Two Republican senators voted with Democrats on a Senate committee to stop the Trump administration from transferring key education offices to other federal agencies, a direct challenge to the president's push to dismantle the Department of Education.
The Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee approved bill S. 5046 in a 13-9 vote Thursday, with Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska joining Democrat Tim Kaine of Virginia to shield four specific Education Department offices from being farmed out to other parts of the federal bureaucracy. The bill would prohibit the department from moving the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services, the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education, the Office of Postsecondary Education, and the Office of Indian Education to other agencies.
The vote lands squarely in the path of Education Secretary Linda McMahon's strategy. McMahon has called the department's interagency agreements, at least a dozen of them so far, a "proof of concept," designed to show Congress that major education functions can operate successfully under other federal agencies. The endgame: persuade lawmakers to formally abolish the department that Congress created roughly 45 years ago under President Jimmy Carter.
Collins and Murkowski had other ideas. Collins called the bill "straightforward" and said it keeps the administration of certain education programs "where Congress specifically put them and where they belong." Murkowski framed her concern around the people who depend on those programs.
As Breitbart News reported, Murkowski told colleagues:
"We cannot lose sight of the fact that at the end of the day, we're talking about children, whether it's children with special needs, whether it's children in our elementary schools, whether it's our Native students, making sure that we don't lose that focus."
The Education Department pushed back hard. ED spokeswoman Savannah Newhouse issued a statement framing the committee vote as an attempt to undercut a plan that is already producing results:
"Secretary McMahon promised Congress a proof of concept that is currently underway and delivering results across our partner agencies, and it is entirely premature to sabotage this effort before it has the chance to eliminate bureaucratic barriers and fully deliver the results that our students, families, and educators deserve."
Newhouse's statement raises an obvious question: what results? The department claims the interagency agreements are "delivering results across our partner agencies," but neither the spokeswoman's statement nor any publicly cited metric spells out what those results look like. Voters who support shrinking the federal education bureaucracy, and there are millions of them, deserve specifics, not slogans.
The bill does not halt every interagency agreement the department has entered into. It targets four named offices and leaves the rest of McMahon's restructuring effort untouched, at least for now. That distinction matters. S. 5046 is a scalpel, not a sledgehammer, and the administration's reaction suggests even a targeted restriction threatens the broader strategy.
This is not the first time lawmakers have tried to rein in the department's interagency maneuvers. Congress approved non-binding language in the most recent spending bill telling ED it has no authority to move functions to other departments. Non-binding language, of course, carries no legal force, which is precisely why Collins, Murkowski, and Kaine moved to put the restriction into an actual bill.
The pattern of Republican senators siding with Democrats to block elements of Trump's agenda has become a recurring feature of this Congress. Whether the issue is war powers, spending, or now education policy, a small but consistent faction of GOP members has shown a willingness to assert congressional prerogatives against executive action.
Formally ending the Department of Education would require an act of Congress, a much higher bar than executive-branch interagency agreements. McMahon's approach has been to build the case for abolition by demonstrating that other agencies can handle the work. The committee vote Thursday directly challenges that strategy by locking four of the most politically sensitive offices in place.
The Senate committee's move puts it at odds with the House, where the Education and Workforce Committee voted last month on a bill to permanently move certain Education Department functions to other agencies. The two chambers are now pushing in opposite directions on the same question: should the federal government's education functions stay where they are, or scatter across the bureaucracy?
Kaine told Politico he hopes S. 5046 will be considered in upcoming appropriations discussions, though the bill's future remains unclear. Attaching it to a must-pass spending bill would be the surest path to forcing a floor vote, but that strategy depends on leadership willingness and the broader dynamics of spending negotiations, neither of which is guaranteed.
The 13-9 vote itself raises questions. The HELP Committee includes both Republicans and Democrats, and the margin suggests Collins and Murkowski were not the only Republicans who crossed over, or that the committee's partisan composition gave Democrats enough seats to prevail with just two GOP defections. The exact breakdown by member has not been publicly detailed.
Intra-party friction on major policy votes is nothing new in this Congress. GOP holdouts have stalled House floor action on other priorities, and the dynamic has repeatedly forced leadership to negotiate with its own members before it can confront the opposition.
Conservative voters have wanted the Education Department gone for decades. The argument is sound: education is a state and local responsibility, and a massive federal bureaucracy adds cost without improving outcomes. President Trump ran on that promise, and McMahon has moved faster than any previous secretary to make it real.
But the administration's strategy has a structural weakness. Interagency agreements are executive-branch tools. They can be reversed by a future president on day one. If the goal is permanent restructuring, it has to run through Congress, and Congress, as Thursday's vote showed, is not a rubber stamp. The administration's own spokeswoman acknowledged the point implicitly by arguing that the proof of concept is meant to persuade lawmakers. Lawmakers, so far, are not persuaded.
Collins and Murkowski are not opposing the idea of shrinking government. They are insisting that Congress, not the executive branch, decides where federal programs live. That is a defensible constitutional position, even when it produces an uncomfortable vote. The question is whether the administration can make a case specific enough to change minds, or whether it will keep offering generalities about "delivering results" while the clock runs out.
The tension playing out over education mirrors broader clashes between the White House and members of its own party. Trump has navigated institutional resistance before, sometimes successfully, sometimes not. The education fight will test whether the administration can convert executive momentum into durable legislative change, or whether its restructuring effort remains a set of agreements that the next administration can undo with a signature.
Meanwhile, Republicans breaking ranks on high-profile votes continues to complicate the White House's ability to move its full agenda through a Congress it nominally controls.
Shrinking the federal education bureaucracy is the right goal. Doing it through temporary agreements that bypass Congress is the wrong method, and Thursday's vote proved it.