Protesters hold signs during a March 13 rally in front of the Department of Education in Washington, DC, to protest budget cuts.Gent Shkullaku/Zuma
President Donald Trump has taken the first step to officially abolish the Department of Education, a $268 billion government agency responsible for the administration of federal funding programs for schools and enforcement of civil rights law that his administration has already gutted.
In an executive order signed Thursday, Trump directed the newly confirmed Secretary of Education Linda McMahon to “facilitate the closure” of the agency to the “maximum extent appropriate and permitted by law.” During her confirmation hearing, McMahon acknowledged that only Congress had the power to eliminate the department it created in 1979, but she evaded questions by Democratic senators when they asked whether she supported Trump’s proposal to eliminate the department. The Secretary of Education can reduce the agency’s power through staff reductions—which she already has—and budget cuts.
“Today we take a very historic action that is 45 years in the making,” Trump said before signing the order at the White House, flanked by children sitting at school desks. The agency’s “useful functions” will be “fully preserved,” Trump claimed, insisting that statute-required programs like Pell Grants and enforcement of disability rights laws will move seamlessly elsewhere.
“We’re going to shut it down,” Trump continued, “and we’re going to shut it down as quickly as possible.”
Trump was expected to sign the order two weeks ago before backing down. Since then, McMahon cut the department’s staff of more than 4,100 employees nearly in half through voluntary buyouts and a sweeping reduction in force. Education advocates have warned that shrinking the agency—already one of the smallest cabinet-level agencies in the federal government—will jeopardize its ability to serve the country’s most vulnerable students, particularly disabled students.
“This executive order is nothing more than an illegal overreach of executive power designed to unemploy dedicated civil servants and decimate the critical services they provide to millions of Americans across this country,” Sheria Smith, president of American Federation of Government Employees Local 252, a union representing thousands of education department employees, said in a statement. “It also cannot be understated that it seems this administration is hell-bent on eliminating the much-needed accountability and oversight the Department of Education provides.”
Within hours of her confirmation on March 3, McMahon sent agency employees a memo titled “Our Department’s Final Mission.” In it, she commended Trump’s sweeping actions, including his slate of executive orders that promote school choice programs, seek to root out so-called “gender ideology” and end “radical indoctrination” of children through diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, while also banning trans girls and women from women’s sports.
“The Department of Education’s role in this new era of accountability is to restore the rightful role of state oversight in education and to end the overreach from Washington,” McMahon wrote. “This restoration will profoundly impact staff, budgets, and agency operations here at the Department.”
McMahon also celebrated Trump’s goal of “eliminating waste, red tape, and harmful programs.” Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency team has canceled more than $1.6 billion in department contracts and $1.1 billion in grants, although by DOGE’s own calculations, the actual savings are less than 60 percent of that. Among the canceled grants was $600 million to place teachers in underserved schools, a decision that a federal judge blocked on Tuesday, saying it would have a “grave effect on the public.”
“It’s just moving the country in such a wrong direction,” Robert Kim, executive director of the Education Law Center, told me, noting that Congress created the department in 1979 out of a recognition that students—and schools—needed an agency focused solely on education. “For this White House and this federal government to want to strip all of that away and return to this fragmented, unfocused way of addressing education would just take us back to those generations where education was deprioritized and really only a privilege for a subset of our children.”
“This administration is hell-bent on eliminating the much-needed accountability and oversight the Department of Education provides.”
The bulk of money for schools does not come from the federal government—federal dollars account for about 14% of public K-12 schools’ funding. But the Department of Education disburses vital funding for schools serving low-income students in poor communities through Title I and offers school support for disabled students through Individuals with Disabilities Education Act grants. At the college level, it administers the Pell Grants for low-income students, a program that is expected to face a $2.7 billion budget shortfall by the end of the fiscal year. Add to this the federal student loan program for which the agency holds $1.6 trillion in loans from 43 million borrowers.
Most Education Department responsibilities are codified by law and cannot be eliminated without Congressional approval, Kim says. Title I, Pell Grants, the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, and important anti-discrimination laws, including Title IX and Title VI protecting against sex and racial discrimination, respectively, would not die alongside the department. At her confirmation hearing, McMahon suggested that other federal agencies are equipped to enforce those laws—the Department of Justice could handle discrimination complaints, she said, and the Department of Health and Human Services, run by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., could oversee funding and protections for students with disabilities.
But properly administering those programs and laws means far more than just disbursing money, Kim says. The department funds and releases important research that guides policy implementation and best practices. It also has established relationships with thousands of school districts and colleges across the United States.
Reallocating Education Department responsibilities would require students and their families to go to multiple agencies to enforce their rights—not only making the civil rights landscape more complex for families but also burdening other government agencies that often lack the expertise to manage these responsibilities. The Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights, for example, handles tens of thousands of civil rights complaints each year.
“It’s fanciful at best to think that civil rights function would be carried out with the same degree of fidelity that is currently happening,” Kim says.
Even without abolishing the department entirely, the significant staff reductions could heavily impair the agency’s ability to investigate civil rights complaints. On March 14, parents and the Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates, a national disability rights group, sued the Department of Education to reverse the reduction in force that is slated to take effect on Friday. The department closed 7 of its 12 civil rights offices and slashed its civil rights workforce in half. “Secretary McMahon knowingly decimated OCR’s staffing to a point where the caseload exceeds any approximation of reasonableness,” the complaint reads. “The gutting of OCR’s staff means that no complainant has a fair shot at accessing an OCR investigation.”
As ProPublica reports, since Trump took office the department has halted most investigations into race and gender discrimination while it’s opened an array of investigations into schools, colleges, and athletic programs with trans-inclusive sports policies. It issued a press release applauding Wisconsin’s and New Hampshire’s interscholastic athletic associations for changing their policies to comply with Trump’s trans sports ban executive order. A bill to codify Trump’s declaration that trans-inclusive sports policies from kindergarten through college amount to sex discrimination couldn’t break through the Senate filibuster earlier this month.
The agency has launched investigations into dozens of universities that participate in an initiative to enroll minority students in doctoral programs, arguing the effort amounts to racial discrimination. The department sent letters to 60 colleges whose students held pro-Palestine protests, warning of potential Title VI investigations for failing to address anti-semitism on their campuses.
“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.”
In furthering the pervasive governmental attack on DEI programs generally, the agency launched an “End DEI Portal,” allowing allowing parents, teachers, students, and the “broader community” to bypass the typical complaint process to report “divisive ideologies and indoctrination.” As my colleague Julianne McShane reported, the right-wing parental rights group Moms For Liberty featured prominently in the announcement of the portal, although neither the department nor the group would say what role Moms For Liberty had in the portal’s creation.
Trump promised Moms for Liberty at its 2023 summit that he would give education “back to the states.” Ahead of the executive order’s signing, Moms for Liberty co-founder Tiffany Justice celebrated it, posting on social media on Thursday that dismantling the agency would allow parents and states to “take the reins” over education. The Department of Education doesn’t dictate curriculum, and states and school districts have wide latitude to set policies. “Abolishing it isn’t chaos,” Justice wrote, “it’s freedom to fix what’s broken.”
“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,” Becky Pringle, president of the National Education Association, said in a statement. “In moving forward with this, Trump is ignoring what parents and educators know is right for our students.”
On March 5, the National Education Association, representing 3 million teachers and professors across the United States, joined the American Civil Liberties Union in suing the Department of Education over its February memo to schools and colleges ordering them to halt diversity initiatives. Kim says the Education Law Center, meanwhile, is “exploring all avenues,” including potential litigation, to prevent the dismantling of the agency. “Only Congress has the power to affect the future of a federal agency such as the US Department of Education,” Kim says. “Executive branch actions that that bypass the role of the legislative branch would be unconstitutional.”
