Protesters rally against school closures outside the Oakland Unified School District office in September 2019.
Andrew Reed/EdSource
It makes intuitive sense: Smaller districts with fewer kids need fewer schools. A district with 40,000 students operates many more school buildings than a district with 20,000, which in turn runs more than a district with 10,000. With widespread enrollment declines (for example, California’s school-age population is forecast to drop by 15% over the next decade), many districts are now grappling with whether to close one or more schools.
What’s the forcing factor for school closure decisions? Money, of course.
District revenues, for the most part, are tied to the number of students a district serves. Enrollment has fallen in many districts, but during the last three or four years, federal pandemic dollars more than made up for the reductions in funding associated with those declines. Many districts have had plenty of cash on hand to keep running a fleet of under-enrolled schools. But federal relief dollars will dry up this fall, and it’s increasingly unlikely that the state will fill the gaps. That’s prompting shrinking districts to grapple with whether they can still afford to operate all their schools.
Mostly what a district saves when closing a school is in staffing costs. Closing three schools can save the costs of three principals, three librarians, three nurses, and so on, and even some teaching positions where students can fill empty seats elsewhere in the district.
At Edunomics Lab, our rule of thumb is that when a district has under-enrolled schools, closing 1 of every 15 schoolssaves about 4% of a district’s budget, mostly in labor costs. There may also be nominal savings in facilities, but labor is far and away the largest portion (85-95%) of the budget, and savings there will be more consequential over the long term.
But not every closure brings layoffs. Where are the savings if the district isn’t issuing pink slips?
Typically, the savings come from downsizing the district’s overall staffing counts with attrition. Often, the district can move staff from the closing school to fill vacancies emerging in other schools as staff leave on their own (thus avoiding layoffs). When a principal retires in one school, the district may move a principal from the closing school over to fill that spot. The cost reduction comes from not rehiring to fill those vacancies. If the leaders choose instead to keep all schools open, then the district has little choice but to rehire to fill each departing principal, nurse, librarian and so on to keep the larger number of schools running.
Maintaining under-enrolled schools drains funds from all the district’s schools, not just the under-enrolled ones. Each district operates on a fixed revenue pool. Spending on principals, librarians and nurses in one or more half-empty schools means spending less on something else. It’s like having a fixed amount of frosting while trying to cover too many cupcakes. In the end, all the cupcakes end up with less frosting. For schools, that means they’ll start to see cutbacks to music, electives, AP courses, athletics and other supports as the district uses its limited funds to prop up the under-enrolled campuses.
Take the Los Angeles Unified School District, for example, where the district spends an average of about $23,000 per elementary student at each of its higher-poverty schools. As the graph below shows, a few of its tiniest schools are drawing down over $34,000 per student from LAUSD’s fixed pool of funds. The higher price tag means less cash available for all the other schools in the district. (This information is available for all districts here.)
Of course, closure decisions shouldn’t focus on money alone. For instance, districts may consider whether there are other nearby schools for displaced students to attend. Also relevant is whether the school is effective in its core mission. In the graphic above, some of the higher-priced under-enrolled schools are below the average performance line for higher-poverty schools. Not only are these schools expensive, but it also matters if that money isn’t delivering value for students.
It’s also important to remember that not every small school has an outsize price tag.If a small school is able to operate cost-efficiently (meaning it has the same per-pupil costs as other similar schools), then closing it won’t likely save much at all. For a small school to be cost-efficient, it probably isn’t staffed in the same way as other schools. Maybe the principal also teaches a class, or the counselor is also the Spanish teacher. Or maybe the school uses some online options for electives or it operates as a multi-age Montessori model, or something else. And if it is demonstrating higher results for kids (meaning it is in that upper left quadrant on the graph), there’s even more of a case to leave it alone. What’s relevant here is that the small school isn’t draining funds from other schools, and is providing good value for the dollar.
School closure decisions are never easy for any community, regardless of what the numbers say. But it’s the leaders’ responsibility to be good stewards of funds and ensure all students are served well. Assessing which schools are most able to leverage their money to maximize student outcomes can help leaders bring transparency to that difficult process.
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Marguerite Roza is director of Edunomics Lab and research professor at Georgetown University. Aashish Dhammani is a research fellow at Edunomics Lab.
(For more on per-pupil spending and outcomes by school in California districts, explore Edunomics’ interactive data here.)
The opinions in this commentary are those of the authors. If you would like to submit a commentary, please review our guidelines and contact us.
Cal Maritime is the smallest campus in the California State University system.
Credit: Cal Maritime / Flickr
This story has been updated to include reporting from the Board of Trustees meeting on Tuesday.
A steep drop in enrollment has put Cal Maritime, the smallest of the California State University’s 23 campuses, on a path to merge with Cal Poly San Luis Obispo.
Under the plan, which went before the Cal State board of trustees Tuesday, Cal Maritime’s 761 students would blend into San Luis Obispo’s 22,000-person student body with the goal of saving on overhead and ultimately attracting more students to the maritime academy.
Recruiting out-of-state students and competing for federal dollars are two pieces of the turnaround plan, according to newly released details about the proposal.
But faculty at both institutions said they have received little guidance about how the plan would impact their day-to-day jobs. And CSU officials’ proposal to the board does not address what one investigation into sexual harassment at Cal Maritime called a “history of pervasive male toxicity.”
The CSU board of trustees opened discussions on the proposal on Tuesday and plan to raise the subject again in September. A vote on the proposed integration is set for November. If approved, CSU officials estimate bringing the two institutions together will cost $35 million over seven years. The plan would go into effect in July 2025 and affect students in the fall of 2026.
Cal Maritime Interim President Michael J. Dumont appealed to the Board of Trustees to support the proposal on Tuesday, saying the campus has already made deep budget cuts that include leaving positions unfilled. Without dramatic improvement in the campus’ enrollment and revenue, Dumont said he does not “see the maritime academy continuing.”
“Quite frankly, we’ve taken a chainsaw to every expense on our campus,” he said. “We are working drastically to save money everywhere we can. I don’t know how much longer that can continue … I have cut muscle, bone, and I’m now down to tendon and arteries.”
In response to questions seeking more information about admissions, degree conferral and recruitment strategy under the proposal, CSU spokesperson Amy Bentley-Smith said it would “be speculative and premature to respond to questions about details yet to be determined.” Bentley-Smith said privacy concerns limit what the university can say regarding incidents and reports related to Title IX, the federal sex discrimination law. She said Cal Maritime responds “appropriately with measures aimed at holding individuals accountable for their actions and providing equity to affected members of the community. The university has placed a great deal of focus, energy and commitment on creating a stronger culture of safety and inclusion on campus and on cruise.”
Cal Maritime, which has a campus in Vallejo and operates a training ship, serves a strategically important niche in higher education. Six state maritime academies together educate most of the nation’s merchant marine officers, the civilian workforce that operates commercial shipping vessels and supplies U.S. military ships and bases. Almost 80% of Cal Maritime students are men, according to fall 2022 enrollment data.
Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, located 250 miles south, is known for its architecture, agriculture and engineering programs. The campus has increased enrollment by 13% over the past decade and receives more qualified applicants than it can accommodate.
Merging the campuses would bolster both institutions’ academic strengths in areas like engineering, oceanography, logistics and marine science while allowing degree programs that lead to a merchant marine license from the U.S. Coast Guard to continue, according to the CSU proposal. Cal Maritime would also enjoy access to Cal Poly’s marketing and fundraising resources — a leg up to recruit prospective students and right the school’s finances.
If the marriage of the two schools goes forward, the maritime academy would be led by a superintendent who is also part of Cal Poly leadership, according to documents describing the proposal. Maritime academy faculty and staff, similarly, would become Cal Poly employees.
Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo campus.Credit: Ashley Bolter / EdSource
Righting the ship
Cal Maritime’s finances are so dire that last spring the university projected that it would have only $317,000 in operating reserves at the end of June 2024 — less than it would need to run the university for three days, according to the merger proposal.
Declining enrollment is a major culprit. Student headcount fell 31% between the 2016-17 and 2023-24 school years. Even if Cal Maritime meets future enrollment targets, Cal State officials write, a growing budget deficit “is inevitable.”
The campus has already slashed spending to save money, CSU officials say, but further cuts would threaten the university’s ability to carry out its educational mission. As it is, CSU officials acknowledge that falling enrollment and budget woes may have had “an impact on the quality of essential student support services such as housing, dining, health and counseling.”
The hope is that maritime academy students will benefit from plugging into Cal Poly’s student services.
Other changes would be subtle. The maritime academy would keep its Vallejo campus during the integration, though additional majors with maritime industry ties could be located there in the future.
Kyle Carpenter, who graduated from Cal Maritime in 2014, said he hopes the proposal can save Cal Maritime. But depending on whether and how majors are folded into Cal Poly, he said, he worries that students who are now required to understand the maritime application of their education could lose that important focus.
“We need to maintain a strong maritime presence, so any bit of maritime education is a great thing,” Carpenter said.
The proposal flags possible benefits for Cal Poly students, too. First among them: Cal Poly students would get access to Cal Maritime laboratory space and, crucially, a $360 million training vessel the campus is set to receive in 2026.
The chance to take advantage of the Vallejo campus is welcome news to Yiming Luo, a sophomore city and regional planning major at Cal Poly. He said he hopes the proposal would expand course offerings and give Cal Poly students from the Bay Area like him the “possibility of taking classes at Maritime over the summer for credit.”
Faculty react
Faculty at both campuses said they have lots of questions about how the proposal could impact them.
Steven Runyon, an associate professor of chemistry at Cal Maritime and vice president of the campus California Faculty Association chapter, said the proposed integration “came out of nowhere” and has garnered mixed reactions.
“Many faculty are very optimistic,” he said. “If we’re going to be integrated with any other university, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo is probably top of our list in terms of who we would like to be associated with.”
But Runyon said a lack of clear communication from the university’s leaders makes him worry about how the proposal would impact colleagues, especially those who do not work in a tenure track position, such as lecturers and librarians.
Faculty learned of the merger plan when it was announced on June 5. They can comment “both individually and through their represented body” before the board acts, a Cal Maritime spokesperson said.
Jennifer Mott, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Cal Poly, said she has heard little about the proposed integration.
“Will we have to teach more students? Will they be teaching more students?” she said. “Will it not affect anything? We just don’t know any information.”
Mott also questions whether her department would remain independent or merge with Cal Maritime’s mechanical engineering department — a process that would impact her department’s gender makeup.
“We made a huge push in mechanical engineering to hire more women faculty,” she said. “I looked at the faculty (at Cal Maritime) and it’s only men, and so I don’t know how that would affect us going forward.”
Cal Maritime is one of six state maritime academies in the country.Credit: Cal Maritime / Flickr
A reckoning with sexual misconduct
Reports of sexual misconduct in both the maritime industry and the California State University system have put pressure on Cal Maritime to do more to address sexual misconduct on its campus.
In 2021, an outside investigator commissioned by Cal Maritime reported “several instances of inappropriate, discriminatory, vulgar or offensive writings or other imagery, especially toward female cadets” as well as “concerns over anti-LGBTQIA+ behavior and language used frequently aboard cruises and on campus.”
The resignation of Joseph I. Castro as CSU chancellor in 2022 over his mishandling of a Title IX sexual harassment case involving an administrator when he was president of Fresno State resulted in a system-wide reckoning. Cal State retained the law firm Cozen O’Connor to assess programs at each of its 23 universities to deal with sexual harassment and assault complaints under the federal Title IX law that prohibits sex-based discrimination. The probe found that the system lacks resources and staffing to adequately respond to and handle sexual harassment or discrimination complaints from students and employees.
At Cal Maritime, a July 2023 report by the firm found “significant improvements to process, responsiveness, training, and prevention programming” over the previous two years. But Cozen O’Connor reported that those improvements were overshadowed by a lack of a permanent Title IX coordinator, distrust of former university leaders and a culture that discouraged reporting misconduct.
In March 2023, Cal State hired Mike Dumont to serve as the maritime academy’s interim president. A 2024 profile of Dumont in the San Francisco Chronicle names several recent reforms at the campus, including improving training on sexual harassment, hiring a full-time victim advocate and updating uniform, naming and housing policies to meet the needs of nonbinary and transgender students.
In a statement, Bentley-Smith said the work of improving campus safety and inclusion “continues and will continue, both at Cal Maritime and throughout the CSU. One of the CSU’s highest priorities is ensuring all students and employees across our 23 universities are protected from discrimination and harassment.”
This month, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a law requiring CSU to implement the recommendations of a state audit into its handling of sexual misconduct. CSU officials say the system is already in the process of meeting the audit requirements.
But Mott, the Cal Poly professor, said reports of sexual harassment and assault at Cal Maritime give her pause.
“I know it’s an issue across a lot of campuses, not to say that we don’t have issues here,” she said. “But if it is a more toxic culture up there (at Cal Maritime), that is definitely a concern that we don’t bring that here, or that the students aren’t forced to go up there if they don’t feel comfortable going to that environment.”
Funding from fees, feds and more
The proposal anticipates a combined institution could raise more philanthropic and federal dollars. It is possible Cal Poly’s fee model — increasing one fee and levying a second on out-of-state undergraduates to pay for more financial aid — could be applied to the maritime academy.
The proposal also argues that Cal Maritime has a great story to tell prospective students and can use San Luis Obispo’s “unquestioned expertise in strategic enrollment management, marketing and brand-building” to tell it.
One draw is graduates’ future earnings. An analysis by the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce found that a Cal Maritime degree had the highest return on investment of any bachelor’s degree from a public university in California as measured by its net present value.
Under the proposal, increased outreach would extend to prospective students in Oregon, Washington, Alaska, Hawaii and U.S. Pacific territories.
Michael Fossum, the superintendent of the Texas A&M Maritime Academy, said maritime academy graduates are in high demand. But schools like his don’t always have the marketing budget to pitch prospective students on pursuing the career.
“It’s a massive industry that people don’t know about,” he said. “We don’t have the reach to help educate people on how important the industry is and what great opportunities there are working in this industry.”
‘A nationally known name’
If the integration proposal wins board approval, Cal Maritime’s future might look a little more like Fossum’s institution, Texas A&M Maritime Academy.
The Texas maritime academy is not an independent institution, but is part of Texas A&M at Galveston. In terms of leadership structure, Fossum, the school’s superintendent, is also chief operating officer at Texas A&M University at Galveston and a vice president at Texas A&M University. That structure reduces some overhead on his campus.
“I don’t have to replicate every single vice president and every single function that’s on the main campus,” Fossum said.
The Cal Maritime integration proposal suggests the two campuses could experience similar consolidation in areas such as facilities maintenance, information technology, cybersecurity and administrative services like payroll and accounting.
Fossum said he hopes that if Cal Maritime links up with Cal Poly, it will enjoy some of the same reputational benefits his campus experiences from its close association with Texas A&M.
“Cal Poly has got a nationally known name,” he said. “When you get the power of Cal Poly, just like me having the power of Texas A&M University, that absolutely helps. The association is good.”
Ashley Bolter, a recent graduate of Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, is a member of EdSource’s California Student Journalism Corps.
Katharyn Boyer, the interim executive director of San Francisco State University’s Estuary and Ocean Science Center, walks the grounds of the Romberg Tiburon campus on Feb. 13, 2025.
Amy DiPierro, EdSource
Top Takeaways
University says attempts to make the Romberg Tiburon campus financially self-sustaining have fallen short.
The likely closure shows the challenges facing some Cal State campuses amid tepid enrollment, anticipated state budget cuts and a maintenance backlog.
One researcher’s specialty is studying eelgrass, a plant important to sustaining the bay ecosystem.
To the untrained eye, the eelgrass in San Francisco Bay is unremarkable, a slimy marine plant easily mistaken for seaweed. But to the ecologist, it is essential: a natural carbon storage system, a hedge against climate change, and a protector of shorelines threatened by rising seas.
That’s why Katharyn Boyer, a biology professor who leads San Francisco State University’s estuary and ocean science centerin Marin County, has spent much of her career studying how to restore and maintainthe bay’s underwater meadows of ribbon-like eelgrass. It’s an effortgrowing more urgent as climate change nudges sea levels ever higher.
Working for the past two decades at the marine research campus,a 13-mile drivenorth of San Francisco, Boyer and her colleagues have trained the next generation of scientists and conservationists. Budding researchers hone their field skills at the site, where saltwater tanks act asa temporary home for eelgrass plants waiting to be replanted in the bay. “You really have to treat the plants well while you’re doing this restoration work,” Boyer said. “Having this nice, cool, natural supply of water — it’s the perfect kind of condition.”
Seawater tanks at Romberg Tiburon provide a temporary home for eelgrass.
But the 53-acre marine research campus where Boyer works could soon close as the university contends with declining enrollment and a likely cut to state funding.
San Francisco State says it can no longer afford to keep the lights on at the site, a former Navy base now called the Romberg Tiburon campus. Since the university announced plans to close Romberg Tiburon in February, Boyer has redoubled efforts to secure enough outside funding to save it. As of last week, Boyer said, San Francisco State finance officials have indicated that the funds she has raised are not enough. The site would start to wind down over the coming months unless a last-minute solution emerges.
“You can bring in the grant money, but you have trouble with covering your basic operations costs,” Boyer said while walking the property on a blustery day. “I don’t think it’s a unique problem here. It just has gotten to the point where our university is just struggling so much financially that it’s hard to justify the costs of it.
“That’s very hard for us to take because we think that we do — and we know that the community thinks what we do — is really valuable,” Boyer added, as a gust of wind blew her ball cap from her head.
The plan to close Romberg Tiburon is one sign of how lower enrollments are setting off a financial domino effect at some California State University campuses. While some campuses, especially those in Southern California, attract a growing student body, San Francisco State’s enrollment fell 26% between 2015 and 2024. That means San Francisco State will receive less money not only from student tuition but also from the 23-campus Cal State system. All of that could be crunched further by Gov. Gavin Newsom’s proposal to reduce funding to CSU and the University of California by almost 8%.
Reductions are surfacing in varied forms at CSU campuses. Sports teams and the geology department are among the cuts proposed at Sonoma State University. Cal State East Bay will close its downtown Oaklandconference and classroomcenter when its lease ends in June. Sacramento State, where enrollment is up 2% year-to-year, plans to cut $24 million from its department of academic affairs over the next two years. Even Cal State San Marcos, among the system’s fastest-growing campuses, is offering retirement incentives to manage a tight budget.
Amy Sueyoshi,San Francisco State’s provost, saidher campus is “scaling back everywhere,” with at least 30 faculty members leaving each year and only a handful joining to replace them.
“At this point, with our limited resources, it’s actually not OK for us to have so much of our resources flowing in a direction that doesn’t serve our undergraduate students directly,” she said.
Romberg Tiburon — named for Paul Romberg, who was president of San Francisco State when the university took over the site — is also an example of the worsening condition of facilities across CSU. San Francisco State estimates the Romberg Tiburon campus needs about $4 million in critical safety repairs.Such expenses barely scratch the surface of the roughly $8 billion maintenance backlog around the Cal State system.
What happens next to the marine campus is uncertain. Boyer continues to seek donors or nonprofits interested in leasing the site. San Francisco State plans to give all estuary and ocean science faculty an opportunity to relocate to the main campus, though lab space is limited. But Boyer says the transition only guarantees lab space to tenured faculty and may leave nontenured faculty, in effect, “homeless,” complicating things for their graduate students.
“There’s a lot of people’s careers and livelihoods that are at stake,” she said.
A marine lab ‘in the middle of gritty San Francisco Bay’
In mid-February, Boyer walked the grounds of the Tiburon campus wearing a parka and baseball cap, a stadium umbrella tucked under one arm in case the scattered drizzle turned into a downpour. To the north, the ghostly outline of the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge emerged from the fog like a half-finished sketch leading east to the unseen Chevron refinery on the opposite side of the bay.
Marine laboratories tend to be located in remote places, where scientists study life in pristine ecosystems relatively untainted by human interference. Romberg Tiburon breaks that mold.
“This one is in the middle of the gritty San Francisco Bay, with all of the problems of the large population that we have here, all of the impacts that that creates, all the opportunities for restoration and conservation that that creates,” Boyer said.
Boyer pointed out barracks and other holdovers from the site’s past lives as a Navy base, coaling station and nautical training school. San Francisco State established a research beachhead at Tiburon in 1978, taking over ownership from the federal government.Today, researchers work out of Delta Hall, a converted warehouse from the 1940s.
A former coal trestle frames a barracks building at the Romberg Tiburon campus on Feb. 13, 2025.Amy DiPierro, EdSource
Working along the shoreline makes it possible to offer hands-on classes in wetlands ecology and biological oceanography, including for undergraduates, Boyer said. “It’s an amazing place to do that, because [students] can do experiments here,” she said. “They can develop a hypothesis and test it from start to finish over the course of a semester.”
The marine research campus currently hosts about 30 graduate students, Boyer said, and as many as 100 undergraduates use the Tiburon campus in a typical year. Recent master’s students have landed jobs at places like the Environmental Protection Agency and the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission. Even with those success stories, Sueyoshi said a master’s program through the estuary and ocean science center has already been discontinued due to a lack of students.
The campus is also showing its age and a lack of upkeep. Signs emblazoned “DANGER” and “RESTRICTED AREA” urge visitors to stay away from buildings whose chipped paint exposes wood beneath.
As recently as 2019, San Francisco State sketched blueprints to redevelop and repurpose buildings on the site. One plan suggested a reinvigorated campus could “amplify SF State’s social justice legacy” and proposed building new housing and academic space while refurbishing existing facilities.
Such ambitions would require a private developer to purchase and invest in the campus, Sueyoshi said, adding that San Francisco State has also explored returning the site to the federal government or persuading other universities to take it over.
A view of San Francisco Bay from the Romberg Tiburon campus on Feb. 13, 2025.Amy DiPierro, EdSource
‘You can’t just rebuild it’
As the financial pressures on San Francisco State have grown, many faculty at the Romberg Tiburon campus now raise the money to pay their own salaries through state and federal grants, Boyer said, rather than relying on San Francisco State. The Tiburon campus also earns money by leasing space, including an onsite conference center, to third parties.
Entrepreneurial efforts aside, the Tiburon campus still counts on San Francisco State for some important costs, including the salaries of facilities and administrative staff members as well as tenured faculty, a university statement noted.
A tight budget has not stopped San Francisco State from investing in other campus improvements. The university combined funding from CSU and private donors to build a new 125,000-square-foot science and engineering buildingon its main campus, which opened last year. In April, it unveiled a new student housing project that includes a health center and dining hall, funded in part by a state grant.
But the lack of long-term funding for Romberg Tiburon leaves Boyer’s eelgrass projects in limbo. She expects to continue the work at Tiburon through the fall, “but after this field season, basically, I don’t know,” she said.
A chain of interconnected life relies on eelgrass to thrive. As the ocean absorbs carbon dioxide released by burning fossil fuels, it becomes less hospitable to oysters and, in turn, less welcoming to birds like the appropriately-named black oystercatcher. But beds of spindly green eelgrass capture carbon, creating a refuge for native oysters and a marine buffet for birds of prey.
Once lost, it is an ecosystem that can be labor-intensive to restore. It’s the kind of work that Marilyn Latta, a project manager at the California State Coastal Conservancy, said requires “early mornings, wetsuits, boat access, all sorts of hard work that’s best suited for a shoreline, marine science location on the water” like the Romberg Tiburon campus.
“If we were to lose that expertise,” she said, “you can’t just rebuild it.”
In an investigative report, The New York Times demonstrated that Elon Musk failed to deliver on his claim that he could cut $2 trillion from the federal budget. Not only did he fall short, but his efforts were so reckless that they might cost money instead of saving it.
Having launched his so-called “Department of Government Efficiency” (which is not a department at all and was never authorized by Congress), Musk and his then-partner Vivek Ramaswamy promised to cut $2 trillion. Their goal dropped to $1 trillion, and Vivek left the team to run for Governor in Ohio.
Some of DOGE’s claims turned out be be inflated (one alleged saving of $8 billion turned out to be a saving of only $8 million.
Musk eventually reduced his saving claim to only $150 billion.
Since DOGE began, thousands of federal employees have been fired. Some have been rehired after courts decided their firing was illegal. Some have been fired, rehired, and fired again. Some career employees have taken buyout offers. Tens of thousands of federal employees have been laid off, without regard to their experience. There was no time for DOGE workers to evaluate each person they ousted, nor did DOGE have the competence to judge its victims.
The New York Times concluded that DOGE’s activities may actually save nothing at all. Firing workers is expensive when you do it the wrong way, the DOGE way.
President Trump and Elon Musk promised taxpayers big savings, maybe even a “DOGE dividend” check in their mailboxes, when the Department of Government Efficiency was let loose on the federal government. Now, as he prepares to step back from his presidential assignment to cut bureaucratic fat, Mr. Musk has said without providing details that DOGE is likely to save taxpayers only $150 billion.
That is about 15 percent of the $1 trillion he pledged to save, less than 8 percent of the $2 trillion in savings he had originally promised and a fraction of the nearly $7 trillion the federal government spent in the 2024 fiscal year.
The Partnership for Public Service, a nonprofit organization that studies the federal work force, has used budget figures to produce a rough estimate that firings, re-hirings, lost productivity and paid leave of thousands of workers will cost upward of $135 billion this fiscal year. At the Internal Revenue Service, a DOGE-driven exodus of 22,000 employees would cost about $8.5 billion in revenue in 2026 alone, according to figures from the Budget Lab at Yale University. The total number of departures is expected to be as many as 32,000.
Neither of these estimates includes the cost to taxpayers of defending DOGE’s moves in court. Of about 200 lawsuits and appeals related to Mr. Trump’s agenda, at least 30 implicate the department.
“Not only is Musk vastly overinflating the money he has saved, he is not accounting for the exponentially larger waste that he is creating,” said Max Stier, the chief executive of the Partnership for Public Service. “He’s inflicted these costs on the American people, who will pay them for many years to come.”
Mr. Stier and other experts on the federal work force said it did not have to be this way. Federal law and previous government shutdowns offered Mr. Musk a legal playbook for reducing the federal work force, a goal that most Americans support. But Mr. Musk chose similar lightning-speed, blunt-force methods he used to drastically cut Twitter’s work force after he acquired the company in 2022.
“The law is clear,” said Jeri Buchholz, who over three decades in public service handled hiring and firing at seven federal agencies, including NASA and the Defense Intelligence Agency. “They can do all the things they are currently doing, but they can’t do them the way they’re doing them. They can either start over and do it right, or they can be in court for forever.”
Members of the California Legislative Jewish Caucus recently introduced a new bill (AB 1468) to address concerns that the state’s new ethnic studies mandate has been and will continue to be used as a vehicle for sneaking dangerous antisemitism and anti-Israel content into our classrooms. Unfortunately, AB 1468 will only serve to exacerbate, rather than mitigate, these concerns.
In 2021, California became the first state to require an ethnic studies course for high school graduation with the passage of AB 101. Despite good intentions, this mandate has been plagued by fundamental and unresolved problems. Chief among them is that it allows school districts to choose their own curriculum, leading many to adopt materials and training from consulting groups such as the Liberated Ethnic Studies Consortium, which promote a highly politicized approach to ethnic studies, exacerbating concerns about classroom bias and antisemitism.
Recognizing this looming threat and knowing that content standards are required for all other California courses required for high school graduation, the Jewish legislators have introduced a bill to establish state-approved standards to prevent antisemitic content and ensure ethnic studies is taught in a way that respects all communities.
The lack of content standards, however, is just the tip of the iceberg. Far more troubling is the absence of any consensus on what kind of subject ethnic studies even is. Some proponents view it as an inclusive, objective examination of the history, culture and contributions of various ethnic groups in the state. This understanding appears to have guided California legislators in passing the ethnic studies mandate with AB 101, whose author stated, “California is one of the most diverse states in the country, and we should celebrate that diversity by teaching a curriculum that is inclusive of all of our cultures and backgrounds.”
Others, however, hold a radically different view. They believe high school ethnic studies should replicate the university-level discipline, which focuses primarily on four racial groups and is rooted in ideologically driven frameworks that emphasize systemic oppression and promote political activism, often incorporating antisemitic content. This approach, championed by state university ethnic studies faculty, teachers unions and Liberated consulting groups, has infiltrated many school districts.
The lack of consensus about the very nature of ethnic studies has led to fierce battles over curricula, which have played out in contentious school board meetings and costly legal challenges, underscoring the folly of implementing a mandatory ethnic studies course without any common understanding of the subject.
The folly becomes even graver when considering that the primary justification for an ethnic studies mandate — its supposed improvement of student outcomes — is wholly unfounded. The single empirical study claiming to demonstrate the academic benefits of ethnic studies was thoroughly debunked by scholars at the University of California and the University of Pennsylvania, who warned that “no conclusion” could be drawn from its data. Worse, an ethnic studies mandate forces students to take a controversial course with no demonstrable academic benefits in place of one with clear value, such as world history.
The mandate’s serious flaws were well-known before the passage of AB 101, which raises the question: How could state legislators establish a law requiring all students to take a course with no agreed-upon subject matter, content standards or proven academic benefits and, under the Liberated approach to ethnic studies, that was likely to sow divisiveness and incite antisemitism?
Unfortunately, the Jewish Caucus’ idea of adding standards to a deeply flawed mandate, though well-intentioned, will not fix the problem. Given the entrenched influence of teachers unions, university ethnic studies faculty and Liberated consultants over who teaches high school ethnic studies and how it’s taught, any attempt to add standards will inevitably be co-opted by these groups, further entrenching an ideological version of ethnic studies that is divisive, controversial and harmful to Jewish students. Moreover, AB 1468 risks giving a false sense of security to concerned parents and community members while failing to address deeper issues.
Now is the time to reconsider — not reinforce — the ethnic studies mandate.
Thankfully, a critical provision in AB 101 has been largely overlooked: The mandate is only operative when the Legislature provides funding for it, which has not yet occurred. And given California’s current financial crisis and the fact that the mandate is estimated to cost the state a whopping $275 million annually, it’s unlikely to become operational anytime soon. This presents an opportunity for legislators to do what is best for all California students: Instead of trying to salvage a foolhardy mandate that is beyond repair, legislators must work to repeal it.
Without a state-funded graduation requirement, school districts could still offer ethnic studies as an elective or even a local graduation requirement, allowing communities to decide whether the course serves their students’ needs. However, given the cost, controversy and administrative burden involved with implementing an ethnic studies requirement without state support, it is doubtful many districts will proceed with it on their own. As a result, the ethnic studies industry — especially consulting groups like Liberated and university-based teacher training programs —will lose their primary source of demand and begin to wither, removing a major driver of politicized and antisemitic content in California classrooms.
Legislators now face a clear choice: double down on a mandate that divides communities, burdens schools, and fails students, or take this opportunity to end it before it does further harm. Repealing AB 101 isn’t just prudent policy — it’s a necessary course correction.
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Tammi Rossman-Benjamin is the director of AMCHA Initiative, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to combating antisemitism at colleges and universities in the United States. She was a faculty member at the University of California for 20 years.
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