President Donald Trump, left, holds up a signed executive order as young people hold up copies of the executive order they signed at an education event in the East Room of the White House in Washington on March 20, 2025.
Credit: Ben Curtis/AP Photo
President Donald Trump signed an executive order Thursday directing U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon to work toward eliminating the Department of Education, pushing forward a campaign promise to dismantle an agency that has long been maligned by conservatives.
With a group of students as a prop busily working on school desks behind him, Trump said, “My administration will take all lawful steps to shut down the department.”
The order instructs Education Secretary Linda McMahon to “take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education and return authority over education to the States and local communities while ensuring the effective and uninterrupted delivery of services, programs, and benefits on which Americans rely.”
The federal government funds less than 10% of public school budgets, though much of that money supports especially vulnerable students. The department also oversees programs that help students pay college tuition, including Pell grants for low-income students.
The White House has already taken steps to gut the Education Department by roughly halving its workforce of 4,100, but officially eliminating the Cabinet-level agency would require congressional action.
The administration has also vowed to ship other critical functions to other federal departments — services for students with disabilities and low-income students to the Department of Health and Human Services and student loans to the Treasury Department.
“Closing the Department does not mean cutting off funds from those who depend on them — we will continue to support K-12 students, students with special needs, college student borrowers, and others who rely on essential programs,” McMahon said in a statement. “We’re going to follow the law and eliminate the bureaucracy responsibly by working through Congress to ensure a lawful and orderly transition.”
Children’s advocates were skeptical. The executive order “could result in a catastrophic impact on the country’s most vulnerable students and cutting much-needed funding will specifically impact students of color, students with disabilities and students in low-income communities,” the Association of California School Administrators said in a statement.
Over the decades, Republicans have repeatedly called for shutting down the department, although doing so would require 60 votes in the Senate — unlikely because Republicans now hold only 53 seats.
Nonetheless, Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-Louisiana, chairman of the Senate education committee, said in a statement, “Since the Department can only be shut down with congressional approval, I will support the President’s goals by submitting legislation to accomplish this as soon as possible.”
House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-Louisiana, praised the order in a post on X “President Trump is keeping his promise and returning education to the states,” but didn’t pledge to bring the issue to a vote. David Cleary, who worked on education issues on Capitol Hill for two decades, indicated he wouldn’t be surprised if Johnson didn’t.
“Leaders don’t like to spend time on things they know can’t get over the finish line,” he told the Washington Post.
California Attorney General Rob Bonta, who has sued the administration over the wholesale firing of federal employees and abrupt cancelation of research contracts, said he would monitor how the executive order is carried out.
While acknowledging the obligation to go through Congress, “the Administration continues to do everything it can to destroy the department’s ability to carry out its most vital, congressionally mandated functions — with the clearly stated ‘final mission’ of shuttering the Department for good,” he said in a statement. “My office will be looking at what this executive order actually does — not what the President says it will do.”
Trump used the executive order to continue his attack on equity-focused education programs. The Secretary of Education will ensure that Department of Education funds will follow federal law and administration policy, it states, “including the requirement that any program or activity receiving Federal assistance terminate illegal discrimination obscured under the label ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ or similar terms and programs promoting gender ideology.”
In response, Jessie Ryan, president of the Campaign for College Opportunity, said the continued attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion and dismantling of the department “will leave millions of students and their families vulnerable to discrimination and deny them the opportunity to succeed in school, achieve their individual potential, and prepare for the future workforce. We cannot allow this administration to steamroll students and communities to achieve its agenda.”
Guillermo Mayer, President and CEO of the nonprofit Public Advocates, attributed the executive order to the Administration’s larger aim.
“Nobody should be fooled,” he said. “While this order purports to reduce federal bureaucracy, it’s part of a longer-term plan to eliminate federal oversight in education and give states free rein to redirect billions of dollars away from public schools and towards private school vouchers. The ultimate goal is to erode the public’s trust in our system of public education.”
