On his way out the door, a top Biden official has worries

WASHINGTON – On a chilly Tuesday afternoon in the nation’s capital, plates of leftover snacks and pastries sat untouched in a government building. The soft murmur of a few dozen conversations lingered outside a small auditorium named after Lyndon Baines Johnson, the 36th president who overhauled the way Americans pay for college.

Top officials in the U.S. Department of Education had just wrapped up a tearful celebration of their time leading the agency. As school leaders and agency staffers shuffled through security to hear a series of farewell addresses, they walked past the official portraits of President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris likely for the last time.

Outside the building, road blockades slowed traffic. Just a few streets over, preparations were underway for Donald Trump’s inauguration.

Back inside, Miguel Cardona typed into his cell phone. The education secretary – who oversaw a historic period for American learners that started with a pandemic and ended with a financial aid crisis – had a jovial, determined air about him. He leaned back in a conference room chair. The goodbye speech he'd just given seemed to have drained him.

His message to the crowd had been slightly counterintuitive – a plea for optimism and hope, contoured by ominous warnings about what Trump’s second term could bring. It included a thinly veiled swipe at his likely successor, Linda McMahon, a wealthy Trump backer who faces a glide path to confirmation in the GOP-controlled Senate.

Read more: Where does Linda McMahon, Trump's education secretary nominee, stand on key issues?

His background, the former fourth-grade educator told the crowd, "should remind all of us of the significance of President Biden's decision – at a moment of crisis, no less – to have a teacher, and not some billionaire donor, lead the Department of Education."

Under Cardona’s leadership, the federal Education Department accomplished a lot, to the delight of supporters and the frustration of critics.

It doled out $130 billion to K-12 schools after Congress passed the American Rescue Plan. It resolved the greatest number of civil rights cases in its history. It authorized nearly $200 billion in student loan forgiveness for 5.3 million Americans (an effort that Republicans like North Carolina congresswoman Virginia Foxx derided as a “free college scheme”). It also overhauled the federal student aid form and finalized regulations that, if left intact, could hold colleges more accountable in the coming years.

There were big challenges, too.

Biden’s plans for debt cancellation only reached a fraction of the tens of millions of student loan borrowers that he tried to help. An effort to rewrite interpretations of a landmark sex discrimination law was ultimately struck down. The department left tons of policy ideas on the cutting room floor. And a crisis in college financial aid, resolved only after many painful months, eroded trust when the department urgently needed credibility.

As Cardona leaves office, the future of the agency he steered is under greater political threat than at any point in the last half-century. President-elect Donald Trump has repeatedly vowed to “close” it. Although doing so would require legislative action, Republicans control both chambers of Congress.

Trump's controversial pledge has received mixed responses. Recent polling shows most voters oppose abolishing the department. And it would be tough to pass such a drastic plan, given the GOP’s slim margins on Capitol Hill. Whether or not Trump follows through on that promise, his surrogates have indicated that the Education Department could still be a target of his administration’s new “Department of Government Efficiency.”

Read more: Trump wants to close the Education Department. It's far easier said than done.

USA TODAY sat down with Cardona a week before he was set to leave office. The following are excerpts from that conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity.

USA TODAY: There’s a sad irony to the fact that Jimmy Carter just passed. We wrote a story about how he was sort of the founder and father of the modern Education Department. 

Cardona: Think about it. Character and faith led him. He believed in the public good of education. He created the department. Another person wants to end it.

How does that make you feel as a former teacher, school administrator and now as secretary? 

As secretary, I feel concerned for the most vulnerable students – students in rural communities who rely on public education, rely on the federal Department of Education’s protections, students with disabilities who rely on our protections. I worry about the vulnerable populations.

As an educator, as a father, I don't bet against schools and teachers. I was a fourth-grade teacher. I was a school principal. I was a district leader. We're going to continue fighting for kids. We're going to continue helping kids.

It would be great if, at the federal level, they respected us and provided adequate funding. But we're going to protect (kids). We signed up for teaching and for leading because we care about children. That's not going to change in four years. Folks are going to have to come together.

There are pieces of bipartisan legislation that have made it across the finish line in Congress. Do those give you any hope that certain things can get accomplished in Washington on a bipartisan basis?

There were a lot of things that we agreed on during these last four years that didn't get the traction that they should have (from) my friends on the other side of the aisle.

Congresswoman Foxx and I talked a lot over coffee that she made me in her office about the importance of pathways. I'm a tech-school graduate. I fixed cars for four years. She knows how important that is in her community. She knows that we need to do more than just four-year college mentality, that we had to increase pathways, that we had to make sure our high schools are preparing students for vocational trades.

Yet she voted against everything that I tried to push in that area.

You said recently that so much of that opposition to the department is based on a misunderstanding of the role of the federal government. What is the best way to combat that?

It’s a misunderstanding in the public, but (it's also) misinformation from people that are intent on destroying public education. I don't think my friends on the Hill don't know that we have a very small role. We're 9% of education funding; 91% is state and local.

I was a commissioner of education before this. I was a district leader. I was a principal. I was a teacher. I had more say in curriculum in every one of those roles than as secretary.

Under Secretary James Kvaal recently wrote an op-ed in Inside Higher Ed about the problems with the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA, and how a lot of the problems there were related to relationships with contractors and the federal contracting process. Is there anything the next administration or Congress could do to fix that?

We did it already. We fixed it. We did it in-house.

There was a six-month period where things were tough. It seemed like everything else in the news was slow, because it got so much attention.

What doesn't get attention is in that same year, 500,000 more students have had access to federal dollars than the year before. Enrollment is up 5%.

It was worth the challenge because we got it done.

Zachary Schermele is an education reporter for USA TODAY. You can reach him by email at [email protected]. Follow him on X at @ZachSchermele.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Biden's education secretary talks FAFSA, the GOP, and what worries him