(Bloomberg) -- US Secretary of Education Linda McMahon has made major advances in what she's described as her "final mission:" the dissolution of her own agency.
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Only Congress can officially eliminate the Department of Education, a key campaign promise of President Donald Trump. But McMahon has been methodically working within her powers to hollow out the department, laying off nearly half of its employees, slashing more than a billion dollars in contracts, and shedding most programs and offices to other federal agencies.
This month the Trump administration moved two of the agency's largest divisions, the Office for Civil Rights and the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services, to the Departments of Justice and Health and Human Services, respectively.
Those had been the last core offices not subject to inter-agency agreements, formal partnerships in which departments can share responsibilities with others — or, in this case, offload them. McMahon has used that strategy to redistribute hundreds of employees and billions of dollars across the federal government.
Only a husk of the Education Department remains, and the vast majority of the $200 billion it distributed in federal funds last year will now flow through different agencies.
Last year officials moved the offices overseeing K-12 schools, higher education and workforce training to the Department of Labor. In March they began transferring the $1.7 trillion student loan portfolio to the Treasury, along with the management of federal financial aid programs.
A new report filed by the department's Office of Inspector General details the extent of the agency's winnowing: 135 divisions were left without a single employee after sweeping layoffs; fewer than 20 had more than five staffers left.
In August, the greatly diminished staff is set to begin moving to a new building, a nondescript office with 300,000 fewer square feet of space, located in the former workspace of the US Agency for International Development.
The department's breakdown represents a shift in federal education policy that may be difficult to undo, whether or not Congress acts to formally dissolve it. The agency was founded in 1979 to consolidate a range of federal policy initiatives like school integration, civil rights enforcement, financial aid for low-income families and support for special needs students. Trump's dismantling means those efforts will once again be scattered across the government.