On March 20, President Donald J. Trump passed an executive order to close the U.S. Department of Education (DOE). The order directed the Secretary of Education to return authority over education to the states “while ensuring the effective and uninterrupted delivery of services.”
Congress assigned many of the DOE’s responsibilities, so the president can’t dismantle the department without an act of Congress or legally direct the agency to refrain from actions it is required to do by law.
The executive order already faces numerous legal challenges. Republican lawmakers also proposed legislation to dissolve the DOE on Nov. 21, 2024, in the Senate and Jan. 31 in the House. The former had no co-sponsors, the latter 34, and neither has advanced past its initial committee.
Created by Congress in 1979, the DOE employs more than 4,000 people and has an annual budget of $79 billion, equivalent to about 5% of the 2025 federal budget. Schools are already largely funded and run on the state and local level, but the DOE does provide a number of key functions. For instance, it provides funding to help districts that serve lower-income communities and students with disabilities, manages college financial aid and student loans, and collects and analyzes public information on colleges and K-12 student performance.
Trump said the department’s “core necessities” would be preserved under his executive order — including funding for lower-income schools and students with disabilities as well as Pell grants, which help students who have exceptional financial need pay for college. The Trump administration also has been inconsistent in communicating which aspects of the DOE it would maintain, making it unclear what would survive a proposed dissolution.
Trump has derided the DOE as wasteful and polluted by liberal ideology, AP reports. He also has blamed the department for America’s lagging academic performance. His administration has already cut the department’s workforce in half.
It also made major cuts to the Office for Civil Rights, which promotes equal access to education, in part by enforcing antidiscrimination civil rights law, and the Institute of Education Sciences, which gathers data on the nation’s academic progress.
Trump has said states would do a better job managing education, which they largely already do. And the DOE does not influence what is taught in schools; that is up to the states.
“It is not the business of the federal government to be involved in curriculum or personnel hiring,” says Kenneth Wong, a professor of education policy at Brown University.
Some Republicans, including Ronald Reagan, have been pushing to dissolve the DOE almost since its creation. They argue that education policy should be left to the states and, more recently, that the federal government uses the DOE to push “woke” political ideology about gender and race onto students.
“For decades, [the DOE] has funneled billions of taxpayer dollars into a failing system — one that prioritizes leftist indoctrination over academic excellence, all while student achievement stagnates and America falls further behind,” said Kevin Roberts, president of The Heritage Foundation.
Advocates for public schools said eliminating the DOE would leave children behind, particularly poor students, those still learning English, disabled students and racial and ethnic minorities.
“Gutting the agency that is charged [with ensuring] equal access to education for every child is only going to create an underclass of students,” said Weadé James, senior director of K-12 education policy at the Center for American Progress, a think tank that advocates for racial equity policies and increased investment in public schools.
Although Trump said he still intends to provide funding for lower-income areas, the new Secretary of Education Linda McMahon has suggested doling that money out to states as block grants, which critics say is a way to defund public education. Block grants allow politicians to “direct funds as they see fit, and that could be away from schools,” said Wil Del Pilar, senior vice president of EdTrust, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank that advocates for educational equity.
The DOE also has traditionally defended the rights of students with disabilities and students facing harassment due to their race.
Proponents of the department argue that defunding this work abdicates the government’s responsibility to address inequality.
