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Despite the fiery rhetoric, President Donald Trump’s push to eliminate a Department of Education he accuses of abusing “taxpayer dollars to indoctrinate America’s youth” comes down, appropriately, to civics and math. First, the president cannot legally abolish a department with statutory responsibilities embedded in the law. Only Congress can do that. Most of the public money that flows to the department goes to programs codified in federal legislation. They include Title I ($18 billion annually), special education ($15 billion), and the Office for Civil Rights ($140 million). To eliminate any of those programs — let alone to shutter the department outright — or even to move them to another agency requires a supermajority in Congress. That leaves a motley assemblage of much smaller programs that are not bound up in Congress’s authority. Michael Petrilli, president of the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute, described those offerings as relative “pocket change” compared to the department’s overall budget.