Why Trump wants to end the Department of Education — and what will change if he succeeds

Late Wednesday, the Wall Street Journal reported that President Trump is planning to sign an executive order aimed at abolishing the U.S. Department of Education.

Newly confirmed Education Secretary Linda McMahon must “take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Education Department,” the draft order says. "The Federal bureaucratic hold on education must end.”

Instead, the draft continues, “the Department of Education's main functions can, and should, be returned to the States."

Initially, the Wall Street Journal said Trump would sign the order “as soon as Thursday,” but the White House “pulled the expected signing,” according to ABC News. The president is likely to revisit the issue at a later date.

So can Trump really dismantle the Department of Education? And what will happen if he does? Here’s everything you need to know.

Where did the Department of Education come from?

In 1867, President Andrew Johnson signed legislation establishing a Department of Education. Just one year later, however, the department was demoted to an Office of Education within the Department of the Interior amid worries that it would exert too much control over local schools. The office initially had four employees and a budget of $15,000; its job was to gather information and advise the nation’s educators.

In 1939, the Office of Education moved to the Federal Security Agency; in 1953, it shifted to the new Department of Health, Education and Welfare. But it wasn’t until 1979 that the office became a cabinet-level department of its own.

Federal education spending had soared during the '50s, '60s and '70s — to compete with the Soviet Union in science; to battle poverty; to provide equal access for women, people of color and Americans with disabilities. As a result, President Jimmy Carter urged Congress to consolidate the scattered, education-related functions of other departments — Defense, Justice, Agriculture, and Housing and Urban Development — into a new (and hopefully more efficient) U.S. Department of Education.

What does the Department of Education do?

Today the Department of Education oversees a budget of $268 billion. Its role, according to the DOE itself, is to “establish policy for, administer and coordinate most federal assistance to education.”

That assistance takes two forms. The first is loans and grants. A full 60% of the Education Department’s 2024 budget (or $160 billion) went to the Office of Federal Student Aid, which administers Pell Grants, federal direct subsidized loans, federal direct unsubsidized loans and the federal work-study program. Pell Grants help roughly one-third of U.S. undergraduates — all from lower-income families — pay for college, with an average award of about $4,500. At the same time, more than half of undergraduates in the United States receive federal loans to make college more affordable.

The second form of DOE assistance is spending on public elementary and secondary education. The largest federal fund for K-12 schools is Title I, which supplements state and local funding for low-achieving children, especially in poor areas ($18.4 billion in 2023). The next largest is the Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act (IDEA), which helps schools cover special-education costs ($14.2 billion in 2023). Through these programs and others like them — Title IX, Title VI, the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 — the Department of Education holds schools accountable for complying with federal nondiscrimination laws.

All told, public K-12 schools receive about $125 billion in federal funding each year, or roughly $2,500 per student.

That might sound like a big number, but it still represents less than 14% of the total spent on public K-12 education in the U.S. The other 86% comes from localities (often through property taxes) and state education departments.

The idea behind federal spending on education — which started in earnest after Congress passed the Elementary and Secondary Education Act in 1965 — is to provide supplementary funding that will help states and localities close achievement gaps between students from different backgrounds.

Seeking to increase accountability and achievement, President George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act (2002) tied some of this federal funding to statewide standards of student testing and teacher performance. In response to criticism, President Barack Obama’s Every Student Succeeds Act (2015) retained NCLB’s focus on accountability while giving states more control over testing and reform.

Why does Trump want to end the Department of Education?

According to his draft order, Trump believes that "the experiment of controlling American education through Federal programs and dollars — and the unaccountable bureaucrats those programs and dollars support — has failed our children, our teachers, and our families.”

This is not a new argument. In 1980 — just one year after its creation — Ronald Reagan campaigned on eliminating the Department of Education, slashing bilingual education and gutting federal funding for public schools.

“Better education doesn't mean a bigger Department of Education,” Reagan said in 1983. “In fact, that department should be abolished.”

Trump has long agreed. "I think that education should be local, absolutely,” he said while campaigning in 2015. I think that for people in Washington to be setting curriculum and to be setting all sorts of standards for people living in Iowa and other places is ridiculous."

During his first term, Trump took various steps to reduce the Education Department’s power. But he didn’t eliminate it.

More recently, however, he has started to blame the department for imposing policies designed to promote diversity, equity and inclusion on local districts — and used that argument to justify ending it once and for all.

“We will drain the government education swamp and stop the abuse of your taxpayer dollars to indoctrinate America’s youth with all sorts of things that you don’t want to have our youth hearing,” Trump said during the 2024 campaign.

“I told Linda [McMahon]: ‘Linda, I hope you do a great job in putting yourself out of a job,’” he added last month. “I want her to put herself out of a job — Education Department.”

Can Trump single-handedly end the Department of Education?

The short answer is no. The department was established by an act of Congress, meaning that Congress would need to pass another law to abolish it. Trump cannot just dissolve a cabinet-level agency with the stroke of his pen — and he’s extremely unlikely to find 60 votes in the U.S. Senate to eliminate the department either. Even if every Republican senator voted yes — a big if — Trump would still fall seven votes short.

At her confirmation hearing last month, McMahon admitted as much.

“Yes or no: Do you agree that since the department was created by Congress, it would need an act of Congress to actually close the Department of Education?” asked Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana.

“President Trump understands that we’ll be working with Congress,” McMahon replied. “We’d like to do this right.”

The longer answer, however, is that the Trump White House can do a lot to alter the Department of Education without congressional approval. Already, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has cut dozens of contracts it dismissed as “woke” and wasteful, firing or suspending scores of employees while gutting the Institute of Education Sciences, which gathers data on America’s academic progress.

So what happens if Trump succeeds?

If Congress actually eliminated the Department of Education — and all the programs it funds — the consequences would be huge.

According to experts who spoke to ABC News, such a move would “gut public education funding and disproportionately impact high-need students across the country who rely on statutorily authorized programs,” leaving “billions of dollars' worth of funds, scholarships and grants hanging in the balance for millions of students in the U.S.”

For her part, McMahon has insisted that isn’t Trump’s vision, or hers. “It is not the president’s goal to defund the programs,” she said during her confirmation hearing. “It is only to have it operate more efficiently.”

“The president’s mission,” she continued, “is to return education to the states. I believe as he does that the best education is closest to the child and not certainly from Washington, D.C.”

But what is that likely to mean in real-world terms? For years, Republicans who oppose the Department of Education have talked more about moving its most popular programs to other departments rather than ending them altogether — and McMahon has sounded similar notes.

“Long before there was a Department of Education, we fulfilled the programs of our educational system,” she said last month. “Are there other areas, other agencies, where parts of the Department of Education could better serve our students and our parents on a local level?”

This suggests that Trump is likely to propose a similar reorganization in the months ahead.

The president has also spoken of imposing different conditions on public schools that receive federal funds. He recently vowed, for instance, to cut off money for schools and colleges that push “critical race theory, transgender insanity and other inappropriate racial, sexual or political content.” He has also said that he would like to reward states and schools that end teacher tenure and support universal school choice programs.

It’s unclear how the Department of Education’s long-standing role in enforcing federal protections for poor children, children of color and children with disabilities would work under Trump’s new system.

But the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 — the far-right blueprint that Trump seems to be following in his second term — offers one possible glimpse. Its authors suggest first shifting oversight of such programs to the Department of Health and Human Services — before eventually converting their funding to no-strings-attached block grants that would be sent to the states to spend as they please.