President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Thursday authorizing a radical reduction in the Department of Education, partially fulfilling a long-standing conservative goal.
Flanked by schoolchildren sitting at desks in the White House’s East Room, Trump signed the order to the applause of officials and supporters including Education Secretary Linda McMahon, Republican governors and members of Congress, conservative organizations and teachers.
Trump said his action will end the Department of Education “once and for all.” In the order itself, Trump directs McMahon to “take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education and return authority over education to the States and local communities while ensuring the effective and uninterrupted delivery of services, programs, and benefits on which Americans rely.”
The president blamed the department for the poor performance of American students on tests and in international rankings. “Unfortunately, the experiment of controlling American education through Federal programs and dollars -- and the unaccountable bureaucracy those programs and dollars support -- has plainly failed our children, our teachers, and our families,” the executive order says.
Trump also criticized the department’s management of its $1.6 student loan portfolio, which he said should be run by a bank, and the fact that the department maintains a public relations office with more than 80 employees, at a cost of $10 million.
“We're going to eliminate it, and everybody knows it's right," Trump said. “We're not doing well with the world of education in this country, and we haven't for a long time.”
Shrinking but not eliminating: Conservatives have been gunning for the Department of Education since its founding by President Jimmy Carter in 1979, and the Trump administration has already taken steps to reduce its workforce of 4,133 by nearly 50%.
However, closing the department completely and permanently would require an act of Congress. Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy said Thursday that he would submit legislation to do that, though passage would likely be difficult. In the meantime, it’s not clear if Trump’s executive order will result in new reductions in staffing or function at the department, beyond what has already been announced.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters earlier in the day that the Department of Education will be downsized rather than shut down, with some critical programs remaining in place. “The Department of Education will be much smaller than it is today,” Leavitt said. “When it comes to student loans and Pell grants, those will still be run out of the Department of Education.”
Still, Trump said he wants to end the department for good, telling McMahon that “hopefully she will be the last secretary of education.”
Critics take aim: Democratic lawmakers and educational professionals reacted harshly to the executive order.
“More bullshit,” Sen. Tina Smith said on social media. “@realDonaldTrump, you can’t shut down the Department of Education — and you know it. Fox News even knows it. So stop it.”
Smith noted that “hundreds of thousands of people” have contacted her office to express their concern, which is consistent with recent polling that shows that roughly two-thirds of Americans oppose the idea of shutting the department down.
National Education Association President Becky Pringle linked Trump’s order to the broader effort led by Elon Musk to eviscerate the federal government, as well as to Republican tax policies. “Donald Trump and Elon Musk have aimed their wrecking ball at public schools and the futures of the 50 million students in rural, suburban, and urban communities across America, by dismantling public education to pay for tax handouts for billionaires,” she said in a statement. “If successful, Trump’s continued actions will hurt all students by sending class sizes soaring, cutting job training programs, making higher education more expensive and out of reach for middle class families, taking away special education services for students with disabilities, and gutting student civil rights protections.”
Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said she is concerned that cuts will harm programs like special education funding and aid for impoverished students. “I have no confidence that those services will not be affected,” she said, per Politico. “If nobody’s there to answer the phone, or if no department exists to make sure that Truman High School in New York City gets the funding it’s supposed to get and that Mayor [Eric] Adams doesn’t put it somewhere else — who is going to do that?”
What comes next: We’ll have to wait and see how the dismantling of the department actually plays out. Meanwhile, the fury on the left could help Democrats as they attempt to push back against Trump.
Celebrating their victory, the conservatives gathered at the White House on Thursday also struck a cautious note. “It seems very likely in races this fall that Democrats will cut ads with Elon Musk waving that chainsaw, and then you’ll see some mom talking about how her child with special needs can’t get the support they used to get,” Frederick Hess, education director at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, told Politico. “The old adage of Colin Powell was, ‘You break it, you buy it’.”