Under the second Trump administration’s push to “return education to the states,” the U.S. Department of Education has entered more than a dozen interagency agreements with six other federal agencies since May 2025.
The 14 agreements outsource a number of Education Department responsibilities to the departments of Health and Human Services, Justice, State, Labor, Interior and Treasury. The four most recent agreements, for instance, transfer various special education and civil rights enforcement activities to the departments of Health and Human Services and Justice, respectively.
We’ve taken a closer look at the impact of these moves — which come amid the administration’s stated goal of dismantling the Education Department altogether — and gathered a selection of our recent coverage below.
