President Donald Trump on Thursday signed an executive order to begin dismantling the US Department of Education, seeking to fulfill decades of conservative ambition to get rid of the agency, but raising new questions for the country’s millions of public schools, student-loan holders and parents.
No president in modern history has tried to close down a Cabinet-level agency. Shutting down the department wholesale would require an act of Congress, which created the agency in 1979. Trump officials acknowledge they don’t have the necessary votes to dissolve the department that way; instead, the order Trump signed Thursday instructed 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.”
Speaking in the East Room, surrounded by school children in uniforms sitting at classroom desks, Trump said, “We’re going to shut it down, and shut it down as quickly as possible.”
How precisely the components of the Education Department would be dismantled wasn’t precisely clear.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said ahead of Thursday’s signing that the order would move to “greatly minimize the agency,” but that certain “critical functions” like student loans and administering grants for at-risk students would remain under the agency’s umbrella.
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