Two months after the Education Department officially opened its doors in 1980, Republicans approved a policy platform calling on Congress to shut it down.
Now, more than four decades later, President Trump may come closer than any other Republican president to making that dream a reality.
Though doing away with the agency would require an act of Congress, Mr. Trump has devoted himself to the goal, and is said to be preparing an executive order with the aim of dismantling it.
Mr. Trump’s fixation has reinvigorated the debate over the role of the federal government in education, creating a powerful point of unity between the ideological factions of his party: traditional establishment Republicans and die-hard adherents of his Make America Great Again movement.
“This is a counterrevolution against a hostile and nihilistic bureaucracy,” said Christopher F. Rufo, a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute think tank and a trustee of New College of Florida.
Here is how the party got to this moment.
Conservatives make their argument.
Right from the start, Republicans opposed President Jimmy Carter’s signature on a 1979 law creating the department, citing beliefs in limited government control, fiscal responsibility and local autonomy.
They argued that education should be primarily managed at the state and local levels rather than through federal mandates.
A year later, Ronald Reagan won the White House, his third attempt at the presidency, thanks to a promise that he would rein in a federal government that he said had overstepped its bounds on myriad issues, including education. In 1982, Mr. Reagan used his State of the Union address to call on Congress to eliminate two agencies: the Energy Department and the Education Department.
“We must cut out more nonessential government spending and root out more waste, and we will continue our efforts to reduce the number of employees in the federal work force,” Mr. Reagan said.
He was unable to persuade Democrats in control of the House to go along with his plan, and the issue started to fade as a top priority for Republicans — but never quite disappeared.
Newt Gingrich, then the speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, called for the abolition of the agency in the mid-1990s. In the 2008 Republican presidential primary, both Representative Ron Paul and former Gov. Mitt Romney supported either terminating the Education Department or drastically reducing its size.
Last year, a proposal to eliminate the agency was voted down in the Republican-controlled House despite a strong majority within the party, as 161 Republicans supported the measure while 60 opposed it.
The Education Department’s primary role has been sending federal money to public schools, administering college financial aid and managing federal student loans. The agency enforces civil rights laws in schools and supports programs for students with disabilities.
“The history of the Education Department is as a civil rights agency, the place that ensures that students with disabilities get the services they need, that English-learners get the help they need,” John B. King Jr., who served as education secretary during the Obama administration and is now chancellor of the State University of New York, told reporters on Thursday. “Taking that away harms students and families.”
Trump reinvigorates the debate.
Mr. Trump rarely mentioned education during his first presidential campaign in 2016, other than to criticize Common Core standards, which aimed to create some consistency across states. He did occasionally call for eliminating the Education Department, though his administration did not make it a focus.
But Mr. Trump is adept at seizing on issues that resonate with his conservative base. During his 2024 campaign, that meant adopting the concerns of the parents’ rights movement that grew out of the backlash to school shutdowns and other restrictions during the coronavirus pandemic.
That movement gained steam by organizing around opposition to progressive agendas that promoted mandating certain education standards and inclusive policies for L.G.B.T.Q. students. Activists contended that these policies undermined parental rights and values.
In that way, Mr. Trump’s desire to eliminate the Education Department became intertwined with his focus on eradicating diversity, equity and inclusion programs from the federal government, a dynamic that has played out vividly through his purge of personnel and policies at the agency in the weeks since his return to office.
In a draft of an executive order aimed at dismantling the department that circulated in Washington this week, Mr. Trump’s only specific instructions for Education Secretary Linda McMahon were to terminate any remaining diversity, equity and inclusion programs.
On Mr. Trump’s campaign website, he criticizes gender or transgender issues eight times in his list of 10 principles for “great schools.”
“One reason this issue has so much momentum was definitely the pandemic and the populist frustration that Washington was not on the side of parents,” said Frederick Hess, the director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute. “The Department of Education really became emblematic of a lot of what was going on that was wrong.”
Project 2025 called for dismantling the department, too.
A multitude of Mr. Trump’s actions during his first six weeks in office were hinted at in Project 2025, the right-wing blueprint for overhauling the federal government.
This includes an excoriation of the Education Department, which is pilloried in the foreword of the 992-page document for being staffed by workers who “inject racist, anti-American, ahistorical propaganda into America’s classrooms.”
The document maintains that schools should be responsive to parents rather than “leftist advocates intent on indoctrination,” and that student test scores have not improved despite 45 years of federal spending. But it does not explain how that might change by giving more power to state and local school districts, which have spent exponentially more on education during that same time.
“This department is an example of federal intrusion into a traditionally state and local realm,” the Project 2025 blueprint reads. “For the sake of American children, Congress should shutter it and return control of education to the states.”
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