President Donald Trump on Thursday signed an executive order dismantling the Department of Education, following through on a key campaign promise that supporters argue will strengthen parental rights and improve academic outcomes across the country.
Trump’s order directs Education Secretary Linda McMahon to “take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education and return education authority to the States and local communities.”
However, McMahon is also directed to “ensure the effective and uninterrupted delivery of services, programs, and benefits on which Americans rely.”
Promises made, promises kept: President Trump signs an executive order to officially begin the process of dismantling the Department of Education. pic.twitter.com/kJj5UcMU3o
— Daily Wire (@realDailyWire) March 20, 2025
Also, any programs still receiving Department of Education funds will “terminate illegal discrimination obscured under the label ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ or similar terms and programs promoting gender ideology.”
“Everybody knows it’s right. The Democrats know it’s right,” Trump said just before signing the order. “We’re going to be returning education, very simply, back to the states where it belongs, and this is a very popular thing to do, but much more importantly, it’s a common sense thing to do, and it’s going to work. Absolutely, it’s going to work.”
Trump said the United States has “two stats you don’t want — the most money spent per pupil, and you’re at the bottom of the list, and that’s where we are, like it or not, and we’ve been there for a long time.”
“The United States spends more money on education by far than any other country…but yet we rank near the bottom of the list in terms of success.
Those are two stats you don’t want.”@POTUS pic.twitter.com/HFYXSn6JBw
— Daily Wire (@realDailyWire) March 20, 2025
The president said Republican governors want “so badly” to “take their children back and really teach their children individually. Probably the cost will be half, and the education will be maybe many, many times better.”
Trump added that he wanted to make “one little personal statement,” that “teachers, to me, are among the most important people in this country, and we’re going to take care of our teachers, and I don’t care if they’re in the union or not in the union. That doesn’t matter.”
TRUMP: “Teachers to me are among the most important people in this country, and we’re going to take care of our teachers.”
👏👏👏 pic.twitter.com/rLH0MoJQqc
— Daily Wire (@realDailyWire) March 20, 2025
He said Thursday’s order is about “our most cherished group of people, and that’s our children. We want to have our children well educated. We want them to love going to school. We have examples of it. Look at those beautiful, bright-eyed faces. They are so smart.”
A group of children, teachers, and advocates for school choice and parental rights including Moms for Liberty also joined Trump for the signing ceremony. Several Republican governors including Florida’s Ron DeSantis, Texas’ Greg Abbott, and Tennessee’s Bill Lee also attended.
Trump’s move to close the department follows through on a key campaign promise that was met with cheers on the campaign trail.
“I say it all the time, I’m dying to get back to do this. We will ultimately eliminate the federal Department of Education,” Trump said at a September rally in Wisconsin. “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.”
Frustration with public schools reached a boiling point over the last several years. During the pandemic, parents pleaded with schools to open the classrooms and stop requiring face masks on children. After COVID, parents complained of crippling learning loss, schools hiding children’s gender identity changes, and teachers pushing controversial ideologies like Critical Race Theory.
The White House pointed out in a fact sheet ahead of Thursday’s order that 13-year-olds’ reading and math scores are the lowest in decades despite skyrocketing spending per student. Meanwhile, the Biden administration spent billions of dollars on entrenching “radical ideologies” in education and bureaucratic red tape, the White House said.
Virginia Gentles, who worked in the Bush administration’s Department of Education and often testifies to Congress on education, attended Thursday’s order signing and said academic outcomes have been “abysmal” since the federal government took on an outsized role in education.
“It’s not like that increase in the federal role since the creation of the Department of Education has resulted in excellent outcomes, academic performance that we should be proud of as a country,” Gentles told The Daily Wire. “In fact, it’s the opposite, particularly if you look at the declines over the last ten years and especially the plummet in academic outcomes the last five years.”
“So my perspective as a former bureaucrat at multiple levels is that it’s time to reduce the strings coming from Washington,” said Gentles, who now directs the Education Freedom and Parental Rights Initiative at the Defense of Freedom Institute.
Critics have pointed out that the Education Department doesn’t do much educating. Though it spends $80 billion in taxpayer dollars each year, it has no say over public school curriculums, which are decided at the state and local levels. Instead, it doles out $18.4 billion annually for Title I, the low-income school district program, and $15.5 billion for special education. It also enforces certain Title IX civil rights laws and sets the rules for colleges to participate in the $1.6 trillion federal student loan program.
Gentles said the administration has been reassuring that funding will continue to flow, noting that the funding streams for disabled and low-income students have been set in law by Congress.
“But the very highly paid bureaucrats in Washington need to have their power and their control and their influence diminished,” Gentles said.
She also criticized the “whiplash” of the department’s changing political agenda, especially the Biden administration’s “dangerous and pervasive” actions on gender ideology.
“Every layer of the way they did business was meant to force gender ideology onto states and districts and schools and educators and students,” Gentles said. “That might have been the religion, the belief, the fervent passion of the appointees of the last administration, but it was dangerous and harmful, especially for emotionally vulnerable students. I want to see a change in the way education is structured in our country so that can’t happen, a handful of very powerful political appointees come in and impose a new regime across the country that is extremely unhealthy and dangerous. That has to stop.”
“And it’s not over,” she said, explaining that gender ideology is now “baked into our education system” despite Trump’s executive orders banning it from public schools.
The administration has threatened to pull federal funding from states that refuse to comply with the administration’s executive orders on gender ideology and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.
Nicole Neily, president and founder of Parents Defending Education, said Thursday that “the status quo has very clearly failed American children and done little more than line the pockets of bureaucrats and activists,” and that it is “past time for a radical rethink of how education is administered in this country, because we cannot keep propping up a failing system.”
To eliminate the Department of Education outright, Trump would need an act of Congress, but his order dismantles the department as much as possible in the meantime.
Senator Bill Cassidy (R-LA) said he plans to introduce legislation soon to formally shutter the department.
“I agree with President Trump that the Department of Education has failed its mission,” Cassidy told The Daily Wire. “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.”
The Education Department has already eliminated about half its staffers in recent weeks. It also recently terminated over $600 million in grants for training teachers in “divisive ideologies” including social justice activism, anti-racism, and recruiting teachers based on race.
McMahon was only confirmed as Education Secretary earlier this month, but Trump previously said he hoped she would put herself “out of a job.”
Earlier this month, McMahon sent an email to staff promising to “send education back to the states,” saying Trump and the American people had “tasked us with accomplishing the elimination of the bureaucratic bloat here at the Education Department—a momentous final mission—quickly and responsibly.”
