Education Secretary Linda McMahon will be tasked with preparing to shut down an already diminished U.S. Department of Education, under a long-awaited executive order President Donald Trump signed Thursday in a White House ceremony.
The executive order directs the secretary to “take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education” while ensuring its programs and services are carried out “uninterrupted.” The president and McMahon have acknowledged that actually eliminating the agency would require an act of Congress.
The executive order allows Trump to put his signature on a plan for shutting down the agency he has repeatedly pledged to close, but it merely represents his latest step toward diminishing it.
Earlier this month, the department announced the dismissal of nearly half its staff, a move that immediately drew litigation over concerns that the agency would no longer be able to carry out its constitutionally mandated responsibilities. The layoffs followed several rounds of terminations of department contracts and grants—some of which judges have told the agency to restore.
The agency oversees more than $1 trillion in student loans and administers a budget of roughly $80 billion covering programs addressing prekindergarten through postsecondary education.
Ahead of the signing, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said the intent of the order is to “return this great responsibility to the states.”
Education is already largely a state and local enterprise, with the federal government fairly limited in its role. It typically supplies less than 10 percent of public school funding each year, and it has no authority over curriculum and academic standards.
The order seeks to whittle the 45-year-old department down more than the Trump administration has already in recent weeks. But the agency will continue to carry out its required functions, Leavitt said: overseeing the distribution of key funding streams, civil rights investigations, and its extensive loan portfolio.
“Beyond these core necessities, my administration will take all lawful steps to shut down the department. We’re going to shut it down and shut it down as quickly as possible,” Trump said. “It’s doing us no good.”
Trump said that the department’s “useful functions” would be “preserved in full and redistributed to various other agencies and departments that will take very good care of them.”
The order directs McMahon to “take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education and return authority over education to the States and local communities while ensuring the effective and uninterrupted delivery of services, programs, and benefits on which Americans rely.”
It adds that she must “ensure” the allocation of taxpayer dollars aligns with federal law and administration policies, which includes Trump’s orders seeking to eradicate diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives.
The order is necessarily limited in scope: Congress, not the president, determines whether a Cabinet-level agency can be dissolved, and the department’s responsibilities are laid out in statute that only Congress can change. Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy, who chairs the Senate’s Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions committee, said in a statement after Trump signed the order that he agreed that department needed to be abolished.
“Since the Department can only be shut down with Congressional approval, I will support the President’s goals by submitting legislation to accomplish this as soon as possible,” he said in a post on X.
Trump signed the order flanked by students and in a room with Republican governors who have called for more flexibility from federal education requirements. Trump called the signing “45 years in the making.”
The order drew immediate pushback from public education advocates, the nation’s largest teachers’ unions, and the union representing most Education Department workers.
“See you in court,” said American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten.
Sheria Smith, president of the American Federation of Government Employees chapter that includes most Education Department workers, called the order “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.”
The president had contemplated issuing the order before he even had his own secretary of education in place; discussions around an order leaked in February, and a draft order circulated in the press in early March.
During her confirmation hearing, McMahon vowed to see through the president’s vision of disbanding the department, but stopped short of outlining where its central functions would go if rehoused in other agencies. She agreed that it would require Congress’ approval to fully do away with the department. Still, McMahon was resolute that the Education Department wasn’t serving students well.
After the order was signed, McMahon said in a statement that it would “free future generations of American students and forge opportunities for their success.”
“We’re going to follow the law and eliminate the bureaucracy responsibly by working with Congress and state leaders to ensure a lawful and orderly transition,” she said
The signing of the executive order builds on growing political momentum from Republicans in recent years to do away with the agency. Still, Congress’ approval of a bill to eliminate the agency is far from guaranteed.
Sixty U.S. House of Representatives Republicans as well as every Democrat opposed closing the department in a failed 2023 vote to abolish the agency. And in the Senate, Republicans would need 60 votes to pass a measure, but hold only 53 seats.
