Congress Pushes to Move Department of Energy into Education Department’s HQ

Congress on Tuesday took its first steps toward moving the Department of Energy into the Department of Education’s current headquarters, part of an ongoing Trump administration push to dismantle the department.

In a 41-24 vote, the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee approved the move, which would cost just over $215 million, per the resolution. Earlier this year, Education Secretary Linda McMahon said the relocation would save an estimated $4.8 million a year.

Because the proposal was made through an arcane procedural vehicle called a prospectus, the measure will not require a full floor vote. The prospectus now moves to the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee for full approval. The Department of Education has said it hopes to move to its new building starting in August.

The Trump administration has used executive orders and interagency agreements to drastically downsize the Department of Education since last January, including eliminating roughly half of the department’s staff. In a fact sheet explaining its plans to downsize, the department wrote that following the layoffs, the building that houses its headquarters is “chronically underutilized.” Congress created the Department of Education in 1979, and congressional action would be necessary in order to fully end it.

Rep. John Garamendi (D-California) said the move would hinder Democrats from being able to rebuild the Department of Education in the future.

“This isn’t just about moving offices around federal buildings,” Garamendi said at the markup. “This is about whether Congress is going to rubber-stamp another step in the Trump administration’s effort to dismantle the Department of Education.

“That’s manufacturing a problem just to justify an outcome that they wanted all along,” Garamendi continued. “That is the destruction of public education in this country. Taxpayer dollars aren’t being used to strengthen the nation’s education systems or to help our students to succeed. They’re being used to make it harder for any future Congress and administration to restore the Department of Education to its full strength.”

One Democrat who strongly supported the resolution: Washington, D.C. Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton. She said she had worked for years to get the Department of Energy to move in hopes of redeveloping the land, which is in the Southwest Federal Center, a part of the city almost completely occupied by federal office buildings.

“This resolution is necessary to begin the disposal of the Department of Energy’s headquarters,” Norton said in the markup. “While I strongly oppose the Trump administration’s illegal dismantling of the Department of Education. This resolution is about the Department of Energy, not the Department of Education.”

The new location for the Department of Education was not included in the resolution considered in committee, although the secretaries had jointly announced the new address, at 500 D Street SW, earlier this year — the same site that had previously housed the U.S. Agency for International Development.