Senate Committee Votes 13-9 to Block Trump Admin's Transfer of Special Ed and K-12 Programs Out of Education Department

The Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee voted 13-9 on Thursday to advance a bill blocking major pieces of the Trump administration's effort to dismantle the Department of Education without Congress actually voting to kill it.

Republican Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska crossed party lines to back the bill, S. 5046, alongside Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., and the committee's Democrats, according to Breitbart News and Education Week.

Trump campaigned on abolishing the Education Department. Doing that for real requires an act of Congress, since Congress created the department under President Jimmy Carter in 1979 and only Congress can unmake it. Republicans hold 53 Senate seats. Actual abolition needs 60 votes to beat a filibuster, and zero Democrats are on record supporting it, according to Chalkbeat.

So instead of waiting on a vote nobody thinks is coming, Education Secretary Linda McMahon has been moving the department's functions to other agencies through what are called interagency agreements, or IAAs. Since June 2026, according to Sen. Tammy Baldwin's office, the administration has struck agreements sending special education oversight under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act to the Department of Health and Human Services, and shifting K-12 and postsecondary programs to the Department of Labor. Indian education is headed to Interior. Education Week's own tracking puts the total at 148 programs moving to six different agencies.

McMahon has called this a "proof of concept," arguing that if Congress sees these functions running fine elsewhere, lawmakers will eventually be more willing to actually vote the department out of existence. ED spokeswoman Savannah Newhouse said the new Senate bill is "entirely premature" and would "sabotage this effort before it has the chance to eliminate bureaucratic barriers."

S. 5046 would specifically stop four offices from being transferred elsewhere: the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services, plus the offices of Elementary and Secondary Education, Postsecondary Education, and Indian Education. It doesn't touch every interagency agreement ED has made, including one moving the department's Office for Civil Rights to the Department of Justice.

Collins called the bill "straightforward," saying it "keeps important landmark education programs at the Department of Education where Congress specifically put them and where they belong." Murkowski framed her vote around the kids affected: "We cannot lose sight of the fact that at the end of the day, we're talking about children, whether it's children with special needs, whether it's children in our elementary schools, whether it's our Native students."

Committee Chairman Bill Cassidy, R-La., had already signaled he wasn't on board with the HHS move specifically. According to Education Week, Cassidy has argued that shifting special education to a health agency risks reclassifying learning disabilities under a "medical model" instead of an educational one, a substantive concern from a Republican rather than a partisan talking point.

Democrats tried to go further. Two amendments, one barring the transfer of any ED functions at all, another specifically targeting the Office for Civil Rights move to DOJ, both failed on party-line votes. Sen. Tammy Baldwin, D-Wis., pushed one of those broader amendments and lost. A narrower amendment requiring the administration to report the cost of these transfers to Congress did pass, with only two Republicans opposed.

Even supporters of the bill admit it's not clear this goes anywhere. Rick Hess, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, told Chalkbeat there's no realistic path to 60 votes on the floor, and even if there were, Trump would just veto it. "Nobody has the votes to do anything," Hess said.

The committee vote is a real signal that the administration can't count on unified Republican support for its restructuring, which Chalkbeat's reporting says frustrates Trump allies. But a signal isn't a law. Kaine told Politico, as reported by Breitbart, that he hopes the bill gets folded into appropriations talks, which is a more realistic path than a standalone floor vote given the Senate math.

Meanwhile the House is moving the opposite direction. A House Education and Workforce Committee bill voted out last month would permanently codify many of the transfers the administration has already made, according to Education Week. That sets up a direct collision between the two chambers if either bill ever gets real momentum.

Congress already told ED, in non-binding language attached to the last spending bill, that it lacks authority to move functions to other departments. The administration has kept moving them anyway. Whether that's a legal problem or just a political one is the fight now sitting in front of the full Senate, with no clear timeline for when, or if, it gets a vote.