The White House publicly released a report called Delivering Government Solutions in the 21st Century on Thursday, June 21.
First among the 32 organizational reform priorities proposed by President Donald Trump is merging the departments of education (ED) and labor (DOL) into a single entity: the Department of Education and the Workforce. According to the Mission Alignment Imperatives section of the report, the new agency would be “charged with meeting the needs of American students and workers from education and skill development to workplace protection to retirement security. As part of the merger, the administration also proposes significant government-wide workforce development program consolidations, streamlining separate programs in order to increase efficiencies and better serve American workers.”
Naturally, this idea has met with endorsements, skepticism and everything in between — as it should be. The $60-billion-plus ED has about 4,000 employees and dozens of programs for K-20 students, while the $9.7-billion has DOL has about 15,800 employees and dozens of training and employment programs for adults. So any presidential recommendation to merge them represents a herculean task. And what the Trump administration has outlined is a template, not a plan of action. His team will roll one out in due time.
In the interim, interested stakeholders must begin a healthy conversation about the proposed merger that includes questions about what, why, how, when, or if it should occur at all, before we jump to a final conclusion about the immediate fate of ED. We should determine whether Congress has an appetite to tackle this issue. We also should assess a substantive strategy for implementation, when it becomes available. Until we know these things, to paraphrase Mark Twain, the report of ED’s death through merger is greatly exaggerated.
Although it is too early to know for certain what a real merger will look like, it is never too soon to examine previous administrations’ reorganization efforts to glean insights about what we can and cannot expect from mergers of federal agencies.
The presidential desire to streamline federal agencies through mergers is not new. The Economy Act of 1932, a part of Depression-era plans to promote growth, empowered the president to reorganize the executive branch of government, subject to congressional review. Unless the House, Senate or both chambers passed a resolution to reject the president’s reorganization plan within a specified time frame — called a “legislative veto” — it became law.
Between 1932 and 1984 — the year the Economy Act expired — more than 100 reorganization plans were submitted to Congress. Every president from Herbert Hoover to Ronald Reagan had the authority to reorganize executive agencies through a merger or another initiative, with at least two reorganization plans taking effect for every president from Franklin Roosevelt to Jimmy Carter.
