A Senate committee on Thursday advanced a bill that would block the U.S. Department of Education from transferring special education and most K-12 programs to other Cabinet agencies as the Trump administration works to dismantle the 46-year-old department.
Members of the Senate’s Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee voted 13-9 to advance the bill, S. 5046, to the full Senate for consideration. Two Republicans on the committee, Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, cosponsored the measure led by Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va.
The bill would prohibit the transfer of programs under four Education Department offices—the offices of special education and rehabilitative services (OSERS), elementary and secondary education, postsecondary education, and Indian education—to other federal agencies.
“This bill is straightforward,” Collins said Thursday. “It keeps important landmark education programs at the Department of Education where Congress specifically put them and where they belong.”
Under agreements the Education Department has struck since last year, most K-12 programs are transitioning to day-to-day management by the U.S. Department of Labor and special education oversight is headed to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
In total, the department is transferring 148 of its programs to six other agencies using “interagency agreements” that Congress hasn’t approved, according to an Education Week analysis.
At the committee meeting, two Democratic amendments—one to prohibit the transfer of any Education Department functions to other agencies and one to specifically bar the recently announced transfer of the department’s office for civil rights to the Department of Justice—failed in party-line votes, with majority Republicans opposed.
However, another Democratic-led amendment, to require the Trump administration to report the cost of these program transfers to Congress—cleared the committee with just two Republican senators opposed.
Thursday’s vote showed some Republican skepticism in the Senate toward the Trump administration’s moves to dismantle the Education Department without congressional approval, two weeks after a House committee voted on party lines to codify many of the changes the administration has already made.
Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, the committee’s Republican chairman, had pledged last month to hold the vote on Thursday’s measure after he voiced his opposition to moving special education to HHS. Democrats on Thursday expressed their disapproval of moving any Education Department functions outright, while Collins and Cassidy were more targeted in their opposition.
Concern raised about shifting special education to a ‘medical model’
Cassidy said he fears moving special education functions to HHS shifts learning disabilities in schools to a “medical model that’s treating students with disabilities as patients to diagnose, rather than learners to educate.”
The committee chairman proposed separate legislation that didn’t get a vote Thursday that would specifically bar the transfer of special education to HHS. He’s said he’s open to shifting those functions to the Labor Department.
Still, Cassidy said that the “status quo isn’t working,” and he opposed the larger measure to bar Education Department program moves to other agencies.
“Although I don’t agree that OSERS should be carried out by HHS, I’m not in favor of stripping the administration’s authority to streamline efforts that help support student success carte blanche,” he said.
Collins opposed the amendment blocking the office for civil rights’ move to the Justice Department.
Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., meanwhile, argued that stopping the administration’s moves of Education Department programs would perpetuate systemic problems with the agency and prevent attempts to correct longstanding problems.
“The definition of losing is doing the same thing over and over without a different result,” said Tuberville, a former college football coach who’s running for Alabama governor. “We’re losing badly and we need to help out the Department of Education.”
In response, Sen. Maggie Hassan, D-N.H., acknowledged that “there are reforms necessary at the Department of Education” and in the special education system, but argued that lawmakers shouldn’t “lose sight of the difference [OSERS] has made to millions of lives, to families, to workforces who now hire people with disabilities.”
Secretary of Education Linda McMahon has pitched the program moves—many of which are spelled out in the conservative policy playbook Project 2025—through interagency agreements as test cases to persuade skeptical lawmakers that her agency is redundant and its programs can be managed more efficiently elsewhere in the federal government.
Congress would have to approve the Education Department’s formal dissolution, an unlikely prospect, especially in the Senate, where such a measure would require 60 votes.
On Thursday, McMahon and the leaders of the six agencies absorbing Education Department programs sent a letter to congressional leaders asking them to support dismantling agency.
“Together, these efforts show that [interagency agreements] are not adding red tape; they are cutting through it,” the letter reads.
Special education advocates have decried the decision to move special education to HHS, led by Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. They worry funding for special education services and enforcement of the nation’s special education law could be disrupted.
In advance of Thursday’s committee session, a group of 30 disability advocacy groups signed a statement that called moving the special education oversight a “mistake.” The group supported the Senate bill that advanced out of committee.
“More than 8 million children with disabilities are counting on Congress to safeguard their rights and access to services,” the statement said. “Congress must enact a clear and unequivocal prohibition on any effort to move OSERS outside the Department of Education.”
