Next Up for Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s Wood Chipper: The Department of Education

Donald Trump is looking to shutter the Department of Education—once he can figure out a way to smooth over the politics of such a dramatic move.

Earlier Thursday, it was reported that he would sign an executive order directing the DOE’s new head, former World Wrestling Entertainment CEO Linda McMahon, to dismantle the $268 billion department. “The Federal bureaucratic hold on education must end,” read a draft of the order obtained by ABC News. “The Department of Education’s main functions can, and should, be returned to the States.” Multiple outlets reported the president could sign the order as early as Thursday afternoon.

But White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt called the reports “fake news” later Thursday morning, saying the president was “NOT signing an Executive Order on the Department of Education today.”

That last word was key: ABC News later reported that Trump and McMahon still aim to kill the department, but they postponed the planned signing on Thursday due to “concern among top administration officials about the blowback the order would receive and the lack of messaging in place ahead of the rollout,” especially “how the administration would answer questions about how the executive order would impact the school lunch program along with other programs that could no longer exist.”

An education leader told ABC that the pullback—however brief—marked a “tremendous victory.” However, it’s too early to celebrate. Republicans have been seeking to shutter the DOE since it was established under Jimmy Carter in 1979, and finally doing so was a key goal of Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s governing blueprint, which Trump claimed to “know nothing about” during the 2024 campaign, but has followed since taking office. The DOE remains under threat; it is perhaps more a question of when, and how, Trump tries to blow it up.

If he does indeed try to eliminate it through an executive order, Trump would once again be defying the separation of powers at the heart of the American system and would almost certainly face legal challenges. But if he gets his way, the end of the DOE would have enormous effects on education in the United States.

Those impacts could be particularly disastrous if the administration implements them with the care it has demonstrated in its other efforts to gut the federal government—a crusade led by Elon Musk, whose unilateral moves to radically reshape the government have made even some in the GOP anxious.

In a meeting with House Republicans on Wednesday, Musk defended his haphazard approach, which has included scrambles to rehire federal employees caught up in his mass firings. According to Politico, Musk told lawmakers that he and his administration-adjacent Department of Government Efficiency “can’t bat a thousand all the time.”

That blasé response to the chaos he’s sowed seemed sufficient enough for the Republicans present, who suggested they might move to codify his cuts through legislation—in a sense, retroactively asserting their congressional authority. “He said he’s making mistakes. He’ll correct them, but his mission is to uncover where our tax money is,” Republican Congressman Ralph Norman told Politico. “Let the chips fall where they may.”

Musk’s “let the chips fall where they may” approach also seems good enough for some of the Trump-installed agency heads, like acting Social Security Administration commissioner Leland Dudek, who told advocates that DOGE—a band of “outsiders who are unfamiliar with the nuances of SSA programs”—are effectively in control of social insurance program. “DOGE people are learning and they will make mistakes,” Dudek said, according to The Washington Post. “But we have to let them see what is going on at SSA.”

Musk’s apparent takeover of Social Security—which Americans pay into, and which more than 70 million depend on—is emblematic of his and Trump’s broader project: Taking a wrecking ball to things they don’t understand, under the flimsiest of pretenses, with little regard for the consequences their actions will have for the public they claim to be serving.

“It’s just chaos, people are terrified, and no one knows anything,” one SSA employee told the Post, “including our supervisors.”