Trump orders dismantling of Department of Education

Cayla Bamberger and Dave Goldiner, New York Daily News on Mar 20, 2025

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President Donald Trump on Thursday ordered the dismantling of the Department of Education, potentially fulfilling a longstanding goal of conservatives.

Joined by a dozen children and several Republican governors at the White House, Trump said he would dismantle the DOE and send more funding to the states.

“We have to get our children educated,” Trump said. “We’re not doing well and we haven’t for a long time. It’s about time.”

Trump rattled off a list of dire statistics on falling test scores from coast to coast, and blamed the failure on the DOE. He noted that some members of former President Jimmy Carter’s cabinet opposed the creation of the department in 1979.

“History has proven them right,” Trump said, introducing Linda McMahon as the “hopefully last secretary of education.”

Trump has regularly derided the DOE as a waste of taxpayer dollars and a cesspool of liberal “woke” ideology. His order vowed to “return education authority to the states, while continuing to ensure the effective and uninterrupted delivery of services, programs and benefits on which Americans rely.”

The Trump administration has already been gutting the DOE, one of several federal agencies targeted by the White House and billionaire first buddy Elon Musk. The DOE’s workforce has been slashed in half and there have been deep cuts to the Office for Civil Rights and the Institute of Education Sciences, which gathers data on the nation’s academic progress.

Advocates for public schools and teachers said eliminating the DOE would be a disaster that would leave children behind in an American education system that’s fundamentally unequal.

“They’re talking about taking this money away from kids,” said Randi Weingarten of the American Federation of Teachers, a union representing 1.8 million educators. “A country’s future depends on its education system. What are we saying?”

“Trump’s reckless attempt to dismantle the Department of Education is an egregious attack on school kids across the nation,” said state Senator John Liu, D-Queens, chair of the education committee.

The department sends billions of dollars per year to schools and oversees $1.6 trillion in federal student loans. It also plays a significant role in overseeing civil rights enforcement.

The White House has not formally spelled out which DOE functions it plans to hand over to other federal agencies and which may be entirely eliminated, though Trump named the popular Pell Grants for college students as one of the programs that would be administered by a different agency.

At her confirmation hearing, McMahon said she would preserve core initiatives, including Title I money for low-income schools and Pell Grants for low-income college students. She claimed the administration planned to implement “a better-functioning Department of Education,” not eliminate it.

Federal funding makes up a relatively small portion of public school budgets — roughly 14%, with the rest coming mostly from local tax revenue. The money often supports supplemental programs for vulnerable students, such as the McKinney-Vento program for homeless students or Title I for low-income schools.

Colleges and universities are more reliant on money from Washington through research grants, along with federal financial aid that helps students pay their tuition.

Republicans have talked about closing the Education Department for decades, saying it wastes taxpayer money and inserts the federal government into decisions that should fall to states and local school districts.

Yet even some of Trump’s Republican allies have questioned his right to close the agency without action from Congress. Most analysts say that permanently eliminating the DOE would require Congress approval, and Trump conceded Thursday that lawmakers would likely need to weigh in.

There are also major questions about the popularity of scrapping the agency. The House considered an amendment to close the DOE in 2023, but 60 Republicans joined Democrats in opposing the move.

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