So far, the Trump team’s confused and piecemeal efforts to “dismantle” the Department of Education (ED) amount to firing a bunch of people (including experts in key functions such as statistics and assessment), terminating some grants, and shuffling a handful of programs and offices over to other federal agencies.

They admit that only Congress can abolish a cabinet department that Congress created in 1979 and that a host of responsibilities and units must by law remain within it.

It boggles my mind how relocating, say, the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education from ED to the Labor Department—from one federal bureaucracy to another—does anything to “return education to the states,” eliminate government regulation, or rein in bureaucratic practices.

Mostly, it seems, this is all for show—the illusion of carrying out a campaign promise while burdening states and districts with more doors to knock on in Washington and different bureaucracies to satisfy in order to obtain the funds and services that the White House says will continue to flow.

The word the media have been using to describe what’s going on—“splintering” the Department—seems far more apt than “abolishing.”

But what’s really been going through my mind is how random (and political) it was back in 1979 to decide what would go into that newborn agency.

Pulling the “Education Division” out of the Department of Health, Education & Welfare was obvious—and precisely why HEW secretary Joe Califano strove to convince President Carter not to carve up his agency. Many others also opposed the creation of a new cabinet department focused on education, ranging from the AFT’s Albert Shanker to Harvard’s esteemed sociologist David Riesman, to my then-boss, Senator Daniel P. Moynihan. So many House members were against it that the bill barely passed that chamber. In the end, however, the National Education Association (and Vice President Mondale, whose brother worked at the NEA) held Carter to his 1976 campaign pledge to create a “separate” department of education, and Congress eventually went along.

What else to put into that new entity, however, was a true conundrum. Education-related programs of all sorts were scattered throughout the government, from the departments of Defense, Interior, Labor, and the Humanities Endowment to a bunch of activities within HEW that had never moved into the Education Division. The most prominent of this latter group was Head Start, whose supporters declared it a “child development” program, not an education program, and wanted nothing to do with the new agency. (Nor have they ever, including resisting Bush 43’s attempt to overhaul the program. That’s partly why Head Start has never functioned well as early-childhood education or kindergarten readiness.)

Almost without exception, supporters, advocates, lobbyists, and beneficiaries of all those other education-related programs, projects, and activities insisted that they stay put and not get shifted to ED. And Congress—almost without exception—was persuaded to leave them be.

So Head Start remains in Health and Human Services. The Defense Department’s K–12 schools remain in the “Department of War.” The Job Corps never left Labor. The education of Native Americans is still at Interior. School lunch programs are at Agriculture. Until its recent defenestration, the National Endowment for the Humanities was supporting all manner of education projects. The National Science Foundation held onto graduate student fellowships. And nearly every bit of scientific research that takes place in universities (not all of it has yet been cancelled) continues to be sponsored by the myriad agencies that rely on it, from NASA to Agriculture to the National Security Agency, not to mention the National Institutes of Health. Although the Institute for Education Sciences within ED—which so far hasn’t been moved anywhere and probably can’t be without Congressional assent—engages in research into education itself, at least as much research is carried out by NSF, NIH and others. (Today’s “science of reading,” for example, can be traced back a quarter century to an NIH-sponsored report.)

In other words, the Department of Education that was finally cobbled together in 1979 consisted of very little beyond the pre-existing chunk pulled out of HEW. In my mind, it could all go back there. But I’m also not surprised that the devotees, recipients, and lobbyists for the programs that ED has been operating these past 45 years are as loath to see them move to other agencies as the devotees of other education programs were to let them move into ED. Perhaps the most important takeaway is that they didn’t budge.

Chester E. Finn, Jr. is Distinguished Senior Fellow and President Emeritus of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and Volker Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.