Pandas: drop a level from a multi-level column index?

You can use MultiIndex.droplevel:

>>> cols = pd.MultiIndex.from_tuples([("a", "b"), ("a", "c")])
>>> df = pd.DataFrame([[1,2], [3,4]], columns=cols)
>>> df
   a   
   b  c
0  1  2
1  3  4

[2 rows x 2 columns]
>>> df.columns = df.columns.droplevel()
>>> df
   b  c
0  1  2
1  3  4

[2 rows x 2 columns]