How Education Department Correspondence Has Wasted Billions

As Elon Musk’s budget-conscious team begins to search for inefficiencies within the US Education Department, good luck pinpointing the culprit.

The department’s annual budget of approximately $240 billion isn’t a playground for whimsical officials — it primarily operates as a distribution channel for funds approved by Congress.

The $18 billion allocated by Title I for underprivileged children? Mandatory. The $15 billion for special education under IDEA? Absolutely the same. Over $30 billion in Pell Grants? That’s dictated by the Higher Education Act, not a rogue bureaucrat’s pet project.

Critics eager to dismantle the department often envision it drowning in frivolous expenditures, but the reality is far less exciting: it mainly acts as a middleman.

The genuine waste doesn’t lie within budget items — it resides in the mailroom.

Introducing the “Dear Colleague” letter, the department’s sporadic billets-doux to educational institutions and districts.

These communications don’t directly consume taxpayer funds, but they excel at extracting money from state and local budgets.

Disguised as “guidance,” they function more like a shakedown: adhere to our progressive perspective or risk a civil rights investigation that could jeopardize your federal funding.

And when that perspective becomes ideologically skewed — particularly during the Obama and Biden administrations — the outcome is a torrent of spending and upheaval that leaves educators in a lurch and taxpayers poorer.

All of this happens without a single line-item to reference in the federal budget, let alone any observable advantages for students.

Consider the April 2011 Title IX letter regarding sexual violence. An honorable cause — safeguarding students from harassment — transformed into a bureaucratic weapon.

Schools and universities were instructed to adopt a lesser “preponderance of evidence” standard for adjudicating allegations of campus rape and sexual assault, bypassing legal protections like cross-examination of witnesses and accusers.

The consequence was a surge in the number of Title IX coordinators hired, each making $150,000 annually or more. Compliance costs soared by a minimum of $2 million each year at some universities.

When multiplied across thousands of institutions, you’re examining hundreds of millions annually — primarily state and local funds, not Uncle Sam’s — until the letter was rescinded in 2017.

Students accused of wrongdoing sued en masse, claiming that their rights were violated, while advocates like the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education criticized a “guilty-until-proven-innocent” atmosphere.

Caught in the middle, schools spent financial resources on compliance and legal battles that should have been directed toward student education.

The Biden administration also aimed to shift Title IX to its agenda, with its 2021 executive order asserting that “gender identity” now fell under Title IX’s purview.

The Education Department promptly followed up with a “Notice of Interpretation” shortly thereafter, nudging schools to comply — and absorb costs — or risk their federal funds.

Next was the January 2014 discipline letter, a collaboration with the Justice Department addressing racial disparities in K-12 school suspensions.

While the intent may have been commendable — who desires bias in school administration? — the implementation was overreaching.

Districts concerned about “disparate impact” on racial minorities adopted popular solutions like restorative justice, or outright ceased to discipline disruptive students.

Teachers underwent implicit bias training costing between $2,000 and $10,000 per session, with no assurance of effectiveness; facilitators were either hired or reassigned, and data systems were established to track every classroom timeout by race.

Even a conservative estimate of compliance costs would reach $100 million to $200 million over several years, primarily in urban school districts eager to avoid a civil rights probe.

But the squandering of funds isn’t the worst outcome: As student suspensions decreased to satisfy federal monitors, teachers voiced concerns that lax discipline policies were resulting in chaos in classrooms. Compliance overshadowed learning, leading to stagnation.

These letters don’t appear in the Education Department’s budget, yet they act as fiscal parasites, siphoning off local resources under the threat of enforcement and distracting staff from their primary duty of teaching.

The Obama-era communications were particularly audacious, heavily promoting progressive ideologies — transforming Title IX into a manifesto for gender justice, perceiving student discipline as a racial reckoning — while leaving educational institutions to bear the cost of Washington’s cultural clashes.

Efforts to reduce the Education Department’s extravagant spending and refocus on student outcomes are both overdue and essential.

However, don’t just comb through its budget — start with its correspondence.

Robert Pondiscio is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a former public school teacher.