Each week during the football season, ESPN’s Dan Graziano pens a column that reacts to the most popular hot takes of the moment, judging whether they’re overreactions or on-point. It’s a useful device I’ve occasionally borrowed. Well, the Trump administration’s announcement before Thanksgiving that it was moving several major Department of Education programs to four other federal agencies produced a bonfire of hot takes.

There’s been a lot of attention paid to the announcement, but all the triumphant Tweets and anxious email blasts can generate more heat than light. So, now that things have settled a bit, let’s pause the rhetorical fireworks and try to sort things out, Graziano style.

Nobody saw this coming! It blindsided everyone. Congress created the Department of Education (ED) and only Congress can dismantle it. The DOGE cuts were one thing, but no one imagined the Trump administration could ship swaths of ED over to the Department of Labor, the Department of the Interior, Health and Human Services, and the State Department.

Verdict: OVERREACTION. In Washington, it was an open secret that this was coming. As department officials have noted, the “interagency agreements” used here are a standard feature of federal activity. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon’s team had already piloted the first of these moves, using a previous interagency agreement to shift Career and Technical Education over to the Department of Labor. Administration sources were pretty open that that agreement would be a model for future reorganization. Indeed, this is something senior staff at ED and the White House have been working on since the spring, especially after President Trump’s executive order in March urging McMahon to find ways to shutter the department.

What’s different here is how ambitiously the agreements are being used—that really is unprecedented. While the formal responsibility for these programs will remain at ED, the actual work, staff, and funds will move. And it’s true that, back in January, I don’t know anyone who expected the administration to pursue this track, much less to do it so aggressively. So, “blindsided”? Not so much. But a lot more than people actually expected at the beginning of this year? Absolutely.

This will be terrible for students, families, and educators. It’s a devastating blow to American K–12 and higher education. Becky Pringle, president of the National Education Association, denounced Trump and McMahon for “turn[ing] their backs on our students, families, and communities to pay for billionaire tax cuts.”

Verdict: OVERREACTION. For better and worse, this is a reshuffling of federal activity. It doesn’t alter federal spending for these programs, their eligibility criteria, or the rules governing disbursement of funds. And, of course, the Department of Education manages no schools or colleges, employs no teachers, and doesn’t actually educate any students. The Trump administration certainly could urge Congress to reduce spending on affected programs, but there’s nothing in the announcement on that score and no reason to think this changes any of the relevant political dynamics.

That said, new systems could create confusion, and separating program responsibility (which stays at ED) from the day-to-day work (which moves elsewhere) could generate problems. At a private meeting with ED staff, McMahon conceded as much. She said, “Let’s move programs out on a temporary basis. Let’s see how the work is done. What is the result? What is the outcome?” These are the right questions to ask, with the answers deserving close scrutiny. And if any of the changes cause headaches, the administration should expect blowback from irate state officials or education advocates.

Actually, this is a huge win for America’s students, reversing 45 years of federal overreach, empowering states, and slashing red tape. As Congressman Tim Walberg, chair of the House Education and Workforce Committee, cheered, “The Trump administration is making good on its promise to fix the nation’s broken system by right-sizing the Department of Education to improve student outcomes.”

Verdict: OVERREACTION. It’s not clear how much this really matters. If employees at the Department of Labor are more competent than those at ED, then the potential benefits are obvious. But it’s not clear why that’d be the case. There also could be synergies from having Labor handle programs with workforce implications or State in charge of foreign language programs. But it’s hard to see how any of this amounts to big change. As the Fordham Institute’s Checker Finn wryly asked, “How [does] relocating, say, the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education from ED to the Labor Department—from one federal bureaucracy to another—[do] anything to ‘return education to the states,’ eliminate government regulation, or rein in bureaucratic practices?”

What risks getting lost is that the problem with Washington’s role is less about the people at ED than about the morass of rules and regulations that have accumulated in the entire federal bureaucracy over decades. Moving programs to Labor or Health and Human Services doesn’t necessarily help on this count. Take Title I, which gives federal funding to low-income schools. Moving program management out of ED won’t resolve the issues with old “time and effort” reporting requirements or “supplement not supplant” strictures, which generate heavy paperwork burdens while limiting the ability of school leaders to zero out ineffectual programs or shift resources to better uses. The rules travel with the money. Empowering the states requires concrete steps to rewrite rules, issue waivers, slash red tape, and convince state and school leaders that it’s safe to act autonomously. This isn’t that.

Well, then this isn’t really a big deal. Not much is changing. And anything that does change can be readily unwound by the next Democratic administration. The day of the announcement, EdNext’s Mike Petrilli termed it a “nothing burger,” arguing that, “They will move some boxes (and people) around, and, if a Democrat wins in 2028, it will be swiftly undone.”

Verdict: UNDERREACTION. These changes are significant, for good or ill. Symbolically, they’re a clear indication that Trump really is trying to shutter ED. Substantively, while the moves may not empower the states or improve efficiency, they do declaw a department that drove No Child Left Behind and the Common Core, used Title IX to push #MeToo and gender radicalism, deferred to the teacher unions on school reopening, and trampled the law in pursuit of student loan forgiveness. In light of Biden-era excesses, this neutering is very much by design.  For now, however, the department will no longer serve as a one-stop shop for teacher unions or other inside-the-Beltway education insiders.

Now, the next president certainly could undo the interagency agreements and move to recreate the old ED. What’s more, unless Congress zeroes out the appropriations for staff (it hasn’t thus far), a new Democratic president could potentially hire ranks of new civil servants to staff up ED, lending the bureaucracy a more overtly partisan cast. Practically speaking, however, the longer the new arrangements persist, the harder they’ll be to unwind. An old rule of government is that it’s hard to reverse new arrangements once they’ve become familiar. That usually trips up Republicans seeking to dismantle new programs; in this instance, it could work the other way. A Democratic administration might decide the payoff just isn’t worth all the time, hassle, and energy. We shall see.

Frederick Hess is an executive editor of Education Next and the author of the blog “Old School with Rick Hess.”