OPINION
Jared Gould | Minding the Campus
Congressman John Garamendi has issued a statement opposing the Trump administration’s decision to move the Department of Education’s (ED) headquarters and hand the Lyndon B. Johnson Building over to the Department of Energy. Garamendi, who is also co-sponsoring an effort to impeach Education Secretary Linda McMahon, warns that giving up the building will make it “significantly more difficult to rebuild the Department’s staffing and operations in the future.”
Of course it will be. That’s the point.
If Congress won’t abolish the ED outright, which it should have done years ago once the department proved to be little more than a bureaucratic swamp that added scant educational value, the next best thing is to make it harder to rebuild. Squeezing the department into a smaller office and handing its headquarters to another agency does exactly that.
Congressional Democrats continue to speak as though the ED is indispensable to educational excellence. They have made that opinion clear in their effort to impeach Secretary McMahon for winding it down. More importantly, however, is what Garamendi’s statement reveals. What he’s really saying is that congressional Democrats intend to rebuild the ED the moment their party regains the White House.
And Trump has not done enough to prevent a future administration from rebuilding the ED.
Nearly every significant education reform of the second Trump administration has come through executive order, including its reforms on anti-Semitism and its efforts to dismantle “diversity, equity, and inclusion” bureaucracies. Many of those orders are already tied up in court. Not even the administration’s changes to the ED’s professional degree designation made it through the courts. But more to the point, executive orders can be rescinded by a future president as readily as they are signed.
Unless Trump’s education reforms are written into law, or otherwise made durable beyond executive action, Garamendi’s ambitions may simply be delayed, not defeated.
This article was originally published on July 17, 2026 at Minding the Campus. It is republished with permission.
