Department of Education secretary nominee Linda McMahon of rasslin’ fame. Photo: Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
It’s easy to look at the Trump administration’s early rampage through the federal bureaucracy and see an unstoppable steamroller. The Office of Management and Budget, often called the nerve center of the federal government, has been fully MAGA-ized to the extent that its temporary director felt empowered to place a freeze on a vast swath of federal spending, even without consulting the White House. Then there’s the powerful if obscure Office of Personnel Management and the General Services Administration, which together supervise federal employees and federally owned buildings. They’ve both been invaded and occupied by Elon Musk’s Geek Kiddie Corps of DOGE operatives, who seem to be in charge of a vast array of sensitive data and are getting rid of career employees who get in their way. And most spectacularly, the administration has moved on several fronts to completely gut the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) as a symbol of the foreign aid that America First activists hate like sin itself.
But one of the next cookies on the plate, the U.S. Department of Education, which Trump has promised to eliminate entirely, may be tougher to chew. Yes, Musk has sent some of his geeks into the agency to look around and also fire staffers alleged to have run afoul of Trump’s ban on DEI activities. Trump himself has issued another early presidential order instructing the Department of Education to wage war before it dies on alleged “indoctrination” of kids around the country by anti-American “radicals.” And word is the administration is preparing a really big executive order killing off any functions of the department that aren’t congressional authorized and asking Congress to kill or reassign the rest of them in legislation.
This half-a-loaf approach to abolishing an agency that many conservatives have hated since its creation in 1979 reflects two realities that even Trump and Musk have to acknowledge to some extent. First, many Department of Education programs carry out mandates explicitly created by Congress that just can’t be abolished by executive fiat. And second, some of these functions — and for that matter, the existence of a federal department focused on education — are very popular, even among Republicans. An additional complication is that Trump’s nominee to run the zombie agency, Linda McMahon, a scandal-plagued professional-wrestling executive, hasn’t even obtained a confirmation hearing pending her completion of required background-search information. It’s helpful to have an onsite undertaker when you are trying to bury a Cabinet-level department.
Presumably when congressional Republicans finally figure out their strategy for implementing Trump legislative agenda via one or two budget-reconciliation bills, they will try to determine if there is consensus support for a provision killing the Department of Education. There will certainly be enthusiasm for doing so among Christian-nationalist types who largely oppose “government schools” altogether and would prefer simply to direct public subsidies to private and religious schools (and to homeschoolers) under the doctrine of “parental choice.” Yet another Trump order has prioritized school choice as a policy matter, whether or not there is a federal agency to spur it on.
One of the biggest political problems for these schemes may come from the powerful grassroots network of parents, teachers, and citizens groups supporting the federal guarantee of special-education offerings around the country, an important mission of the current department. This is one of many areas where GOP plans to massively reduce domestic spending outside Social Security and Medicare could make proposals to eliminate the Department of Education especially fraught, as Education Week explained:
If Republican lawmakers in Congress execute Trump’s promises to slash the federal budget and cut spending on education, states and districts could be forced to dedicate a larger share of their finite budgets to the costs of serving students with disabilities, at the expense of other crucial priorities.
And the impacts on America’s large population of people with disabilities could be far-reaching. If Trump acts on plans to slash federal Medicaid funding, K-12 students and adults with disabilities could face steeper hurdles to accessing affordable health care.
Current federal-education programs also provide critical subsidies to many school systems via Title I grants that prioritize federal funding for schools serving disadvantaged kids. Republican governors and state legislators could have issues with the potential demolition of these grants.
Beyond these specific areas, education is simply not an unpopular focus of federal money and staff, unlike, say, the “foreign aid” doled out by USAID. A recent Wall Street Journal poll showed 61 percent of Americans oppose plans to eliminate the Department of Education. And a bipartisan November 2024 survey showed rank-and-file Republicans opposing this idea by a two-to-one margin.
This is one of quite a few Trump agenda items that will test whether Republicans at either end of Pennsylvania Avenue want to cash in political capital to do something that a segment of the MAGA base loves but that the general electorate doesn’t like at all. Even if Elon Musk or Christian nationalists want to kill the Department of Education, Republican members of Congress from swing districts may feel otherwise.
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