Along with his newly sworn-in Secretary of Education Linda McMahon, Trump said the department had failed in its mission, calling it an overly bureaucratic system burdening schools with regulations and paperwork.
“We’re going to shut it down and shut it down as quickly as possible,” Trump said before signing the order.
Trump argued that the United States spends more money than most other countries on education, yet its maths performance ranks among the lowest and has been declining for decades.
Trump has accused the education system of indoctrinating students with programmes incorporating diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), and teaching students sexual, racial, and political material.
Part of Trump’s plan of cutting into the federal government through the Department of Government Efficiency is also to eliminate its DEI initiatives.
The Department of Education was created in 1979 and pioneered by President Jimmy Carter as a form of welfare access to impoverished children.
Two years later, President Ronald Reagan tried to abolish it on the idea that it was government overreach and that the authority should be left to states and local communities, but he didn’t receive enough support from Congress.
Since then, over the next nearly 50 years many Republicans have been against it, while many Democrats have cheered it.
In order to fully end the Department of Education, Trump would need full support from Congress, which is unlikely to happen since the Democratic Party stands in full opposition to any cuts to the department, let alone a complete abolishment.
The Republican Party leads by a slim 53–47 majority over Democrats in the Senate, and approval would need 60 votes.
What they can do, though, is gut it from the inside, which is effectively what they have been doing by continuing to cut programmes and lay off staff, although certain funding and welfare programmes will remain in place.
Similar to the actions with USAID, in which 50,000 staff members were laid off last month, on March 11 McMahon issued the department’s final mission in a press release: a 50 percent reduction in workforce from 4,133 to 2,183 employees.
“We’re going to be returning education, very simply, back to the states where it belongs,” Trump said.
While some states have approved of this newfound freedom, student unions have vowed to flood the courts with lawsuits.
National Education Association President Becky Pringle said in a statement, “If successful, Trump’s continued actions will hurt all students by sending class sizes soaring, cutting job training programs, making higher education more expensive and out of reach for middle-class families, taking away special education services for students with disabilities, and gutting student civil rights protections.”
