Donald Trump’s administration is preparing an executive order to start the process of eliminating the Department of Education, but the president can’t unilaterally do that — abolishing a federal department takes approval from Congress.
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It would be a two-part process, sources told CNN. “The order would direct the secretary of Education to create a plan to diminish the department through executive action,” CNN reports. “Trump would also push for Congress to pass legislation to end the department, as those working on the order acknowledge that shuttering the department would require Congress’ involvement.” The plan is being pushed by Elon Musk, the billionaire heading Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, which was created without an act of Congress and is the subject of lawsuits.
Right-wing forces have called for the department’s elimination since the Reagan administration in the 1980s, shortly after the department was created. Federal education programs were previously part of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, which in 1979, during President Jimmy Carter’s administration, was split into the Department of Education and the Department of Health and Human Services. The DOE has been at the center of recent battles over allegedly “woke” education, such as teaching about LGBTQ+ issues and racism.
“We will drain the government education swamp and stop the abuse of your taxpayer dollars to indoctrinate America’s youth with all sorts of things that you don’t want to have our youth hearing,” Trump said while campaigning. The Republican Party platform also called for the DOE’s abolition, as did Project 2025, the far-right policy blueprint issued last year for the next conservative president.
In a 2024 campaign email, he called for “cutting federal funding for any schools or programs pushing ‘critical race theory,’ opening civil rights investigations into schools discriminating against Asian Americans, implementing a new credentialing system to certify teachers who ‘embrace patriotic values,’ and ‘find[ing] and remov[ing] radicals who have infiltrated the federal Department of Education,’” NBC News notes.
Also, Trump said in a September 2023 video, “In total, American society pours more than $1 trillion a year into public education systems, but instead of being at the top of the list, we are literally right smack — guess what — at the bottom.”
No, the U.S. is not at the bottom. “The United States, as an economic powerhouse, consistently ranks among the top countries in global education, though its exact position can vary based on the criteria and ranking system used,” according to Essay Hub.
As for the DOE itself, “The Department’s elementary and secondary programs annually serve nearly 18,200 school districts and over 50 million students attending roughly 98,000 public schools and 32,000 private schools,” says the DOE website. “Department programs also provide grant, loan, and work-study assistance to more than 12 million postsecondary students.” It has the smallest staff of any Cabinet department, although it has the third-largest discretionary budget. But federal funds distributed by the DOE and other federal agencies accounts for only 8 percent of national spending on elementary and secondary education, with the rest coming from state and local sources.
“Although ED’s share of total education funding in the U.S. is relatively small, ED works hard to get a big bang for its taxpayer-provided bucks by targeting its funds where they can do the most good,” the website continues. “This targeting reflects the historical development of the Federal role in education as a kind of ‘emergency response system,’ a means of filling gaps in State and local support for education when critical national needs arise.”
Republican U.S. Reps. Thomas Massie of Kentucky and David Rouzer of North Carolina have introduced bills calling for the department’s abolition, and Sen. Mike Rounds of South Dakota plans to introduce one in his chamber, NBC reports. Republicans have majorities in both the House and Senate, but the House majority is slim, and in the Senate, “60 votes are required to overcome a filibuster and advance to a final vote,” NBC notes. “Given their narrow majority, Republicans would need Democratic support to do that, which would make it unlikely for such a bill to pass.”
Melanie Willingham-Jaggers, executive director of GLSEN, which advocates for safe and inclusive schools for LGBTQ+ students, reacted to Trump's plan with this statement: "The Administration’s executive order to defund the Department of Education is the latest attack on our country and our students. This is a radical move that strips federal protections, slashes funding for public schools, weakens civil rights enforcement, and leaves our most vulnerable students at risk. Removing oversight of discrimination cases leaves marginalized students unprotected and limits schools’ ability to serve their communities. In an increasingly hostile climate, this plan prioritizes politics over the rights of LGBTQ+ youth to access safe and inclusive learning environments."
Leaders of teachers’ unions also denounced Trump’s effort. “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,” said a statement from Becky Pringle, president of the National Education Association. “Americans did not vote for, and do not support, ending the federal government’s commitment to ensuring equal educational opportunities for every child.
“This comes just days after an Executive Order designed to drain resources from our public schools through vouchers. The intent is clear: starve our public schools of the resources our students need and funnel these resources to discriminatory and unaccountable private schools or tax cuts for billionaires who funded his campaign.”
The department sees that federal funds are spent as they should be, on low-income students and others, and it doesn’t control curricula, Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said on CNN Tuesday. Trump can’t legally dismantle the DOE on his own, and even his order recognizes that it would take congressional action, she said.
“If we need to out-educate China and out-compete with China, we need to have some federal policy that actually shows how to do that,” she added. She also denounced Musk’s role in the DOE abolition plan and other federal policy plans, noting that his team has accessed personal information from the DOE as it has from the Treasury, and “nobody elected Donald Trump or Elon Musk to take their personal information.”
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