Donald Trump Orders Education Department Dismantled

Describing it as a move “45 years in the making,” Donald Trump on Thursday signed an executive order directing Education Secretary Linda McMahon to begin dismantling the department she leads. “No president ever got around to doing it, but I’m getting around to doing it,” Trump said, insisting that the sweeping and controversial measure is extraordinarily popular.

“We’re gonna shut down and shut it down as quickly as possible,” Trump said at a signing ceremony that featured Republican governors like Ron DeSantis, Moms for Liberty cofounder Tiffany Justice, and kids seated at what looked like school desks. “It’s gonna work,” he added.

And with that, Trump officially moved to eliminate the DOE, realizing a longstanding right-wing fantasy and one of the key ambitions of Project 2025, the governing blueprint Trump swore off on the campaign trail last year. “What a win for American children,” Heritage President Kevin Roberts wrote Wednesday, after USA Today and other outlets reported hours earlier that Trump would sign the executive order.

The move—which will surely face legal challenges—comes as Trump consolidates power with extreme government cuts, and as he targets education more broadly with attacks on diversity initiatives in higher education and several high-profile crackdowns on foreign-born academics.

It had always been a question of when, not if, Trump would take aim at the department, which had been established by Congress in 1979 under President Jimmy Carter. He’d been expected to direct McMahon to begin shuttering the $268 billion department earlier this month, but pulled back after word of the signing emerged in news reports: “Fake news,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said at the time. Trump was “NOT signing an Executive Order on the Department of Education today.”

Some education advocates counted that as a win. But the Trump administration would nevertheless begin hobbling the department, hitting DOE with severe cuts last week: More than 1,300 of its employees were laid off, effectively halving the staff at the department. And while McMahon insisted that “all of [its essential functions] are being met,” the purge—including within the office of Federal Student Aid—was sure to have a dramatic impact on its ability to function. “If you’re a student, or you’re a public school teacher, Trump is sending a message loud and clear,” Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren said last week. “He doesn’t care about you, and he doesn’t care about your family.”

The executive order Thursday is meant to be a continuation and formalization of what the administration has already been doing to gut the department—and, of course, for Trump and his allies to take another victory lap in their race to radically remake America. Indeed, the fiat isn’t only poised to have sweeping impacts on education in the US; it is perhaps Trump’s boldest assertion of executive authority. The president, who has been testing the judicial branch’s check on him, has already sidestepped—and essentially sidelined—the legislative branch, assuming power over the purse that normally rests with Congress and empowering Elon Musk to decimate agencies established by lawmakers on Capitol Hill.

The Department of Education is the largest target of that power grab. It’s been subjected not just to the mass firings that have hit other departments but to outright elimination—something that, in theory, can only be done by the legislative branch that created it. (Ahead of the order, Leavitt acknowledged that the president could not officially shut down the department with the power of his pen.) It’s unclear if he has the votes on Capitol Hill for that; even two Republican senators, Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski, have expressed opposition to abolishing the department entirely, making it unlikely that Trump could get the 60 votes he needs in the upper chamber to eliminate it through normal procedures. The question, for both the education system and the separation of powers, is: Will that technicality even matter?