Education watchers are bracing for a long-contemplated executive order that would direct Education Secretary Linda McMahon to prepare for the Education Department’s dissolution.
The order will direct McMahon to “take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education,” according to draft text obtained by Education Week. The Wall Street Journal first reported on the draft.
Though the order would be a bold step toward abolishing the department, the actual elimination of the agency would still require approval from Congress—a high bar to reach, despite Republican majorities in both chambers.
The order follows up on a campaign pledge Trump made repeatedly last year to eliminate the 45-year-old agency. Trump has already moved aggressively in the first weeks of his second term to downsize it, and shortly after her swearing-in on Monday, McMahon laid out what she called the department’s “final mission” in a note to agency employees.
It’s unclear when Trump plans to sign the order, or what a final version would ultimately look like. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said on X that the president didn’t plan to sign an executive order on the department on Thursday. An Education Department spokesperson didn’t respond to a request for comment.
“We’ve seen this administration take a lot of actions—to release executive orders, release guidance documents, say stuff off the cuff, and then they pull back really soon after,” said Jon Valant, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution and the director of the Brown Center on Education Policy. “I think we also need to realize that whatever is in the EO, that doesn’t mean that that’s the end of the story.”
Another policy expert, who worked in the U.S. Department of Education under President George W. Bush, called the executive order “a nothing burger.”
“I think it’s really just theater,” said Mike Petrilli, president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, an education policy think tank. “This is something that the president promised to do on the campaign trail, and so he’s got to check the box, and this executive order will show that he’s doing what he can. But I don’t think it’s going to have much of an impact.”
The draft order also directs McMahon to make sure fund allocations from the agency comply with the administration’s flurry of recent directives pertaining to “illegal race- and sex-based discrimination, including illegal discrimination obscured under the label ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ or similar terms.”
The order has been anticipated since media reports about it last month. Education advocates have decried the possibility of eliminating the agency, with the nation’s two largest teachers’ unions saying it would harm vulnerable students and vowing to take action should it be signed.
The agency’s dismantling was a plank in the Republican Party’s 2024 platform, and it’s been a perennial position from some Republicans, who have wanted to do away with it ever since it was carved into its own department under Democratic President Jimmy Carter in 1980.
“I’ve begun thinking about these executive orders less as legal directives and more as a particularly potent version of the president’s traditional tool of the bully pulpit signaling the president’s priorities to their allies and to Congress and to the public and to their co-partisans and state government and local government about what the priorities of this administration are, and what are the marching orders for other folks on the same team,” said David Houston, an assistant professor of education at George Mason University.
Trump and other Republicans have repeatedly argued that the federal government’s already limited influence on education should be diminished, but those calls have come as Trump’s administration has sought to exert federal muscle over schools through a series of other executive actions that target diversity, equity, and inclusion and transgender athletes.
“The experiment of controlling American education through Federal programs and dollars—and the unaccountable bureaucrats those programs and dollars support—has failed our children, our teachers, and our families,” the draft order reads.
Houston has analyzed the effects of presidential endorsements on different education policies and public opinion. Presidents often don’t have luck moving the public in the direction of their policies, but they’re good at polarizing public opinion, he’s found in his research.
“They move members of their own party in the direction of their position, and they move members of the opposite party away from it,” he said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if the same dynamic happens with the U.S. Department of Education.”
The Department of Education, its offices, and its programs are in statute
Today, the department oversees an annual budget of about $80 billion, covering programs addressing prekindergarten through postsecondary education, as well as a student loan portfolio of more than $1 trillion.
Congress would be needed to eliminate the agency because the department and most of its divisions and the programs it oversees are specifically laid out in statute.
During her hearing, McMahon said educators shouldn’t worry that eliminating the department will result in the loss of federal funds for schools.
The department sends out billions of dollars annually in for schools with large populations of low-income students, under Title I, and for services for students with disabilities, under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.
It also distributes funding for teacher-preparation programs, services for English learners, and a number of other grant programs. An independent division of the department, the Institute of Education Sciences, oversees data collection, research grants, and the National Assessment of Educational Progress.
The scope of an order on dismantling the department that relies on executive authority alone would be necessarily limited, said Valant, from Brookings.
“That leaves out a whole lot of activity that would be kind of the most consequential when it comes to dismantling the department,” he said. “I think it’s going to be very important that we don’t read more into it than what it says, and if it goes farther than that … I think we should expect that that’s going to end up in the court system.”
The department also enforces federal civil rights laws in schools through its office for civil rights. As he seeks to eliminate the agency, Trump’s administration has actually relied more heavily on this office to implement his political agenda.
The office has started investigating schools, state athletic associations, and at least one state education department over policies allowing transgender girls to play on girls’ sports teams—something Trump has cracked down on through an executive order threatening to withhold federal funds from schools that allow it to happen.
It also opened an investigation into the Denver school district following news that one of its high schools had opened an all-gender restroom.
More recently, the office for civil rights directed schools and colleges to eliminate race-based programs or risk losing federal funds.
Trump has already been scaling back the Education Department
During her confirmation hearing, McMahon didn’t reveal a firm plan for redistributing the Education Department’s functions across the federal government, but she floated ideas that appeared in the conservative public policy agenda Project 2025, penned by people who now work in Trump’s administration, such as moving oversight of IDEA to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and the office for civil rights to the U.S. Department of Justice.
A bill is already filed in the U.S. Senate to move the agency’s responsibilities to other departments, and another bill pending in the U.S. House of Representatives proposes simply, in one sentence, to terminate the department on Dec. 31, 2026.
Even without congressional action and before McMahon’s arrival at the agency, the Trump administration has already dramatically scaled back department functions.
It’s canceled hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts and grants that funded research and data collection efforts, teacher training programs, and two different sets of regional centers that provide technical assistance to states and school districts to help them improve instruction and solve pressing problems.
It also canceled a national test that measures 17-year-olds’ performance in math and reading—part of the broader National Assessment of Educational Progress.
Additionally, more than 100 department employees have either been dismissed or placed on administrative leave, and the agency’s chief human resources officer told employees last week in an email offering them a buyout of up to $25,000 that a significant reduction in force was in the works, according to Politico.
The Education Department is the smallest Cabinet-level agency in terms of staffing.
Those steps, spurred by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency team, have been “more aggressive than you might have imagined when it comes to reductions in force, trying to lay off a lot of Department Education staff,” said Petrilli, the Fordham Institute president. “But in terms of actually taking the department apart or shipping its pieces to other agencies, that takes Congress, and I don’t think that’s a priority right now for Congress, and I don’t think you’ve got 60 votes in the Senate to do it.”
Neal McCluskey, director of the libertarian Cato Institute’s center for educational freedom, agreed.
“In part, that’s because many may believe that the department should not exist and that it’s not valuable, but the politics of it are kind of difficult,” he said. “It’s a distant bureaucracy for most people, and they may have no daily interaction with it, no sense of what it what it does, what its purpose is, but people hear education and they say, ‘Well, that must be good.’”
Trump tried shuttering ED in his first term
The elimination of a Cabinet-level agency would be the most significant change to the federal bureaucracy in recent years.
The federal government hasn’t shut down a major agency since the Interstate Commerce Commission closed in 1995. That agency wasn’t Cabinet-level, unlike the Education Department. It’s been more likely to add new agencies—such as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau after the Great Recession and the Department of Homeland Security after the 9/11 attacks.
Several U.S. presidents in the 19th and 20th centuries took advantage of “presidential reorganization authority” to consolidate or reshape federal agencies. But that authority expired in 1984, making it so Congress would have to approve major reorganizations.
During his first term, in 2018, Trump proposed merging the Education and Labor departments into the Department of Education and the Workforce, but that proposal soon fizzled. He also proposed merging many of the department’s key funding streams, such as Title I, into block grants distributed to the states.
Before that, President Obama in 2012 pushed Congress to pass a bill that would eliminate the Commerce Department, but the bill failed.
Republican President Ronald Reagan ran on ending the energy and education departments, but Congress accomplished neither during his two terms as president.
However, Reagan’s first education secretary, Terrel Bell developed a plan for dramatically scaling back the federal role in education, which included a blueprint for dispersing the Education Department’s functions across the federal government.
Under that plan, the office for civil rights, for example, would have moved to the Department of Justice, student loan programs would have moved to the Treasury Department, and department grants would have become block grants with fewer rules attached.
The plan, however, faced resistance from Congress, and Bell himself became increasingly convinced of a need for federal leadership in education.
Many of those suggestions, however, resurfaced in Project 2025.
2025-03-06 19:45:08
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