President Trump made a lot of promises on the campaign trail. Border security, energy expansion, rolling back “woke” policies in government institutions. Most of those boxes have already been checked. But one promise that many voters were quietly hoping for, without necessarily expecting it to happen, was dismantling the Department of Education. That one is now getting checked off too.
The Department of Education announced it would be significantly downsizing, moving several of its divisions to other federal agencies. It is a major step in Trump’s broader goal of stripping the department down to a shadow of its former self, short of fully eliminating it.
As originally reported, Trump nominated Linda McMahon as Education Secretary, and she took the job with full knowledge of his intentions. She has been entirely on board with the mission to disassemble the agency and, in Trump’s words, “move education back to the states where it belongs.”
The reasoning behind the push is straightforward. American primary education consistently lags behind other industrialized nations, despite enormous federal spending. The White House has pointed out that the U.S. Department of Education has spent more than $3 trillion on the federal education bureaucracy since 1980, with what it describes as dismal results.
McMahon addressed the restructuring directly. “The Trump Administration has been clear: as we scale back federal micromanagement when it hinders success, we are equally committed to bolstering the efficacy of federal oversight where it is essential,” she said in a statement.
Fully shutting the department down is not something Trump can do on his own. That would require an act of Congress, and no Democratic lawmaker is expected to support it. Critics of the department argue that Democrats have a vested interest in keeping it alive because it has served as a vehicle for pushing ideological mandates into public schools nationwide.
So Trump is doing what he can within his executive authority. By moving divisions out and reducing the department’s footprint, the goal is to leave it largely hollowed out even if the nameplate on the door remains.
It is a significant development for the millions of voters who saw federal overreach in education as a genuine problem, not just a talking point. Whether the restructuring produces better outcomes for students remains to be seen, but the political promise has been kept.