President Trump signaled his plans Tuesday to diminish the U.S. Department of Education, saying that he has told Secretary-Designate Linda McMahon that he wants her to “put yourself out of job” and that he would work with Congress and teachers unions to achieve his goal of turning education over to the states.
“I believe strongly in school choice, but in addition to that, I want the states to run schools, and I want Linda to put herself out of a job,” Trump said at a Oval Office press briefing.
He has not issued an executive order making good on a campaign pledge to eliminate the department, instead indicating the process would evolve with Congress. When asked if he is looking to issue an order, Trump said: “ I think I’d work with Congress … We’d have to work with the teachers union because the teachers union is the only one that is opposed to it.”
McMahon, a former pro-wrestling mogul and small-business champion, has not yet been confirmed.
The prospect of dismantling the Department of Education has led to questions and fears over potential chaos over how key responsibilities and billions in federal funding — including handling federal financial aid, grants for disadvantaged students and civil rights enforcement — would be affected.
The department has authority over financial lifelines that so many campuses and students rely on. The department’s K-12 programs serve more than 50 million students attending 130,000 public and private schools; federal grant, loan, and work-study assistance benefits more than 13 million post-secondary students.
Student loans also fall under the department’s authority. Conservatives have criticized the student loan process, with Republican states successfully suing the Biden administration over its multiple attempts to cancel wide swaths of the nation’s ballooning federal student loan debt. According to the Education Department, the government is owed more than $1.5 trillion in student loans by more than 43 million Americans.
California’s reliance on federal funds
California has a massive stake in how the department is run. The state receives more than $2.1 billion in Title I grants to counteract the effects of poverty — more than any other state — with $417 million provided to Los Angeles Unified, the nation’s second-largest school system, according to the California Department of Education.
More than 200,000 low-income students in the California State University system, the largest and most diverse four-year higher education system in the nation, annually rely on $1 billion in federal Pell grants to afford college. At the University of California, more than 80,000 undergraduate students received about $454 million in Pell Grants in the 2023-24 academic year.
But Trump and many Republicans have long railed against the federal department as wasteful and ineffective, arguing that education should be handled at the state and local level closest to families.
Opponents have vowed to fight any executive order that would eliminate the department.
“If it became a reality, Trump’s power grab would steal resources for our most vulnerable students, explode class sizes, cut job training programs, make higher education more expensive and out of reach for middle class families, take away special education services for students with disabilities, and gut student civil rights protections,” National Education Assn. President Becky Pringle said in a statement Monday. “Americans did not vote for, and do not support, ending the federal government’s commitment to ensuring equal educational opportunities for every child.”
What role does Congress play?
Changing or redirecting the department’s myriad functions that touch on every school district, college and university that receives federal funding would be an enormous and complicated task.
Many people question whether Trump has the authority to dismantle a department created by Congress or refuse to provide funding appropriated by federal lawmakers. Legal questions also arise over whether the president can unilaterally transfer functions from one branch of government to another. If Congressional approval is needed, Republicans have only narrow majorities in the House and Senate and a potential Democratic-led filibuster in the Senate could block the move.
Michael Petrilli, president of the right-leaning Thomas B. Fordham Institute think tank, said that closing down the department was “pretty hypothetical.”
“It would take an act of Congress to dismantle the department and Republicans simply do not have the votes, let alone the fact that it would be an unpopular move in many Republican districts,” he said.
In 2023, 60 Republicans — including five of 11 Californians — joined 205 Democrats in voting against an amendment that would have expressed Congressional support for ending the authority of the Department of Education to administer K-12 programs. The amendment, seen as a precursor to abolishing the department, failed.
Debate over the federal government’s role in education isn’t new.
The Department of Education was first established in 1867 by President Andrew Jackson, but abolished a year later and its functions were merged into other parts of the federal government. Democratic President Jimmy Carter asked Congress to reestablish a standalone department in 1979; his Republican successor, Ronald Reagan, tried to eliminate it but was unsuccessful. Efforts to ax the department have continued since, including a bill introduced last month by U.S. Rep. David Rouzer (R-N.C.).
Rick Hess, a senior fellow and director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, said it was “perfectly reasonable” to abolish the department — or at least downsize it — because of what he called wasteful spending, political biases toward teacher unions and misplaced responsibilities. He and Petrilli have questioned, for instance, why educational bureaucrats should manage a trillion-dollar student loan portfolio rather than financial experts in the Treasury Department — a shift advocated by Project 2025, the conservative policy playbook written in part by many members of the first Trump administration.
But Liz Sanders, a California Department of Education spokesperson, voiced unease over any attempt to abolish the department.
“We are incredibly concerned about what seems to be a thoughtless approach to changing essential federal programs that support our kids every day — and support our most vulnerable kids every day. We’re talking about essential academic support services,” Sanders said. “We want to make sure that these services are able to have a level of continuity for our educators and our families and our students. Simply a one-sentence hatchet job is not how we should make changes that impact our kids.”
For now, education leaders are waiting for clearer signs of what Trump intends.
“If this is all about cutting costs and programs, then the move would have a huge impact,” said Pedro Noguera, dean of the USC Rossier School of Education. “If it’s about moving tasks and the people carrying them out into other agencies, then it’s hard to see costs being reduced.
“It’s hard to know exactly what’s going to happen or why it’s happening, because they haven’t really been real clear about the strategy, if there is one.”
