-income communities as they are more likely to take out student loans in the first place.
Additionally, they propose ending a multitude of protections under Title IX, a federal statute (signed into law by Richard Nixon) that prohibits sex-based discrimination in schools and educational programs that receive federal funds. Research has shown that Title IX has been integral in producing a more equitable educational landscape, and some have even argued that it is the reason why the United States’ Women’s National soccer team has been so successful. And Department of Education programs support students with special needs and disabilities at schools across the country.
Of course, abolishing the Department of Education will not simply eliminate policies like student loan forgiveness and Title IX. It will also have enormous implications for science in the United States.
Support for Science
The United States’ higher education system (i.e., colleges and universities) is integral in producing scientific breakthroughs. For example, the research leading to the development of mRNA vaccines, like that used in those for COVID-19, was largely conducted by scientists working at the University of Pennsylvania. This work clearly saved countless lives.
But it’s not just medical breakthroughs at stake. One can also look at the battery research happening at the University of Texas, which holds potential to improve technology from smartphones to electric cars.
The research initiatives originating at U.S. colleges and universities improve the lives of people not only in the United States, but around the world. Indeed, the U.S. higher education system has long been a draw for scholars around the world and a major contributor to the U.S. economy. Dismantling the Department of Education could have disastrous effects on this life-changing research.
Since the Great Recession in 2008 and 2009, universities have seen state support slashed, which has increased their reliance on tuition dollars to keep the doors open. A large portion of the tuition dollars universities receive come in the form of student loans and grants doled out by the Department of Education. In 2017, Federal Pell grants and other federal financial aid grants accounted for 17.1% of all spending on higher education. This doesn’t even include the money transferred to universities through traditional government issued student loans, which reaches about $100 billion each year.
If these tuition dollars are no longer available for universities, what happens to support for research? It could easily lead to budget cuts at universities affecting the research that progresses society through scientific discovery. Imagine a world without GPS (first developed at Johns Hopkins University), without MRIs (with the first step in development coming at the State University of New York), or cancer medications that have the promise of increasing a patient’s likelihood of survival (such as this breakthrough at Stanford University). But it is not just the research these universities support. It’s also the training they provide for future scientists.
Supporting STEM Education
According to the Pew Research Center, the United States is not exactly a world leader when it comes to Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (i.e., STEM). In Math, American 15-year-olds test below the average for countries in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (28th out of 37), and they test just slightly above average in Science (12th out of 37). Further, between 2018 and 2022 US scores actually declined.
We are already behind the 8-ball when it comes to STEM in the United States. As I noted above, cutting the Department of Education could have profound effects on the ability of universities to keep the doors open. It is in these universities that the next generation of scientists is created. How are universities supposed to train new scientists when they are cutting budgets due to a lack of funding?
And it’s not just an inability to train new scientists. Abolishing the Department of Education could lead to many of those trained scientists leaving the United States – a brain drain effect.
Student Loans and the Brain Drain
As of July 2024, there is $1.62 trillion in outstanding student loan debt among those who attended universities in the United States, and 42.8 million borrowers of federal student loans. These loans need to be repaid–but quite often, recent graduates have a difficult time paying them back. Thus, in 1995 the United States introduced the Income-Contingent Repayment plan. This plan and further tweaks have allowed graduates to pay back their loans over time, and after a certain amount of time repaying the loans, usually 20 or 25 years, the remaining balance would be cancelled. This allows people to work in lower income jobs, including teachers, firefighters, and librarians, that are necessary parts of the economy, rather than seeking the highest paid positions just to repay loans.
Part of the Trump and Project 2025 plan for the Department of Education is to eradicate the income-based loan repayment system as we know it. Specifically, they want to replace the current plans with programs that will cost borrowers substantially more per month, making it harder for those with student loans to make ends meet.
Of course, people respond to incentives. When faced with few options other than pay a burdensome loan payment, what could those with college educations and loan debt do? This is where it is important to note that moving out of the United States allows a person to avoid paying anything in student loans, and it doesn’t even require reneging on debt. Expats are given the ability to take a massive tax deduction of $126,500 per person. This is because the government recognizes that they are already paying taxes in the country in which they live. Of course, this policy means that an American living abroad doesn’t have to pay any taxes on the first $126,5000 they earned overseas. Income-based repayment plans are tied to an individual’s taxable income. After all, in order to determine a payment based on income, the government would need to know a person’s income. This is the case for current income-based repayment systems, and would have to be the case for any income-drive repayment plan developed under Trump.
Taken together, what this all means is that if a person moves abroad, taking a job that is paid $126,500 or less, they will have a taxable income of $0. If a person has a taxable income of $0, paying 5%, 10%, or even 25% of their taxable income in the form of a student loan payment is, in fact, $0 per month. That’s right. Student loan borrowers, such as newly minted scientists, have incentives to move abroad rather than do their important work in the United States.
Inexpensive student loan payment options may well encourage scientists to stay in the United States. If they’re not overly burdened by student loan payments, they very well may want to stay in the country they were educated in. However, if Trump is able to implement his Project 2025 policies, affordable student loan repayment options would likely go by the wayside, which would incentivize scientists to move abroad, leaving the United States bearing the costs of educating scientists but not reaping many of the rewards. Put simply, eradication of the Department of Education and the subsequent reorganization of the student loan repayment system could very well lead to a brain drain.
It’s clear that President-elect Trump’s expressed interest in following the Project 2025 playbook and abolishing the Department of Education, as well as many of the programs it operates, will have substantial and detrimental effects on science in the United States. It will handicap the ability of university scientists to undertake groundbreaking research. It will create obstacles for universities to train the next generation of scientists. And, it will produce greater incentives for scientists with student loans to move abroad, rather than staying here and contributing to scientific discovery in the United States. This is a dangerous policy that the United States cannot afford at a time in which we are already lagging behind other countries in STEM.