President Trump’s proposal to eliminate the U.S. Department of Education would require an act of Congress, and K-12 schools would continue receiving key streams of federal money even if the department no longer existed, Trump’s education secretary nominee Linda McMahon said Thursday during her Senate confirmation hearing.
“It is not the president’s goal to defund the programs, it is only to have the programs run more efficiently,” McMahon said roughly half an hour into the hearing in response to a question from Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La.
Trump has reportedly been preparing an executive order to begin dismantling the 45-year-old agency as part of his broader plan to “return education to the states.” Many school district leaders and advocates have questioned what his comments in favor of eliminating the department mean for the billions of dollars from the federal government that annually help balance K-12 school budgets across the country.
As Thursday’s hearing began, senators from both parties highlighted the urgency of maintaining federal funding programs like Title I for low-income schools and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act for students with disabilities.
McMahon said she isn’t proposing to reduce funding for Title I and IDEA. But if confirmed, she plans to assess whether agencies other than hers would manage existing grant programs more effectively. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, for instance, might be a better fit for programs that support students with disabilities, she said.
McMahon said her goal as education secretary would be to collaborate with lawmakers to reduce unhelpful bureaucracy in her agency, and to make programs work more effectively so schools can “focus on teaching our children to read and to do math.”
“President Trump understands we’ll be working with Congress. We’d like to do this right,” McMahon said. “We’d like to make sure that we are presenting a plan that I think our senators could get on board with and our Congress could get on board with.”
Senators also pressed McMahon on the Trump administration’s early efforts to freeze federal grant spending, in apparent violation of Congress’ “power of the purse,” as laid out in the U.S. Constitution.
McMahon said she wouldn’t hold back money approved by Congress. But she said she sees value in examining where money is going before it leaves the federal government’s hands.
“We will certainly expend those dollars that Congress has passed, but I do think it is worthwhile to take a look at programs before money goes out the door,” McMahon said. “It is much easier to stop the moneys going out the door than it is to claw it back.”
McMahon would step into the role as the nation’s 13th education secretary with limited experience in education. Though she once aspired to be a French teacher, McMahon went on to be a business mogul instead: She co-founded World Wrestling Entertainment, a company worth billions, with her husband. She served for roughly a year on the state school board in Connecticut before she resigned to pursue an unsuccessful bid to represent the state in the U.S. Senate.
But McMahon wouldn’t be a stranger to the Hill. She served in Trump’s first administration as the head of the U.S. Small Business Administration before stepping down in 2019 to lead the America First Action PAC in support of Trump’s 2020 reelection bid.
A major Trump donor, she has more recently served as chair of the board of the America First Policy Institute, which was created to propel Trump’s public policy agenda after his 2020 loss, and as co-chair of Trump’s transition team.
