Abolishing the Department of Education Isn’t Conservative — It’s Reckless Vandalism

Argue for radical change if you must, but don't call it conservative.

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This article is a guest post by Mike Burke.

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In recent years, a strange amnesia has crept into the American right. Once the champions of stewardship and stability, too many now mistake demolition for conservatism. What Elon Musk is doing to America’s civil service under the guise of “efficiency”, Donald Trump now proposes to do to American education in the name of “freedom” by abolishing the Department of Education outright.

Let’s be clear: the Department of Education is deeply flawed. Like all bureaucracies, it has become bloated, and like many institutions during the 2010s and early 2020s, it underwent a great deal of left-wing ideological mission creep. It has not merely failed to resist the advance of far-left social justice ideology — it has often led the charge. The ED has pushed race-essentialist thinking under the banner of “equity”, promoted extremist policies regarding sex and gender, and helped entrench a grievance-based worldview that inflames rather than heals America’s racial wounds. In many places, educational standards have declined while ideological purity tests have been raised. And the damage — to trust, unity, and educational excellence — has been severe.

To many, including Trump, the solution is simple: just burn it all down. It’s a perfectly valid opinion. If you believe that its failings justify abolishing the Department of Education entirely, then by all means, feel free to make your case and show your work. Argue for radical change if you must. But don’t call yourself a conservative.

Abolishing the Department of Education is not a conservative act. It is the mirror image of the political left’s worst impulses. It is the education-policy equivalent of “defund the police”: loud, emotional, and wholly indifferent to institutional consequences or tangible outcomes.

Conservatism, properly understood, is the politics of preservation. It recognizes that institutions are not accidents of history but repositories of accumulated wisdom — imperfect, yes, but indispensable. Like coral reefs, they are slow to grow but easy to destroy. To tear one down in a fit of ideological fervor is not a corrective — it is a betrayal.

The Department of Education, for all its faults, performs vital functions: coordinating federal aid for low-income students, enforcing civil rights protections, distributing student loans and Pell Grants, collecting and standardizing national education data, and supporting education research. That it has become a vector for ideological overreach is precisely why it must be reclaimed, not razed.

Destroying the Department of Education would unleash chaos in three acts.

First, the short-term: disarray — a patchwork of conflicting state standards, sudden legal vacuums in anti-discrimination protections, a disruption to educational research and oversight, and turmoil for millions of students who depend on federal aid.

Second, the medium-term: inequality and extremism — poor states falling further behind, bad actors exploiting a regulatory vacuum, and ideological curricula metastasizing without oversight — left-wing, right-wing, or otherwise.

And finally, the long-term: the unforeseeable. The true cost of lurching upheavals is rarely paid in the moment. It comes in courtrooms and classrooms, in fractured national standards, and in lost generations. It comes in the slow corrosion of civic unity and the triumph of cynicism. And as ever, it will be the poorest and most disadvantaged who suffer the most.

And yet, the Heritage Foundation — the once-principled think tank that helped shape the Reagan revolution — now champions this destruction as part of its Project 2025, an ideological blueprint for the present Republican presidency. The document speaks not of reform, restraint, or renewal — but of annihilation. The Department of Education is to be scrapped entirely. No serious plan for transition. No thought for continuity. No awareness of the institutional chaos that would follow. Just a single-minded urge to destroy, cheered on by people who still dare to call themselves conservatives.

Edmund Burke, the father of modern anglo-American conservatism, once wrote that “to love the little platoon we belong to in society is the first principle of public affections,” and that “a state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation.” Burke knew the difference between reform and recklessness. He warned against men who, drunk on the idea of purity, tore down the old in pursuit of the new.

Now, the Trump administration, the MAGA movement, and the Heritage Foundation have become exactly what Burke feared: ideologues who believe themselves wiser than history, so certain of their virtue that they think no institution is beyond dismantling, no tradition is sacred, and no consequence is worth considering.

This is not just an intellectual error. It is an ideological betrayal. And history will be merciless in its judgment of those who, entrusted with the legacy of conservative thought, abandoned it for the titillating thrill of destruction.

There is nothing conservative about cheering on the demolition of an American institution without a plan, without an alternative, and without a clue. It is the political version of burning down the schoolhouse because you disagree with the syllabus. Real conservatives do not torch institutions — they tend them. They reform, they rebalance, and they restrain. And occasionally, they gradually phase things out with a plan in place for what comes after. They understand that when something is broken, the answer is not always a hammer. The task before us is to restore excellence, reassert fairness, and drive out the ideological poison — not to destroy the very body in which it circulates.

So let’s tell the truth. Those who cheer for the abolition of the Department of Education are not conservatives. They are vandals in conservative clothing. And if history is any guide, their revolution will end as all revolutions do — not with utopia, but as a cautionary tale.

See also: “DOGE Isn’t Conservative — It’s Radical Arson”

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