A Backdoor Departmental Closure

Clever idea, in a way. If you can convince the school systems to walk away from the money, in order to secure their academic freedom and independence, the Department of Education would eventually only be funding relatively right-leaning school districts. That would greatly reduce the resistance to closing the DoE entirely, since right-leaning institutions generally support that (although in this case there would be strongly countervailing rice-bowl winds, especially as new funds were freed up to support those districts directly).