President-elect Donald J. Trump on Tuesday tapped Linda McMahon, a former professional wrestling executive who ran the Small Business Administration for much of his first term, to lead the Education Department, an agency he has routinely singled out for elimination in his upcoming term.
A close friend of Mr. Trump’s and a longtime booster of his political career, Ms. McMahon had been among his early donors leading up to his electoral victory in 2016 and has been one of the leaders of his transition team, vetting other potential appointees and drafting potential executive orders since August.
Ms. McMahon, 76, led the Small Business Administration during Mr. Trump’s first term and resigned in 2019 without a public fallout or rift with Mr. Trump, who praised her at her departure as “one of our all-time favorites” and a “superstar.” She stepped down from that role to help with Mr. Trump’s re-election campaign and became the chairwoman of the pro-Trump super PAC America First Action.
More recently, Ms. McMahon also played an influential role in laying the groundwork for a second Trump presidency as the chairwoman of the America First Policy Institute, a conservative policy group. It has offered training for prospective leaders, outlined staffing plans and drafted policy agendas for every federal agency, rivaling the similar Project 2025 effort led by the conservative Heritage Foundation.
Since last year, Mr. Trump had reportedly complained in private that the America First Policy Institute, which filled out its ranks with former officials from his first term in office, owed him a portion of the money he said it had brought in by fund-raising off its political associations with him.
The group nonetheless maintained close ties to Mr. Trump’s transition team, and Ms. McMahon’s nomination on Tuesday was the latest sign of its relevance.
In part because of her recent policy role and her experience as the small business administrator, Ms. McMahon had been discussed as a possible pick to lead the Commerce Department until the role was officially offered to Howard Lutnick, a Wall Street executive and a chairman of the Trump transition team, earlier in the day.
Ms. McMahon will be in charge of overseeing what is widely expected to be a thorough and determined dismantling of the department’s core functions, as Mr. Trump and many of those in his orbit have questioned the agency’s purpose and disparaged its work as overregulating schools on political and ideological terms.
Other than a brief appointment in 2009 to the Connecticut State Board of Education, where she served for just over a year, Ms. McMahon has no experience in overseeing education policy. She would assume the role at a time when school districts across the country are facing budget shortfalls, many students are not making up ground lost during the pandemic in reading and math, and many colleges and universities are shrinking and closing amid a larger loss of faith in the value of higher education.
While Mr. Trump has repeatedly called for an outright dissolution of the agency, any effort to shutter it would require congressional action and support from some Republican lawmakers whose districts depend on federal aid for public education.
But the America First Policy Institute has set out a more immediate list of changes it says could be achieved through vastly changing the department’s priorities. Those include stopping schools from “promoting inaccurate and unpatriotic concepts” about American history surrounding institutionalized racism, and expanding “school choice” programs that direct more public funds to parents to spend on home-schooling, online classes or at private and religious schools.
On Monday, Vivek Ramaswamy, who is expected to recommend and plan steep cuts to the federal work force as a leader of the proposed government efficiency department, voiced support on social media for a proposal to shut down the department, calling the idea a “very reasonable proposal.”
Ms. McMahon has for decades been a financial supporter of Mr. Trump’s political campaigns and the Trump Foundation, the charitable organization that is now defunct. She gave more than $7 million to two pro-Trump super PACs in 2016, according to data from the watchdog group OpenSecrets. In 2024, she gave $10 million to the Make America Great Again PAC.
In 2009, Ms. McMahon stepped down as chief executive of World Wrestling Entertainment to run as a Republican to represent Connecticut in the U.S. Senate. She spent heavily to fund her own campaign, winning her party’s nomination, but lost to the Democrats Richard Blumenthal in 2010 and Chris Murphy in 2012.
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Mr. Trump’s ties to Ms. McMahon and her husband, Vince McMahon, go back decades. He served as a sponsor for the W.W.E. broadcast WrestleMania when it appeared in Atlantic City, N.J., in the late 1980s, and later appeared in his own story lines on WrestleMania that had him throwing punches in the ring and shaving Mr. McMahon’s head.
The two had a fake feud in which Mr. Trump pretended to buy the franchise from Mr. McMahon — causing a real-life market upset for the company’s stock — then sell it back for twice the price. In 2013, W.W.E. inducted Mr. Trump into its hall of fame.
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