Trump signs order to ‘eliminate’ Department of Education — even though he’d need Congress to do it

President Donald Trump on Thursday signed an order aimed at “eliminating” the Department of Education, delivering a long-anticipated political win for conservatives who’ve pushed to privatize education.

Flanked by schoolchildren at desks, Trump signed the order during an East Room ceremony attended by multiple Republican governors and activists who celebrated the move, including Education Secretary Linda McMahon, who the president pointedly said he hopes is the last person to hold the position.

Trump claimed President Jimmy Carter’s decision to sign legislation creating the department had faced widespread opposition and insisted poor test scores among American schoolchildren proved critics “right.”

“Students in our public elementary and middle schools score worse in reading today than when the department opened, by a lot,” he said, adding that the department’s budget has nonetheless “exploded by 600 percent” to include “bureaucrats in buildings all over Washington.”

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Trump also lauded his administration for having slashed the department’s workforce by half since taking office. But — in an apparent nod to the legal pushback his order will inevitably face — insisted “the department's useful functions” would be “fully preserved,” including “Pell Grants, Title One funding resources for Children with disabilities and special needs” remaining in place.

“But 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. It's doing us no good,” he said.

Of course, the department — like all cabinet departments — is a creation of Congress, and only an act of Congress can formally shutter it.

During his announcement, the president claimed that leaving education “to the states” would allow the U.S. to keep up with countries like “Denmark, Norway, Sweden ... and China,” and suggested that high population states such as New York would allow “sections of the state” to run school systems — something that already happens because New York schools are administered at the city and county level.

“You'll have a Manhattan, and you'll have a Suffolk County, and you'll have a Nassau County, and you'll have Westchester County. You'll do four or five or six of them. You have upstate New York. And those counties, I think are going to do very well, and I think ultimately Manhattan should do very well. But we'll break it down into sections, and I think it'll be really good,” he said.

“We're going to love and cherish our teachers along the children and work with the parents and everybody else and sing thing to watch, and it's really going to be something special.”

Trump then moved from the lectern adorned with the presidential seal to a similarly-decorated desk surrounded by children seated with him at at their own child-sized desks. He took up his trademark Sharpie marker to sign the order before holding it up. In a surreal moment, the children seated next to him signed “orders” of their own.

Despite Trump’s claim that his action will return responsibility for education back “to the states,” that task has long rested with state and local governments — not the federal government. The Department of Education does not play any role in determining curricula, requirements for enrollment or graduation, lesson plans or hiring at public schools, colleges or universities.

The actual role the Education Department plays in education is largely a financial one — and a limited one at that.

While it does provide federal funding to K-12 schools, what dollars it does disperse to states and local school districts amounts to approximately eight percent of school funding as a whole — with a particular focus on providing funds earmarked for supporting low-income school systems and students living in poverty under Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.

California, Texas, New York, Florida, Georgia, Ohio, Illinois, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina are among the states with the largest number of students who participate in Title I programs.

The department’s annual appropriation amounted to roughly $268 billion — around 4 percent of the government’s overall budget — making any savings negligible compared to what Trump and his allies have promised to cut from federal spending.

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And while conservatives have long railed against the department’s role in elementary and secondary education, the vast majority of its budget is used to manage the massive federal student loan program, under which the Education Department is the largest provider of financial aid for American college students — both in the form of loans and other need-based aid to low-income students such as Pell Grants.

Colleges and universities are far more reliant on money from the federal government than K-12 schools through federal financial aid and research grants.

The department oversees the Nation’s Report Card, which collects data on students’ test scores and tracks overall progress.

It also enforces civil rights laws in schools by ensuring that institutions that receive federal funding are abiding by those laws, including those protecting students from discrimination on the basis of race or sex. It’s those functions that have often rankled conservatives under Democratic administrations, including the Obama and Biden administrations, which drew ire from activists and Republican lawmakers over efforts to combat sexual assault on college campuses and ensure LGBT+ students were protected from discrimination.

A White House fact sheet obtained by The Independent said Trump’s order would “direct that programs or activities receiving any remaining Department of Education funds will not advance DEI or gender ideology.”

In recent weeks, McMahon — whose estranged husband is disgraced World Wrestling Entertainment founder Vince McMahon — has slashed the department’s employee headcount by half.

Before McMahon’s mass firing, the department’s workforce was around 5,000 strong — the smallest of any cabinet department — and now numbers roughly 2,500.

Sheria Smith, president of American Federation of Government Employees local 252 — the union representing around 2,000 department workers — slammed Trump’s order as “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” and said the Trump administration “clearly has no respect for the thousands of people who have dedicated their careers to serving this country.”

“Americans throughout the country will bear the brunt of this reckless order. Americans will no longer adequately and efficiently receive the services they rely on, from the ability to investigate civil rights complaints to accessing financial student aid, and so much more,” said Smith, who added that it “cannot be understated that it seems this administration is hell-bent on eliminating the much-needed accountability and oversight the Department of Education provides.”

Another union executive — American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten — reacted to Trump’s order with a simple, four-word statement, writing on X: “See you in court.”