Two people with knowledge of the plans informed NBC News that the White House is drafting an executive order to abolish the Department of Education.
A federal agency cannot be abolished by President Donald Trump on his own without Congress’s consent.
The proposed directive comes after Trump pledged throughout the campaign to dismantle the federal Education Department.
“One other thing I’ll be doing very early in the administration is closing up the Department of Education in Washington, D.C., and sending all education and education work and needs back to the states,” the then-candidate stated in a video shared to social media in September 2023.
Trump stated previously in the film that although American society spends more than $1 trillion year on public education systems, we are actually at the bottom of the list, not at the top.
Trump issued another education-related order last week, instructing the Education Department to provide states with direction within 60 days on how to use federal monies to strengthen their state-specific school choice programs.
The GOP has traditionally supported school choice, and in recent years, many Republican-led states have increased financing for low-income families to send their children to private or charter schools.
Eliminating or dismantling the federal Department of Education has emerged as a key Republican policy tenet in recent years.
On the Pennsylvania campaign trail in 2023, computer entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy demanded the dismantling of the Department of Education as part of the Republican presidential primary. Additionally, during a 2023 campaign appearance in New Hampshire, former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley declared that if elected, she would abolish the Department of Education.
Trump outlined his other goals for American education in a July 2024 campaign email. These included severing federal funding for any programs or schools that promote critical race theory, initiating civil rights investigations into Asian American-discriminating schools, establishing a new credentialing system to certify teachers who uphold patriotic values, and identifying and expelling radicals who have infiltrated the federal Department of Education.