By: James Lynch – nationalreview.com – March 20, 2025

The long-expected executive order will likely face significant legal challenges.

President Donald Trump signed an executive order Thursday shuttering the Department of Education, fulfilling a long-standing conservative wish to do away with the agency.

Trump’s order directs Education Secretary Linda McMahon to take the “necessary steps” to close the $268 billion agency and transfer its authority back to the states. The order does not immediately shutter the agency, and it will require programs and services to continue uninterrupted.

“Everybody knows it’s right,” Trump said moments before signing the order, which he said was 45 years in the making. “We have to get our children educated.”

The long-expected executive order will likely face significant legal challenges over whether Trump has the authority to dismantle the agency. Fully closing down the Department of Education will require congressional approval.

Since the days of President Ronald Reagan, Republicans have sought to eliminate the Department of Education, created in 1979 under former President Jimmy Carter, for its role in promoting left-wing ideology and encroaching on state authority. The Education Department’s responsibilities primarily consist of allocating grant money, administering student loans, and enforcing federal civil rights laws

Trump has long promised to terminate the agency and empower states to run their own education systems without federal interference. Shuttering the Education Department was a bullet point on the 2024 GOP platform, which largely aligned itself with Trump’s presidential campaign.

McMahon, Trump’s pick to run the department, has spoken enthusiastically about Trump’s plan to eliminate the agency and make her job obsolete. Upon being confirmed and sworn in, she laid out her “final mission” for the Education Department earlier this month in a message to employees.

“Our job is to respect the will of the American people and the president they elected, who has tasked us with accomplishing the elimination of bureaucratic bloat here at the Department of Education — a momentous final mission — quickly and responsibly,” McMahon said.

“Removing red tape and bureaucratic barriers will empower parents to make the best educational choices for their children. An effective transfer of educational oversight to the states will mean more autonomy for local communities. Teachers, too, will benefit from less micromanagement in the classroom — enabling them to get back to basics.”

McMahon moved to fire nearly 50 percent of the Education Department’s workforce earlier this month, putting affected staff on administrative leave beginning Friday. The headcount reduction is affecting all divisions within the department and includes employees who already accepted buyout programs.

Likewise, the department has cut almost $1 billion worth of grants to left-wing organizations that promote DEI and critical race theory, two progressive ideologies that obsess over demographic characteristics and group people together based on skin color, ethnic identity, and sex, rather than focusing on individual character and merit.

The Trump administration’s Education Department has launched civil rights investigations into dozens of educational institutions for antisemitic harassment and discrimination on the basis of race and sex.

Those investigations are part of the Trump administration’s wholesale push to remove left-wing diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and gender ideology from American institutions. They followed a warning from the Trump administration to schools that they could lose federal funding if they do not eliminate DEI programs that discriminate against certain groups in violation of federal civil rights law.

The Education Department was also one of the agencies to cut off grants totaling $400 million to Columbia University because of an explosion of antisemitism and anti-Israel campus activity since Hamas’s massacre on October 7, 2023, and the subsequent war in Gaza.

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Source: Department of Education: Trump Signs Executive Order Dismantling Agency | National Review