Last Tuesday, the U.S. Department of Education launched historic, unprecedented layoffs. While the specifics remained murky at week’s end, reports suggest that the cuts will eliminate close to half of the department’s 4,000-odd positions. What to make of all this?

In principle, I’m supportive. There’s plenty of inefficiency, waste, and bloat at the department. During the 23 years I’ve been in Washington, there’s never been even a token effort to address that. (The old joke is that whole floors in ED’s seven-story headquarters at 400 Maryland Avenue could vanish and no one would know.) The cuts promise to make it a whole lot harder for federal officials to promote grandiose education agendas, which should offer solace to those who resisted Bush-Obama-Biden overreach as well as those who fear it from Team Trump.

The potential savings are far from earthshaking. We don’t have good numbers, but back-of-the-envelope I’d put the savings in salary and benefits at something like $400 million. That’s terrific, but it’s also less than 1 percent of what Washington spends each year on education. Generally speaking, for good or ill, the cuts aren’t as big a deal as the dramatic headlines and pronouncements might make them seem. Even with fewer staff, all the rules and regulations (the proverbial “red tape”) will still be there. All the programs (like Title I, IDEA, and Pell) will still be there. Fewer staff will be sending press releases and writing rules, but it’s not clear how much this matters or why it’s a bad thing. As my EdNext colleague Mike Petrilli aptly put it, “I don’t anticipate these staff cuts will make much of a difference in the real world of schools and classrooms. I suspect it will be hard to notice much of a difference.”

Okay, now we get to the trickier stuff.

The case for these cuts assumes they’ve been made to address redundancy, waste, inefficiency, and unnecessary activity. The problem is there’s no way to assess that, because it’s not clear which positions have been eliminated or why they were selected. Observers have to rely on phone calls, leaked union accounts, and Beltway word-of-mouth to determine what’s been cut or to speculate how the department will carry out congressionally mandated activities.

Now, it’s easy for me to imagine a scenario where streamlining, automation, elbow grease, and healthy prioritization make for a more efficient and less intrusive department. But this shouldn’t be about what some think tank yahoo can imagine. It’s the job of the officials at ED to make that case, and they haven’t yet done so. Thus, while I’m unimpressed by the “sky-is-falling!” hysteria from the education blob, it’s wholly fair to ask how these cuts align with the administration’s pledges to fix the broken student-lending system, combat campus antisemitism, enforce its Title IX executive order, or ensure the smooth administration of the National Assessment of Educational Progress. I’m disinclined to take government officials’ words on faith, whatever their party. I want to see the particulars. That information should be readily available, but it’s not.

For instance, with nearly half of ED’s positions reportedly eliminated, I also have it from a trusted source that the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education lost only about 20 percent of its staff—and that all those positions were either internal operations or dedicated to Covid relief funds. I have it on similarly good authority that 90 percent of the staff at the Institute for Education Sciences were cut—including pretty much all the staff who are operationally responsible for NAEP (even as the staff who support the National Assessment Government Board’s management of NAEP were retained). If this is all correct, why were the OESE cuts so modest? Why were the IES cuts so severe? What criteria were used to decide where the axe fell more heavily? It’s not clear.

If we were talking about a Fortune 500 company, those wielding the axe would be answerable only to their shareholders. Public agencies, however, are called upon to operate with less opacity, especially when it comes to dramatic moves of this kind. The president and his team are charged with leading the executive branch, but they’re stewards with a four-year tenure—not owner-operators of a private venture. I made this critique time and again about the Obama-Biden approach to education, and the same holds here. The administration should provide a clear accounting of the staff positions being reduced, the savings created, the responsibilities ended or delegated, and how operations mandated by Congress will be handled.

Reducing staff within the strictures of civil service rules in maddening. I get it. The executive branch isn’t free to decide which individual staff to keep, based on performance or skill set. Rather, an agency can only eliminate whole units or “subcomponents.” This is a ridiculous way to shrink an organization. But it’s also the only permissible way. The result is either that staff never gets cut or that the cutting will be pretty coarse. Fair enough. Given those limits, though, it’s important to make the case that cuts were as thoughtful as possible. Absent that, the clumsiness baked into the civil service regulations will be seen as the clumsiness of those wielding the knife.

All that said, I want to touch on a few particulars that haven’t gotten nearly enough attention.

First, contrary to popular myth, cutting staff (by itself) won’t meaningfully address the red-tape problem in K–12 nor shift power to the states. The culprit obstructing these goals is less the people at ED and more the accumulated rules and regulations. When it comes to Title I, for instance, these cuts won’t do anything to address the problems with “time and effort” reporting, “supplement not supplant” strictures, or “maintenance of ‘equity’” mandates. Similarly, the boggy bureaucracy that suffuses special education is less about those positions at the department than about the copious case law and resulting rules that have accreted over time. Slashing red tape and returning power to the states requires rewriting ED’s rules, convincing state and school leaders that it’s safe to do things differently, or enacting new legislation that can reboot the system. Absent such a push, reductions in staff won’t yield significant changes on that count.

Second, I’ve long held that the federal government has an appropriate role when it comes to collecting national education data and supporting rigorous research. This is consistent with Article I of the Constitution and reflects a role Washington has played since the 1800s. It’s not yet clear how the cuts to IES, which appear to be dramatic, will impact its congressionally mandated activities. After all, even those tired of asking taxpayers to subsidize mediocre, ideologically loaded studies still see great value in the National Assessment of Educational Progress, national statistics on school staff and spending, and data on higher education outcomes, which could inform a more responsible student-lending system.

Finally, it’s worth appreciating the theory of action here, which helps explain what’s going on. Those driving the cuts are convinced that there’s no real path for incremental measures, that most Republicans can’t bring themselves to make any cuts, and that Democrats won’t even try. Moreover, the underlying assumption is that the department and its ecosystem of unions, associations, and contractors have come to function as extensions of the Democratic Party coalition. Thus, the thinking is that the only plausible course is to act fast and fearlessly. That’s why complaints that these cuts might “wreck” the department (or that future Democratic administrations might respond in kind) aren’t getting much traction.  The thinking is that Secretaries Duncan, King, and Cardona already played every card they had and that, whether these cuts serve to streamline the department or simply wreck it, the end result of the shrinkage will be to make it far tougher for the next Democratic administration to ramp the department back up into a forcible presence.

But there’s danger here for the administration, even for staff unworried about breakage. A lack of transparency risks making it easier for critics to convince the public that the cuts were hurried or haphazard. It weakens the department’s hand as it fights to defend the cuts in court. It also makes it easier to blame the cuts for all sorts of frustrations, no matter how tenuous the relationship. (Keep an eye out for the first campaign attack ad which begins with Elon Musk waving that chainsaw and ends with a mom explaining that’s why her school can’t provide her special needs child with a qualified aide.) I mean, none of this is novel. Education has a long history of chaotic execution of ambitious agendas that causes the public to revolt. We live in a thermostatic age where the missteps of one side energize and mobilize the other. As someone who’s waited decades for an administration willing to take on the education bureaucracy, I want downsizing to prove successful. The worst case is that it goes south, becoming a cautionary tale seized upon by the education blob to counter future attempts at reform.

In principle, downsizing ED makes good sense. In practice, though, the jury is still out. Or maybe it’s that the jury is still empaneled and waiting on Team Trump to present evidence that these cuts are being made wisely and well. That’s a case I hope the Department makes ASAP.

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