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 order is the culmination of Trump’s campaign pledges to dismantle the federal Education Department, which was founded in 1979 under President Jimmy Carter.
“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.
Project 2025 also promoted Trump’s proposal, which was included in the Republican Party platform last summer.
Over 50 million pupils are served by the department’s elementary and secondary programs in over 98,000 public and 32,000 private institutions. Additionally, according to the agency, “more than 12 million postsecondary students” get “grant, loan, and work-study assistance.”
In a statement released Tuesday, Becky Pringle, president of the National Education Association, a significant labor organization, cautioned that Trump’s upcoming order will harm families and kids, particularly those in vulnerable groups.
Trump’s power grab, if it materialized, would deprive our most vulnerable students of resources, increase class sizes, eliminate job training programs, make college more costly and unaffordable for middle-class families, eliminate special education services for students with disabilities, and undermine civil rights protections for students, she said. “Americans did not vote for, and do not support, ending the federal government s commitment to ensuring equal educational opportunities for every child.”
Soon after the agency was established, President Ronald Reagan began to push for its dissolution, garnering Republican support for the move. However, Republicans in Congress have failed to enact legislation to accomplish this.
Representatives David Rouzer of North Carolina and Thomas Massie of Kentucky submitted measures last month that would abolish the department.All 27 co-sponsors of Massie’s legislation are Republicans. His office stated that it expects Sen. Mike Rounds, R-S.D., to introduce a bill identical to the one he introduced in the previous Congress.
The House and Senate are controlled by Republicans, but any attempt to dismantle the department would encounter significant resistance in the upper house, where a filibuster must be broken with 60 votes in order to move on to a final vote. It would be difficult for such a bill to succeed because Republicans would need Democratic backing to accomplish that given their slim majority.
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.
A number of the Republican contenders who faced Trump in the previous year’s presidential primary supported the idea of dismantling or eliminating the federal Department of Education, which 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.