Two Republican senators joined Democrats on a Senate committee to pass a bill blocking the Education Department from transferring key offices to other agencies, a direct challenge to the Trump administration's push to dismantle the department it has called obsolete.
The Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee approved S. 5046 on Thursday in a 13, 9 vote, with Republican Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska crossing party lines to back the measure alongside its Democratic co-sponsor, Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia. The bill would bar the Education Department from moving four specific offices, Special Education and Rehabilitative Services, Elementary and Secondary Education, Postsecondary Education, and Indian Education, to other federal agencies.
The vote puts a bipartisan roadblock in front of Education Secretary Linda McMahon's strategy of using interagency agreements to shift department functions elsewhere while Congress debates whether to abolish the agency altogether. McMahon has framed those agreements as a "proof of concept", a way to show lawmakers that other agencies can handle education programs, making a full shutdown easier to swallow.
The Education Department has already signed at least a dozen interagency agreements to transfer certain functions to other federal agencies. McMahon has said she hopes Congress will be more willing to end the department once lawmakers see major programs operating successfully under different roofs.
ED spokeswoman Savannah Newhouse pushed back on the committee vote, calling the bill premature:
"Secretary McMahon promised Congress a proof of concept that is currently underway and delivering results across our partner agencies, and it is entirely premature to sabotage this effort before it has the chance to eliminate bureaucratic barriers and fully deliver the results that our students, families, and educators deserve."
That word, "sabotage", tells you how the administration views the bill. McMahon's team sees the interagency transfers as a live experiment, and S. 5046 as an attempt to shut the experiment down before results come in.
Collins and Murkowski see it differently. Collins described the bill as straightforward, arguing it simply keeps administration of certain education programs where Congress specifically put them. The Department of Education was created roughly 45 years ago under President Jimmy Carter, and Congress, not the executive branch, designated which programs it would oversee. That distinction matters to Collins, who has framed the fight as one about congressional authority, not about defending bureaucracy for its own sake.
Republican senators breaking with their party on key votes is not a new pattern in this Congress. But Collins and Murkowski have long occupied a particular lane, willing to support the administration on many priorities while drawing hard lines on institutional prerogatives they consider non-negotiable.
Murkowski made her case in terms that had nothing to do with org charts or agency turf:
"We cannot lose sight of the fact that at the end of the day, we're talking about children, whether it's children with special needs, whether it's children in our elementary schools, whether it's our Native students, making sure that we don't lose that focus."
That framing is deliberate. Murkowski represents Alaska, home to a significant Native population with particular stakes in the Office of Indian Education. By centering children, especially those in special education and tribal schools, she sidesteps the ideological argument about whether the Education Department should exist and instead asks a narrower, harder-to-dismiss question: Can you guarantee these kids won't fall through the cracks during the transition?
It is a fair question, and one the administration has not fully answered. The reporting identifies no specific results the department has cited from its interagency agreements. Newhouse's statement references "delivering results across our partner agencies" but offers no data, no metrics, and no program-level outcomes. The proof of concept, so far, is a promise.
S. 5046 is not the first time Congress has tried to pump the brakes. Lawmakers approved non-binding language in the most recent spending bill telling the Education Department it has no authority to move functions to other departments. Non-binding language carries no legal force, it is Congress expressing its position without attaching consequences. The department kept signing interagency agreements anyway.
That sequence matters. Congress said stop. The department did not stop. Now Collins, Murkowski, and Kaine are trying to make the instruction binding. Whether you support dismantling the Education Department or not, the pattern raises a legitimate separation-of-powers concern: if Congress created the department and assigned it specific responsibilities, does the executive branch have the authority to redistribute those responsibilities unilaterally through administrative agreements?
The administration's answer, implicitly, is that interagency agreements are a routine executive tool and that the transfers are temporary, a demonstration project, not a final restructuring. Officially ending the Education Department would still require an act of Congress, and the White House has acknowledged as much. McMahon's strategy is to make that vote easier by showing Congress the alternative works.
The tension within the Republican conference on institutional questions like this one has surfaced repeatedly. Senate dynamics have grown unpredictable, with closed-door clashes and White House lobbying sometimes needed to hold the caucus together on priorities the administration considers essential.
The committee vote also highlights a growing split between the two chambers. Just last month, the House Education and Workforce Committee voted on a bill to permanently move certain Education Department functions to other agencies, the exact opposite of what S. 5046 would do. The House bill aligns with the administration's vision. The Senate bill blocks it.
That collision course means any final resolution will require either one chamber backing down or a conference negotiation that reconciles two fundamentally incompatible approaches. Kaine told Politico he hopes S. 5046 will be considered in appropriations discussions, which would attach it to must-pass spending legislation. But the bill's future remains unclear.
The bill's scope is also narrower than some Democrats wanted. S. 5046 does not halt every interagency agreement the Education Department has signed. It targets four specific offices. Some Democrats have pushed to block all such agreements, but the bill as written takes a more surgical approach, which is likely why Collins and Murkowski were willing to sign on.
Intra-party fractures have become a recurring feature of this Congress, whether the issue is procedural standoffs over legislative priorities or individual senators charting their own course on policy. The Education Department fight fits that mold, a policy disagreement within the GOP that Democrats are happy to exploit.
The 13, 9 committee vote was comfortable but not commanding. The full breakdown of which senators voted which way was not disclosed in the reporting. What is clear is that the margin required more than just the two Republican defections, the committee's Democratic members voted as a bloc, and Collins and Murkowski provided the cushion.
Getting to the Senate floor is another matter. Even if Majority Leader schedules a vote, the bill would need 60 votes to clear a filibuster, a threshold that demands significant Republican crossover. And the House bill moving in the opposite direction means any Senate passage would set up a confrontation, not a resolution.
The pattern of Republican holdouts extracting concessions before major votes suggests Collins and Murkowski may have leverage beyond this single bill. If appropriations negotiations become the vehicle, as Kaine hopes, the two senators could use their votes on spending legislation as bargaining chips.
For the Trump administration, the committee vote is a setback but not a fatal one. The interagency agreements are already in place. The House is moving in the administration's direction. And the non-binding spending bill language Congress already passed had no practical effect on the department's actions. Whether a binding bill fares any differently depends on whether it can survive a floor vote, a House-Senate conference, and a near-certain presidential veto.
Loyalty within Senate caucuses has been tested on both sides of the aisle this Congress. Collins and Murkowski are not abandoning the Republican Party, they are asserting that Congress, not the executive branch, decides where federal programs live. Whether that principle holds up against the political pressure to deliver on a campaign promise is the question that will define this fight going forward.
If the administration wants to shut down the Education Department, it has a straightforward path available: persuade Congress to vote for it. Routing around the legislature through interagency agreements may be efficient, but it is not how the system is supposed to work, and two Republican senators just said so.