As a presidential candidate in 2024, Donald Trump never came up with a detailed plan related to education policy, but the Republican did make one thing explicitly clear: He wanted to shut down the Education Department if given a second term.
In September 2023, for example, he released a video, which was posted to social media, in which he vowed to scrap the Cabinet agency “very early in the administration.” He added in March 2024, “It’s time. Close it up.”
As the president’s second term gets underway, he’s apparently following through on this — or at least taking steps in that direction. On Thursday afternoon, the president did, in fact, sign an executive order designed to start the process of closing the department. NBC News reported:
President Donald Trump signed an executive order Thursday directing Education Secretary Linda McMahon to start dismantling the Department of Education. “It sounds strange, doesn’t it? Department of Education. We’re going to eliminate it,” Trump said while speaking in the East Room of the White House at a ceremony where he was flanked by children seated at school desks.
The order will not literally shutter the agency — a step that would require an act of Congress. Rather, according to White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, the Education Department will still perform its “critical functions,” including oversight of student loans.
The executive order, in other words, will start the dismantling process, but it will not permanently and completely close the department’s doors.
The announcement comes on the heels of Education Secretary Linda McMahon sending an email to her agency’s staff. The title on the message read, “Our Department’s Final Mission.”
Subtle, it was not. A few days later, McMahon was asked on Fox News whether the country needs her department. “No,” she replied, “we don’t.”
There’s ample evidence to the contrary. At the federal level, the Education Department is responsible for everything from overseeing a massive federal student loan program to administering grants, from collecting key data used in policymaking to enforcing civil rights laws. McMahon, incidentally, will get a different job, Trump announced at the signing event. There is no great public appetite for such a dramatic change. In fact, publicly available polling has long suggested the American public is broadly against scrapping the Education Department. In fact, a recent Washington Post analysis noted that while there hasn’t been a lot of recent public opinion research on the issue, “virtually all of the polling … suggests this is not what the American people want. Indeed, it appears to be among the more unpopular things Trump has pushed for.” Evidently, the White House is moving forward with its plans anyway, executing a plan that, like so much of Trump’s agenda, was part of the right-wing Project 2025 blueprint.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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