(AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
President Donald Trump kept a campaign promise to his supporters on Thursday (March 20). He signed an executive order today calling for the dismantling of the U.S. Education Department.
Before the signing, the White House released an official fact sheet saying Education Secretary Linda McMahon would lead the agency’s wine down. McMahon previously said the administration’s goal would be “a better functioning” department. With Trump’s ink on the order, she now preparing to relocate the core operations to other agencies and roll back federal regulations.
She gave insight into her plan in an opinion piece published Friday by Fox News Channel. The White House hasn’t given a timeline for the dismantling, and the Education Secretary confirmed it “will not happen tomorrow.” However, in her eyes, McMahon is paving the way.
“We will systematically unwind unnecessary regulations and prepare to reassign the departments other functions to the states or other agencies,” McMahon wrote.
She will be reassigning functions such as distributing federal money to support low-income students and students with disabilities, managing the department’s student financial aid, civil rights enforcement, and data collection. In her Fox News piece, McMahon claimed the nations student test scores have remained flat despite $1 trillion in agency spending since its creation in 1979.
During a White House event, President Trump said the Small Business Administration would handle student loans. “…It will be serviced much better than it has in the past,” the president stated. Additionally, Trump announced that the Department of Health and Human Services would take over programs involving students with disabilities.
Advocacy groups have been sounding off about the redistributing of the programs. They predict disruption in services, especially the cuts across government agencies. Before moving to dismantle the Department of Education, Trump had already been gutting it with employee and resource cuts, especially in the Office for Civil Rights and the Institute of Education Sciences. The second agency previously gathered data on the nation’s academic progress.
The same is happening with the future executors of the student loan programs. On Friday, the Small Business Association announced it will cut its staff by 43%. That announcement is raising questions about its ability to take on the Education Departments $1.6 trillion loan portfolio.
Meanwhile, Trumps executive order argues that the student loan portfolio is too big for the Education Department to manage. After the SBA cuts, however, the agency will be left with fewer than 4,000 employeesabout the same size as the Department of Education before the Trump administration slashed it in half.
Democrats on Friday said Trump does not have the authority to move federal loans or disability services to other agencies. They noted that federal law, including the Higher Education Act and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, places those duties under the management of the Department of Education.
On Friday, Democrats introduced a House resolution requesting Trump and McMahon turn over records related to the shutdown attempt. If the House Committee on Education and the Workforce takes action within 14 legislative days, it could go before the full House. AP reports that completing its dismantling is most likely impossible without an act of Congress.
Even some of Trump’s allies have questioned his power to close the agency without action from Congress. There are also doubts about its political popularity. The House considered an amendment to close the agency in 2023, but 60 Republicans joined Democrats in opposing it.
During Trump’s first term, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos sought to dramatically reduce the agency’s budget. DeVos asked Congress to bundle all K-12 funding into block grants that give states more flexibility in how they spend federal money. That move was rejected, also with pushback from some Republicans.
According to the Associated Press, the signing advances a campaign promise to eliminate the agency. President Donald Trump himself has called the Education Department wasteful and polluted by liberal ideology. In his platform, Donald Trump promised to close the department “and send it back to the states, where it belongs.”
Republicans have also talked about closing the Education Department for decades. Many have said the Department wastes taxpayer money and inserts the federal government into decisions that should fall to states and schools. Trump has cast the department as a hotbed of “radicals, zealots and Marxists” who overextend their reach through guidance and regulation.
Even as Trump moves to dismantle the department, he has leaned on it to promote elements of his agenda. President Trump has used the investigative powers of the Office for Civil Rights and the threat of withdrawing federal education money to target schools and colleges that run afoul of his orders on transgender athletes participating in women’s sports, pro-Palestinian activism, and diversity programs.
Associated Press staff Collin Binkley and Chris Megerian contributed to this report.
