The federal Department of Education has been politically controversial since before it existed. The first one was created in 1867 and killed in two years. The second was threatened with elimination within months of its founding in 1980. And the argument used to kill it each time (federal overreach, return power to the states, too much Washington) has never changed. What has changed is who bears the cost when that argument wins.

This piece is about that pattern. Not the policy disputes, which are real and complex, but the pattern underneath them: the same argument, recurring at intervals long enough to let the cost of the last time it prevailed fade from view. The three parts of this series have moved from the conceptual (what the medical and educational models of disability are) to the structural (what IDEA actually promised and what it failed to deliver) to the historical. This final piece asks the oldest question: where did the system now being dismantled come from, what did it build, and what happened each time it was dismantled before?

History does not repeat itself automatically. It repeats itself when people choose to forget.

Before the Department: A Nation That Couldn’t Agree on Federal Education

Education is not mentioned in the U.S. Constitution. The Tenth Amendment, reserving powers not delegated to the federal government to the states, became the default justification for keeping Washington out of schools entirely. For most of the nineteenth century, that was the arrangement: education was a local matter, administered by states, counties, and districts with wildly unequal resources and wildly unequal access.

That included, by design, the exclusion of the people most in need of public education. In the post–Civil War South, illiteracy was rampant, the result of laws that had made it illegal to teach enslaved people to read. An estimated 10% of formerly enslaved people were literate in 1865. The Radical Republicans in Congress understood that Reconstruction could not succeed without a massive, coordinated investment in education, particularly in the South. And for that, they needed a federal presence.

Act One: Born from Reconstruction, Killed by It (1867–1869)

On March 2, 1867, under significant pressure from Radical Republicans in Congress, President Andrew Johnson signed legislation creating the first U.S. Department of Education. Its mandate was modest by design: collect and share educational statistics to “show the condition and progress of education” across states and territories. It had one commissioner (Henry Barnard, an early champion of public education), three clerks, and an annual budget of $15,000 (roughly $300,000 in today’s dollars).

The politics were another matter. The department was born from abolitionist fervor and Reconstruction-era urgency to build schools for formerly enslaved people. Southern Democrats and some Northern conservatives immediately recognized it for what it was: a federal foothold in education that could be used to track and enforce educational access for Black children. The objections were framed in terms of states’ rights and anti-federalism. Still, the underlying fear was explicit: “The schoolhouses of the country will go under the control of the General Government,” warned an 1866 editorial in the Council Grove Democrat, a Kansas newspaper.

Johnson himself was ambivalent. He had been told the department would “yield little power” and serve as an “empty gesture” to appease the Radical Republicans. He signed it anyway.

The House voted to abolish the department outright; the Senate settled on a compromise. The appropriations act of July 20, 1868 demoted the Department of Education to an “Office of Education” buried inside the Department of the Interior, effective the following year. The stated reason was money and politics: critics argued it was unnecessary and expensive. But the deeper driver, documented by historians, was that Southerners feared the department would track states’ compliance with requirements to establish schools for both Black and white students. The first Department of Education was strangled by the same racial politics that defined Reconstruction itself.

It would not be reestablished as a cabinet-level department for another 111 years.

Act Two: 111 Years in the Wilderness — and a Civil Rights Revolution (1869–1979)

For over a century, whatever federal presence existed in education drifted between agencies. The Office of Education moved from the Department of the Interior to the Federal Security Agency to, eventually, the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW), established on April 11, 1953, under President Eisenhower. Before 1980, special education oversight was housed within what was essentially a health agency. HEW is the direct predecessor of the Department of Health and Human Services, which is exactly where the current administration is sending special education today.

The political and social terrain shifted beginning in the late 1950s. The Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik in 1957 panicked Congress into directing significant federal dollars toward science education. The 1960s brought Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, which produced the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (ESEA) and Title I, the first major federal investment in low-income school districts. Federal education spending was growing rapidly, even as its administration remained scattered across agencies.

The Civil Rights Cases That Made IDEA Possible

The story of federal special education law begins in two federal courtrooms.

Before the 1970s, students with disabilities had no federal protection guaranteeing access to public education. In 1970, U.S. schools educated only one in five children with disabilities. Many states had laws explicitly excluding students who were deaf, blind, emotionally disturbed, or had intellectual disabilities from public schools entirely. Districts were legally permitted to turn away any child deemed unable to meet academic expectations. Some states defined this as failing to reach a “mental age of five” by first grade.

Two cases changed everything. In Pennsylvania Association for Retarded Citizens (PARC) v. Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania ruled that the state could not deny children with intellectual disabilities access to public education. The case was resolved through a consent decree (a court-approved settlement), entered in 1971 and approved and adopted in final amended form in 1972, that declared several Pennsylvania statutes unconstitutional and required the state to evaluate and appropriately place all students with intellectual disabilities ages 6–21 in publicly funded educational settings.

Months later, Mills v. Board of Education of the District of Columbia (1972) significantly expanded the legal framework. Where PARC had focused specifically on children with intellectual disabilities, the Mills court ruled that students with any type of disability, including physical, behavioral, and emotional disabilities, were entitled to a public education, and that a school district could not justify excluding them by pointing to the cost of accommodations.

Twenty-seven federal lawsuits involving disability and education followed PARC and Mills. The pressure on Congress was unmistakable.

PL 94-142: The Law That Changed Everything

On November 29, 1975, President Gerald Ford signed the Education for All Handicapped Children Act, Public Law 94-142. The four purposes of the law were precise:

• To assure that all children with disabilities have available to them a free appropriate public education (FAPE) designed to meet their unique needs
• To assure that the rights of children with disabilities and their parents are protected
• To assist states and localities in providing for the education of all children with disabilities
• To assess and assure the effectiveness of efforts to educate all children with disabilities

PL 94-142 emerged from litigation, from parents who sued, from advocates who documented exclusion, and from Congress, responding to evidence that states could not be trusted to act without federal oversight and financial incentives. The law authorized financial grants to states contingent on compliance, and those grants came with accountability requirements.

Ford signed the bill with reservations. His written statement opened with the word “Unfortunately” and warned that the bill promised more than the federal government could deliver. He went further, telling the country that the measure’s strongest supporters were raising expectations they knew the authorization levels would not meet. His concerns were noted. The law passed anyway, 404–7 in the House and 87–7 in the Senate.

Act Three: The Modern Department — Created, Then Immediately Threatened (1979–1981)

Why a New Department?

By the late 1970s, federal education programs had multiplied (ESEA, Title IX, PL 94-142, Vocational Rehabilitation Act, Bilingual Education Act), and they were administered across multiple agencies with no central coordination. President Jimmy Carter made the creation of a cabinet-level Department of Education a central campaign promise in 1976, and the National Education Association vigorously supported it. The argument was straightforward: education had become too significant a federal responsibility to be handled as a subdivision of a health agency.

On October 17, 1979, Carter signed the Department of Education Organization Act (Public Law 96-88). The department was split off from HEW, which simultaneously became the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). The first Secretary was Shirley Hufstedler, a federal appeals court judge with no prior experience in education policy. The department became fully operational on May 4, 1980.

The vote in Congress was close: 215–201 in the House. The opposition argued, as critics of federal involvement in education always have, that this was an overreach of federal power, a waste of money, and a threat to local control of schools.

Critically, Pub. L. 96-88 placed special education oversight explicitly within the new Department of Education. The law identified specific offices, including the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services (OSERS) and the Office for Civil Rights (OCR), as components of the department. OSERS became home to the Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP): the federal body responsible for implementing IDEA, distributing formula grants to states, monitoring compliance, and ensuring that PL 94-142’s guarantees had enforcement teeth.

The Threat Arrived Within Six Months

Ronald Reagan defeated Carter in November 1980, just months after the department opened. Reagan had campaigned on eliminating it. In his 1982 State of the Union address, he stated plainly: “The budget plan I submit to you on Feb. 8 will realize major savings by dismantling the Departments of Energy and Education.”

Congress would not cooperate. Reagan abandoned the effort. However, the political impulse did not go away — it just waited.

Where it waited is best understood as a matter of ideological lineage rather than a single chain of cause and effect. In August 1971, Lewis F. Powell Jr. — then a Richmond corporate attorney two months from his own Supreme Court nomination — wrote a confidential memorandum to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce arguing that its defenders needed permanent intellectual infrastructure: funded scholars, policy institutes, and an activist presence in the courts (Powell, 1971). Historians disagree about how much causal weight the memo itself deserves, and the honest claim is not that one document set the course. It is that the institutions built in these years shared a project.

Joseph Coors supplied the initial funding that launched the Heritage Foundation in 1973 (Gerstle, 2022). Heritage’s Mandate for Leadership (1981) recommended that the year-old Department of Education be completely restructured. Project 2025’s policy volume is the ninth edition of the same document, and its recommendation has hardened from restructuring to elimination (Burke, 2023). The impulse did not wait idly. It waited in print, revised every few years, for an administration willing to execute it.

The philosophical lineage runs through the courts as well. By the time Heritage opened its doors, Powell was on the Supreme Court, and weeks later, in San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez (1973), he wrote the 5–4 majority opinion holding that education is not a fundamental right under the federal Constitution. Rodriguez was a school-finance case, not a special education case, and nothing suggests it was written to serve the memorandum. However, the philosophical position is continuous: education as a state matter, beyond the reach of federal constitutional guarantee.

Rodriguez is also part of why PL 94-142 exists in its current form. With the Supreme Court having closed the door on a federal constitutional right to education, the durable guarantee for children with disabilities had to come from Congress, which means the guarantee has been only statutory. Moreover, a statutory guarantee is only as strong as the will to enforce it.

Act Four: The Current Dismantling (2025–2026)

The March 2025 Executive Order

On March 20, 2025, President Donald Trump signed an executive order directing Education Secretary Linda McMahon to “take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education and return authority over education to the States and local communities.” Standing in the East Room of the White House, Trump declared: “Today we take a historic action that was 45 years in the making.”

The executive order cannot abolish the Department of Education. Federal agencies can be created, and thus dissolved, only by an act of Congress. Abolishing the department would require 60 votes in the Senate to overcome the filibuster; there are currently 53 Republican senators. What the executive order can do is gut the department’s capacity through staff reductions, budget freezes, and the reassignment of functions to other agencies.

That is precisely what followed.

The Dismantling of OSEP

On October 10, 2025, 415 Department of Education employees were laid off, including 121 from OSERS. Fewer than half a dozen employees remained within OSEP, the office responsible for monitoring states’ compliance with IDEA, administering technical assistance to families, and overseeing the rights of more than 8 million students with disabilities. The layoffs were later reversed under the congressional agreement that ended the fall 2025 government shutdown, but advocates widely viewed them as a deliberate attempt to hinder IDEA enforcement capacity.

Both OSEP division directors retired in late 2025 after a combined 70 years of service, following years of institutional disruption. The institutional knowledge embedded in OSEP, built over decades, was being systematically drained.

The Pattern: Same Argument, Different Century

The history traced in the preceding sections forms a single recurring pattern, visible across 160 years:

1867: Federal education department created to extend educational access to formerly enslaved people and establish federal oversight. Framed as Reconstruction urgency.

1869: Department killed. Argument: federal overreach, states’ rights, too expensive. Real driver: fear that federal oversight would enforce educational access for Black children.

1975: PL 94-142 enacted. Federal government mandates educational access for students with disabilities for the first time. Forty percent federal funding promised.

1975–1980: Law on paper, enforcement toothless. The Bureau of Education for the Handicapped operates within HEW, with 20 staff and no enforcement actions initiated. Waiting lists in the thousands.

1979–1980: Department of Education created over significant opposition and signed into law in October 1979; became fully operational May 1980. OSEP established. Enforcement infrastructure built over 45 years.

1981: Reagan campaigns to eliminate the department less than a year after it opens. Argument: federal overreach, return power to the states, too much Washington. Congress does not cooperate.

2025–2026: The Department of Education is being functionally dismantled. IDEA oversight is being transferred to a health agency without congressional authorization. The argument is efficiency, states’ rights, and reducing federal bureaucracy.

The through-line is a pattern — an interpretive claim, but one the record supports at each step. The argument for federal withdrawal has never been disproven by evidence — it has simply been repeated after enough time has passed that the cost of the last withdrawal has faded from view. Whether one reads this as historical recurrence, institutional amnesia, or simply a cyclical dispute over federal authority, the practical question is the same: who maintains the enforcement infrastructure when the federal government mandates educational rights but withdraws the capacity to protect them? The next section examines the most common version of that argument as it circulates today, because it deserves a direct answer, not only a historical one.

Addressing the Counter-Argument: “Special Education Existed Before the Department — It’ll Be Fine”

The claim that special education predates the Department of Education, and will therefore survive its dismantling, is perhaps the most common dismissal you will hear, and it deserves a direct answer. The argument goes like this: PL 94-142 was signed in 1975. The Department of Education did not open until 1980. Special education law therefore predates the Department of Education, which means dismantling the department will not hurt special education.

Every word of this is technically accurate. And it is wrong in every way that matters.

The Law Is Not the Same Thing as the Enforcement

We know this not as a theory, but as documented history. In April 1980, the same month the Department of Education opened its doors, a coalition of advocacy groups from eleven states published a report cataloging what PL 94-142 had actually produced in the five years since its passage, while federal oversight lived inside the Bureau of Education for the Handicapped (BEH) under the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. Their findings were specific, documented, and damning.

In New York City alone, 15,000 children with disabilities were on a waiting list for evaluation and special education placement — some waiting for more than two years.

In Texas, over 200 children with intellectual disabilities living in state institutions were receiving no education at all.

Across the country, 71,500 children in institutions or special schools were in entirely segregated programs.

Black students were being placed in classes for the “educable mentally retarded” at more than three times the rate of white students.

Children were being illegally suspended and expelled for behavior caused by their disabilities, with no consequences for the districts doing it and no BEH enforcement response.

The coalition’s conclusion about the federal enforcement agency, the Bureau of Education for the Handicapped, operating inside the health-focused HEW, was blunt: “This is a national disgrace — a disgrace to the nation’s millions of handicapped children and their parents who rely on enforcement of PL 94-142 to provide for their children the opportunity to become independent, self-sufficient adults.”

BEH had approximately 20 staff members overseeing a nearly $1 billion federal program spanning all 50 states. By comparison, the Office for Civil Rights had 1,770 employees. BEH had never initiated a single cease-and-desist proceeding. It was conducting paper compliance reviews that reported states as “in full compliance” at the same time federal courts in those same states were finding thousands of children without the individualized education programs (IEPs) the law required, without services, without placements. BEH’s own officials told state education agency directors at a public hearing in Texas that the agency’s enforcement powers amounted to little more than a “water pistol.”

This is what “special education existing before the Department of Education” actually looked like.

That same year, the GAO reviewed implementation of PL 94-142 across ten states and concluded that Congress’s goal, that all children with disabilities ages 3–18 have access to a free appropriate public education by September 1, 1978, would probably not be achieved until at least the mid-1980s. The deadline had already passed. States were not complying. The enforcement infrastructure was failing.

OSEP was built precisely to fix this. The Office of Special Education Programs, created within the new Department of Education in 1980, was designed from the beginning to be what BEH was not: a compliance agency with real monitoring authority, real enforcement tools, real technical assistance infrastructure, and real institutional expertise in schools and education law. Over 45 years, it built exactly that.

The “Before the Department” Baseline Is Not a Reassuring One

When someone says “special education existed before the Department of Education,” they are, at most, making the case that special education law can survive on paper without federal education infrastructure. They are not making the case that children with disabilities were well-served, or served at all.

If we extend the argument back further, before PL 94-142, before PARC, before Mills, the baseline becomes even starker. Recall where the numbers stood: in 1970, public schools educated one in five children with disabilities — and exclusion was not a failure of the system but a feature written into state law. Some districts offered what amounted to custodial warehousing in basement classrooms with no curriculum, no expectations, and no pathway to any future. Families had no legal recourse. Courts were the only remedy, and courts move slowly.

“Special education existed before the Department of Education” is true, just as “civil rights law existed before the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice” is true. The law existing is a prerequisite. The enforcement infrastructure is what makes it real.

The Current Transfer Is Not a Return to 1979 — It’s Worse

There is one more layer to address. Some who make this argument may be picturing a return to the pre-1980 HEW arrangement: a health agency managing special education with competent staff and an established institutional presence. That is not what is happening.

HHS in 2026 bears little resemblance to HEW in 1979. The current administration has already reduced its staff and capacity. It has no established relationships with state education agencies, no IDEA-specific institutional expertise, no infrastructure for monitoring IEP compliance or handling due process complaints, and leadership that has said openly it views disability as a medical matter.

OSERS staff who spent decades building expertise on how best to serve students with disabilities are largely gone. By every available indicator (the departure of division directors with a combined 70 years of service, the gutting of staff, and the absence of any established transition infrastructure), the institutional knowledge is not being transferred. It is being dissolved.

And Project 2025’s blueprint for what comes next makes the trajectory explicit: convert IDEA funding into a no-strings block grant distributed by HHS’s Administration for Community Living. No accountability requirements. No compliance monitoring. No federal standards for the quality of a child’s IEP, for placement in the least restrictive environment (the rule that children be educated alongside non-disabled peers whenever possible), or for Child Find. States receiving block grants are not required to demonstrate that children with disabilities are being served at all, let alone appropriately.

The question is not whether special education law will still exist on paper. It will. The question is whether anyone will remain with the authority, expertise, and institutional infrastructure to enforce it.

History already answered what happens when that answer is no.

What This Means on the Ground: Practitioners, States, and the Infrastructure of Accountability

The preceding history carries direct and concrete implications for the practitioners, families, and students who depend on the implementation infrastructure that OSEP built and maintains. To understand what is at stake, it is worth examining what OSEP does as a daily operational presence in special education practice across the country.

The Interpretive Function: Policy Letters and Dear Colleague Letters

OSEP’s most immediate influence on day-to-day special education practice is interpretive rather than financial. Through policy letters, Dear Colleague letters, and formal guidance documents, OSEP has spent four decades answering the question that IDEA’s statutory language cannot always resolve on its own: what does this law actually require in this situation?

These documents sit underneath everyday special education practice. When a district asks whether a particular evaluation timeline is permissible, whether a specific assessment can be used to document a processing deficit, or whether a district’s duty to seek out and evaluate a child (Child Find) has been triggered by a referral from a community physician, the answers trace back, often directly, to OSEP guidance. State education agencies translate that federal guidance into state rules and technical assistance documents. The state rules practitioners follow every day flow directly from that federal guidance.

Texas’s evaluation framework under TAC §89.1040 (including the convergent evidence standard for SLD identification, the requirement that no single measure or score be used as the sole determinant of eligibility, and the specific procedural protections governing nondiscriminatory assessment) exists within a structure that OSEP guidance has shaped and bounded. The convergent evidence model emerged from IDEA 2004’s explicit rejection of the IQ-achievement discrepancy model, the “wait to fail” approach that required a student to fall far enough behind their measured ability before help arrived.

That was a shift OSEP clarified, refined, and defended through guidance over the subsequent two decades. Practitioners who conduct SLD evaluations in Texas today are working within a framework made possible by the federal interpretive infrastructure.

The field has already run the experiment on what practice looks like without that interpretive function, and extended school year services are the case study. In the late 1970s, parents of children with severe disabilities argued that a rigid 180-day school calendar caused their children to regress over long breaks, losing hard-won skills that took months to recover, if they were recovered at all. BEH declined for years to issue any national policy on the question, leaving families to litigate it state by state.

In Armstrong v. Kline (1979), a federal court in Pennsylvania held that the Commonwealth’s inflexible 180-day limit denied FAPE to students whose disabilities caused severe regression, and the Third Circuit affirmed the following year on reasoning that should sound familiar to every IEP team (in Texas, the ARD committee): a blanket rule that precludes individualized consideration is incompatible with the Act.

However, without a federal agency willing to translate that holding into national policy, ESY remained a jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction question, resolved family by family in the courts, until the 1999 IDEA regulations finally codified the requirement (now at 34 C.F.R. §300.106), twenty years after Armstrong was decided.

Today, ESY is a routine consideration at annual ARD meetings: an agenda item with state criteria, documentation expectations, and regression-recoupment data (whether skills lost over a break come back quickly), discussed every spring without anyone filing a lawsuit. That routineness was manufactured. It is the end product of interpretive infrastructure: a court ruling became federal regulation, which became state rule, which became everyday practice.

Every ARD committee that documents an ESY determination without litigation is standing on that scaffolding. Remove the federal interpretive function, and the Armstrong v. Kline questions of the next decade, the novel questions that new assessment tools, changing demographics, and new service models will inevitably raise, return to being resolved the old way: courtroom by courtroom, in the states and districts where families can afford to bring suit.

If OSEP’s capacity to produce, maintain, and defend that guidance is gutted, whether through staff reductions, the disruption of the HHS transfer, or the eventual elimination of accountability strings through block grant conversion, the interpretive infrastructure does not simply pause. It withers. Guidance documents go unrevised as case law evolves. Emerging questions about new assessment tools, changing disability demographics, and novel eligibility scenarios go unanswered. States are left to develop their own interpretations without a federal floor defining the boundaries of permissible practice.

The result is fragmentation — a patchwork of state-by-state interpretation with no common reference point, in which a child’s access to evaluation, eligibility, and services becomes increasingly dependent on the state and district in which that child happens to live.

The Accountability Function: Monitoring, Determinations, and Corrective Action

OSEP’s second major function is compliance monitoring. Under IDEA, OSEP is responsible for issuing annual state determination letters that assess each state’s performance on two dimensions: compliance with IDEA’s procedural and substantive requirements and educational results and outcomes for children with disabilities. States receiving determinations of “needs assistance,” “needs intervention,” or “needs substantial intervention” face escalating federal responses, from required technical assistance to conditions on the use of federal funds.

This monitoring structure is the mechanism by which federal special education rights become enforceable realities at the district level. When a state receives a finding of noncompliance, it must develop a corrective action plan. That plan filters through the state education agency to local education agencies, creating accountability pressure that reaches into individual districts, individual campuses, and individual practices.

The monitoring structure also drives data collection and public reporting. OSEP’s annual reports to Congress document how many children with disabilities are being served, in what placements, with what outcomes, across every state and territory. That data is the empirical foundation on which policy is evaluated, litigation is pursued, and advocacy is grounded. Without it, the field loses the ability to document whether students with disabilities are being served — or to demonstrate, with evidence, when they are not.

The Child Find obligation (the affirmative federal duty to identify, locate, and evaluate all children who may have disabilities, regardless of the severity of their disability or whether they are enrolled in public school) is an IDEA mandate with no state-law substitute. It exists because Congress determined that states, left to their own discretion, would not find and serve children with disabilities without a federal requirement to do so. The history documented in the preceding sections supports that determination.

If IDEA’s accountability requirements are converted to a no-strings block grant, as Project 2025 proposes, Child Find does not disappear from the statute immediately. But it loses its enforcement mechanism. A state that fails to conduct Child Find activities faces no federal consequences when no federal agency has the authority, expertise, or political will to impose them.

The Equity Function: Who Bears the Cost of Weakened Oversight

The consequences of weakened federal oversight are not distributed evenly. They follow the same patterns they always have.

None of this argues that federal oversight has produced uniform quality; it has not. Some states built strong special education systems and some built weak ones, and a child’s experience has always depended in part on the state and district lines around them. But the federal floor is what keeps the weakest states from falling further, and it is that floor — not the ceiling — that the current changes remove.

The families most likely to successfully navigate a fragmented, de-federalized special education system are those with the resources to hire advocates and attorneys, the social capital to know which questions to ask, and the time to pursue administrative remedies across multiple agencies. History is specific about who those families are. They are not the families whose children were excluded from public schools before 1975, whose children sat in segregated classrooms while BEH issued paper compliance reviews, or whose children were disproportionately labeled and misplaced in the decade before IDEA 2004’s reforms.

The families whose children are most dependent on the accountability infrastructure OSEP provides are those for whom the alternative (private evaluation, private school, legal counsel, persistent advocacy) is not financially accessible. When federal oversight weakens, it is their children who wait the longest for evaluations, receive the least intensive services, and are most likely to be placed in increasingly restrictive environments as underfunded districts manage limited resources without the pressure of federal accountability.

The history of federal education oversight, traced from 1867 to the present, is consistent on this point: the withdrawal of federal oversight has never produced better outcomes for the students most in need of protection. It has produced conditions in which those students become invisible — their needs undiminished, the infrastructure for seeing them dismantled.

A Note on the Scope of This Moment

It is tempting, in the face of a development as significant as the June 2026 interagency transfer, to frame it as a crisis that may be reversed when political conditions change. That framing underestimates the nature of institutional knowledge loss. The OSEP division directors who retired in late 2025 had a combined 70 years of service. The staff who were laid off in October 2025 had spent careers building relationships with state education agency personnel, developing technical assistance resources, and acquiring the specific expertise that IDEA implementation requires. None of that transfers with a signature.

That framing is being tested in real time. On July 30, 2026, the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee advanced S. 5046, a bipartisan bill from Senators Tim Kaine (D-VA), Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), and Susan Collins (R-ME) that would block the transfer of OSERS and other Department of Education offices to other federal agencies. It passed 13–69, with Murkowski and Collins joining all Democrats. A narrower alternative from Committee Chairman Bill Cassidy (R-LA), which would have blocked only the move to HHS while permitting a transfer elsewhere, could not find enough support to reach a vote. Both bills would still need to pass the full Senate, the House, and receive the President’s signature to become law — a difficult path even for popular legislation, and neither has cleared that bar as of this writing.

But suppose one does. A statute can restore an organizational chart. It cannot restore a retirement, a working relationship built over a decade, or the 70 years of combined institutional memory that already left OSEP in 2025. The correction, if it comes, arrives too late for what has already been lost.

What is being dismantled is a system of accountability for civil rights, built over fifty years in direct response to the demonstrated failure of states to protect those rights without it. The students who will bear the cost of its dismantling are the same students who bore the cost before it was built.

That is the lesson the history demands we not forget.

Key Takeaways

• The federal government has had two Departments of Education: one from 1867–1869 (killed by racial politics), and one from 1980 to the present (currently being functionally dismantled).
• Before 1980, special education oversight lived inside HEW, the direct predecessor of HHS. The creation of the Department of Education intentionally separated education from health administration.
• IDEA exists because states demonstrably failed to educate students with disabilities without federal mandate. In 1970, U.S. schools educated only one in five children with disabilities, and roughly 1.8 million were excluded from public school altogether.
• PARC (1971) and Mills (1972) established the constitutional and legal framework for IDEA; Congress acted only after courts forced the issue.
• The argument that “special education existed before the Department of Education” is historically accurate and practically misleading. The documented record of 1975–1980 shows that a law without an enforcement agency produced waiting lists of thousands, mass noncompliance, and segregated programming, all while the federal oversight agency was housed inside a health department with almost no enforcement power.
• The June 2026 transfer of OSERS to HHS is a functional dismantling accomplished without congressional authorization, by routing around the law instead of changing it.
• The central risk runs deeper than administrative disruption: the replacement of an educational civil rights framework with a medical treatment model, the dissolution of decades of institutional expertise, and the loss of the federal interpretive and accountability infrastructure that makes IDEA real in practice.
• The consequences of weakened oversight are not distributed evenly. They follow the same patterns they always have: the students who most depend on federal accountability are those for whom private alternatives are not an option.
• The argument being used today (federal overreach, return power to the states) is the same argument used in 1867, in 1981, and at every other moment when federal protection for vulnerable students was at risk. What changes each time is who pays the price when that argument prevails.

Conclusion: No Blueprint

The administration’s press secretary assured parents and educators on June 16, 2026, that the interagency transfer to HHS “does not impact the critical protections enshrined in IDEA law” and that “students, parents and teachers should experience no impact from this partnership.” The Council for Exceptional Children’s response to that assurance was measured and precise: “the future for students with disabilities is unclear, as we have no blueprint for how compliance with IDEA will be ensured under HHS.”

OSEP was built to be that blueprint — the interpretive infrastructure that turned IDEA’s guarantee into daily practice, and the accountability infrastructure that gave it enforcement teeth. That infrastructure is now being functionally dissolved, not through debate but through the departure of the people who carried it. HHS has no established infrastructure for monitoring IEP compliance or maintaining the interpretive continuity practitioners and families depend on. As a former OSEP division director put it directly, “inherently a model that is incompatible with education because it’s a medical model.”

As of January 2025, disability-based cases represented nearly half of the 12,000 unresolved complaints at the Office for Civil Rights — now being moved to the Department of Justice. Congress had a chance to close that gap: during the same July 30 markup, Senator Patty Murray (D-WA) offered an amendment extending the OSERS-protection bill’s coverage to OCR. It failed on a party-line vote. There is no blueprint for those cases either.

This is the third piece in a series that began with the medical model versus the educational model, moved through what the funding promise actually delivered, and now traces the longer history: the argument that won in 1867, lost in 1975, and returned in 2025 wearing the same clothes.

The argument (federal overreach, return power to the states, too much Washington) has never changed. What has changed each time is who pays the price when it prevails.

The students who needed federal protection in 1867 were children freed from slavery whom states would not educate without a federal requirement. In 1975, they were children with disabilities excluded from public school nationwide. The students bearing the cost of the current dismantling are not different in kind — for them, this accountability infrastructure isn’t bureaucratic overhead, it’s the only mechanism that makes their legal rights real.

History does not repeat itself automatically. It repeats itself when people choose to forget.

The first Department of Education lasted two years. The second has lasted forty-six. Neither survived without opposition. The question has never been whether it should exist — it has always been whether the nation is willing to sustain the institutions required to make rights real.

None of this leaves families and practitioners without recourse while the federal scaffolding is pulled apart — the leverage simply moves. When the federal floor drops, states become the floor. States can write IDEA’s protections directly into state law, where an executive order can’t reach them. State education agencies and regional service centers can keep issuing the guidance districts need. And the professional communities that carry this expertise — diagnosticians, special education directors, parent advocates — can keep the interpretive knowledge alive instead of letting it retire with the people who held it.

That’s not a substitute for a functioning federal system, and it shouldn’t be mistaken for one. But it’s where the work goes now, worth naming plainly — a parent or practitioner who understands the fight has moved to the states is in a very different position than one who believes the fight is simply over.

We cannot forget.

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