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House Republican leaders have joined President Trump in trying to dismantle the Department of Education (ED) by introducing legislation that would relocate ED’s (Title II of the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act) to the Department of Labor (DOL).  Secretary of Education Linda McMahon unlawfully transferred administration of the program to DOL through an last year.  (She has since using the same strategy.)  , a bill introduced by House Education and Workforce Chairman Tim Walberg to reauthorize the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act, would make McMahon’s program transfer legal, sever adult education’s connections to the rest of education, and silo it with DOL workforce development programs that are principally focused on moving people quickly into employment. Adult education would be reoriented as a funnel to low-wage jobs. 

McMahon and Walberg are trying to pick off adult education as their first target because they think it doesn’t have a powerful constituency. The program educates people who do not have a high school diploma or who want to learn English, offering instruction in reading, writing, math, and English language acquisition, as well as preparation for a high school equivalency credential and postsecondary education. With a $715 million annual budget spread across last year, . If exhausted program managers and teachers have time to make telephone calls to the Hill, it will be about saving the program from extinction because the would zero it out. (Never mind that rigorous research has found that spending on adult education more than pays for itself by boosting wages and generating higher tax revenues.) And the students in adult education are not the people with loud voices in Washington these days. More than two-thirds are . Many are immigrants. One-third have . Roughly one in seven left school during . One in 10 are in . “Fish in a barrel,” McMahon and Walberg must be thinking.

It can be too easy to dismiss where a program sits in the federal government as an inside-the-beltway concern. But where we locate adult education will have real-world consequences for program effectiveness, threatening to waste the time of people sitting in adult education classrooms, who are tired after a day (or night) of work, missing time from their families, and dreaming of something better.    

Adult education students need teachers who are as knowledgeable about evidence-based reading and math instruction as K-12 teachers. Teaching in adult education is in many ways more challenging than teaching K-12. Attendance is voluntary, so teachers must constantly work to engage students and keep them coming back, especially those who have had negative school experiences and doubt their ability to learn. Adult educators strive to help students with disabilities thrive in the classroom largely on their own, without the supplemental services and personnel that support K-12 teachers, like school psychologists, speech-language pathologists, and in-class paraprofessionals. And indicates that it’s harder for adults to learn a new language than it is for children.

To be effective in these difficult jobs, adult educators need the support and expertise of an education agency with administrators and other professionals who have specialized training and experience in the field. People who have done this work themselves. People who have studied education and understand the research. And people who know both professional development and adult educators and can make that research actionable for them, like the ED team that created an for adult educators before Linda McMahon arrived. (According to , she killed efforts to create new resources to support adult educators in March 2025.) 

The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) classifies federal employees who have this expertise as “education program specialists.” , you must have a degree or completed 24 semester hours in a field related to the position (with at least 9 of those hours in education courses), or four years of experience working in the field that is equivalent in depth to a four-year degree, or a year of professional teaching experience. Even after Secretary McMahon last year, ED still had 180 education program specialists on board in February 2026, according to . How many did DOL have? Out of 11,152 employees, DOL had only one. Even the National Aeronautics and Space Administration had more (it had five). As an agency, DOL just doesn’t have the institutional know-how needed to run education programs.

Moving adult education to DOL would also weaken its ties to higher education, a blow to the ambitions of students who need more than a high school equivalency credential or basic English proficiency to earn family-sustaining wages. Most need at least a postsecondary certificate or associate degree to achieve real economic mobility, and that pathway runs through Education, not Labor.

Our economy needs these students to continue their studies. The Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce has that we face shortages of hundreds of thousands of people with postsecondary certificates and associate degrees needed to fill over 100 occupations with median annual salaries that start at $55,000 and reach $83,300 by mid-career. These are good jobs, like industrial machinery mechanic and paramedic, that we need adult education students on pathways to fill. Adult and higher education should be closely connected so that standards align with postsecondary entrance expectations, teachers can prepare students to meet them, and programs can give students a smooth transition to college when they are ready.        

Congress should reject the relocation and reorientation of adult education in what is surely just the start of the legal dismantling of ED. Policymakers must preserve, for students and their teachers, the expertise in education they deserve and strengthen adult education as a pipeline to higher education and good jobs with a living wage and benefits, not low-wage, high-churn employment.