Republicans have wanted to abolish the Department of Education since it was established in 1979. Under Secretary Linda McMahon, they’ve come closer than ever to achieving this goal. They may come to regret it.

McMahon, on her first day in office, told staff that they should consider dismantling the department their “final mission.” Two weeks later, the president issued an executive order directing McMahon to close the agency “to the maximum extent appropriate and permitted by law.”

Formally abolishing the department would require an act of Congress. The administration’s workaround involves scattering the agency’s core responsibilities to other parts of the government. In recent months, oversight of the $1.7 trillion federal student loan portfolio has started shifting to the Treasury Department, special education to the Department of Health and Human Services, and civil rights enforcement to the Department of Justice, among other changes. (Last month, House Democrats moved to impeach McMahon, alleging such efforts are illegal.)

Shrinking the Education Department isn’t a bad idea per se — not least because the agency isn’t as powerful as the administration likes to convey. It has no role in curriculum development, and many of the grants it administers largely follow congressionally derived formulas. Services will continue so long as Congress keeps appropriating money (which it has). Federal laws protecting access to public education haven’t changed.

Nor was the department particularly well-suited for its biggest task: student lending. It’s often said the Education Department wasn’t designed to run the equivalent of a large commercial bank. Moving some of its mammoth operation to the Treasury makes sense.

The challenge, as ever, is execution. Take the Office for Civil Rights, which investigates discrimination complaints. Last year, the White House cut roughly half the office’s workforce, exacerbating backlogs that already had surpassed 20,000 cases. In a lawsuit challenging the department’s layoffs last year, a federal judge wrote that an understaffed OCR had been rendered “incapable” of addressing complaints and had “abdicated its enforcement duties.” A report by the inspector general last month found that 13 regional and suboffices responsible for legally required functions have no remaining employees.

Moving the OCR to the Justice Department is unlikely to improve matters. Rather, diffusing expertise across multiple agencies could make it harder for families and school districts to get help. Much of the OCR’s work involves enforcing federal civil rights laws that protect students with disabilities from discrimination. Might it make sense to have OCR lawyers work in the same building as special-education experts?

The White House needs to make a stronger case that shuffling staff, IT systems, contracts and grants between departments will produce real, long-term gains — that is, greater efficiency, federal savings, improved customer service and, above all, better educational outcomes, which seem to be an afterthought in this endeavor. It bears emphasizing that much of the research underpinning recently improved reading scores in states such as Mississippi came from the department’s Institute of Education Sciences, which itself has endured drastic cuts.

Abolishing the Education Department may be ideologically satisfying, but it’s unclear how a hobbled agency serves the needs of American students. Given mounting evidence of dysfunction, the administration needs to convince the American public that its preferred approach — tossing fragments of the agency across the federal government — is worth the trouble.

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