Describing it as a transfer “45 years in the making,” Donald Trump on Thursday signed an government order directing Education Secretary Linda McMahon to start dismantling the division she leads. “No president ever got around to doing it, but I’m getting around to doing it,” Trump mentioned, insisting that the sweeping and controversial measure is awfully widespread.
“We’re gonna shut down and shut it down as quickly as possible,” Trump mentioned at a signing ceremony that featured Republican governors like Ron DeSantis, Moms for Liberty cofounder Tiffany Justice, and children seated at what regarded like college desks. “It’s gonna work,” he added.
And with that, Trump formally moved to eradicate the DOE, realizing a longstanding right-wing fantasy and one of many key ambitions of Project 2025, the governing blueprint Trump swore off on the marketing campaign path final 12 months. “What a win for American children,” Heritage President Kevin Roberts wrote Wednesday, after USA Today and different shops reported hours earlier that Trump would signal the chief order.
The transfer—which can absolutely face authorized challenges—comes as Trump consolidates energy with excessive authorities cuts, and as he targets schooling extra broadly with assaults on range initiatives in increased schooling and a number of other high-profile crackdowns on foreign-born lecturers.
It had at all times been a query of when, not if, Trump would take goal on the division, which had been established by Congress in 1979 below President Jimmy Carter. He’d been anticipated to direct McMahon to start shuttering the $268 billion division earlier this month, however pulled back after phrase of the signing emerged in information experiences: “Fake news,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt mentioned on the time. Trump was “NOT signing an Executive Order on the Department of Education today.”
Some schooling advocates counted that as a win. But the Trump administration would nonetheless start hobbling the division, hitting DOE with severe cuts final week: More than 1,300 of its staff have been laid off, successfully halving the employees on the division. And whereas McMahon insisted that “all of [its essential functions] are being met,” the purge—together with throughout the workplace of Federal Student Aid—was positive to have a dramatic impression on its means to operate. “If you’re a student, or you’re a public school teacher, Trump is sending a message loud and clear,” Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren said final week. “He doesn’t care about you, and he doesn’t care about your family.”
The government order Thursday is supposed to be a continuation and formalization of what the administration has already been doing to intestine the division—and, after all, for Trump and his allies to take one other victory lap of their race to radically remake America. Indeed, the fiat isn’t solely poised to have sweeping impacts on schooling within the US; it’s maybe Trump’s boldest assertion of government authority. The president, who has been testing the judicial branch’s check on him, has already sidestepped—and essentially sidelined—the legislative department, assuming energy over the purse that usually rests with Congress and empowering Elon Musk to decimate companies established by lawmakers on Capitol Hill.
The Department of Education is the biggest goal of that energy seize. It’s been subjected not simply to the mass firings which have hit different departments however to outright elimination—one thing that, in principle, can solely be carried out by the legislative department that created it. (Ahead of the order, Leavitt acknowledged that the president couldn’t formally shut down the division with the facility of his pen.) It’s unclear if he has the votes on Capitol Hill for that; even two Republican senators, Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski, have expressed opposition to abolishing the division totally, making it unlikely that Trump might get the 60 votes he wants within the higher chamber to eradicate it by regular procedures. The query, for each the schooling system and the separation of powers, is: Will that technicality even matter?
