President Trump on Thursday instructed Education Secretary Linda McMahon to begin shutting down her agency, a task that cannot be completed without congressional approval and sets the stage for a seismic political and legal battle over the federal government’s role in the nation’s schools.
Surrounded by schoolchildren seated at desks in the East Room of the White House, Mr. Trump signed a long-awaited executive order that he said would begin dismantling the department “once and for all.” The Trump administration has cited poor test scores as a key justification for the move.
“We’re going to shut it down, and shut it down as quickly as possible,” Mr. Trump said.
The department, which manages federal loans for college, tracks student achievement and supports programs for students with disabilities, was created by an act of Congress. That means, according to Article I of the Constitution, that only Congress can shut it down. That clear delineation of power, a fundamental component of democracy from the inception of the United States, underscores why no other modern president has tried to unilaterally shutter a federal department.
But Mr. Trump has already taken significant steps that have limited the agency’s operations and authority. Since Mr. Trump’s inauguration, his administration has slashed the department’s work force by more than half and eliminated $600 million in grants. The job cuts hit particularly hard at the department’s Office for Civil Rights, which enforces the country’s guarantee that all students have an equal opportunity to an education.
Mr. Trump’s order contains potentially contradictory guidance for Ms. McMahon. On the one hand, the order directs her to facilitate the elimination of the agency. On the other, she is also mandated to rigorously comply with federal law. The order offers no guidance on how to square those two points.
Mr. Trump said Thursday that the department would continue to provide critical functions that are required by law, such as the administration of federal student aid, including loans and grants, as well as funding for special education and districts with high levels of student poverty. The department would also continue civil rights enforcement, White House officials said.
Mr. Trump called those programs “useful functions,” and said they’re going to be “preserved in full.” He added that some functions would be “redistributed to various other agencies and departments that will take very good care of them.”
Higher education leaders and advocacy groups immediately condemned the executive order.
“This is political theater, not serious public policy,” said Ted Mitchell, the president of the American Council on Education, an association that includes many colleges and universities in its membership. “To dismantle any cabinet-level federal agency requires congressional approval, and we urge lawmakers to reject misleading rhetoric in favor of what is in the best interests of students and their families.”
Lawyers for supporters of the Education Department anticipated they would challenge Mr. Trump’s order by arguing that the administration had violated the Constitution’s separation of powers clause and the clause requiring the president to take care that federal laws are faithfully executed.
These lawyer, who requested anonymity to describe private deliberations about impending litigation, have also discussed the possibility of using a Supreme Court ruling from June 2024 to block Mr. Trump’s action. That ruling, 6 to 3 with all the conservative justices in the majority, swept aside a long-established precedent by limiting the executive branch’s ability to interpret statutes and transferring power to Congress and the courts.
“See you in court,” said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, the trade union for educators. Her group is among those that intend to sue.
While many conservatives support Mr. Trump’s desire to close the agency, the order presents a predicament for congressional Republicans, who must balance their eagerness to please Mr. Trump and their constituents’ wishes. Public opinion polls for the past two months have consistently shown nearly two-thirds of voters oppose closing the department.
While local education departments primarily control how their schools are run already, the federal department has been influential in setting academic standards, guiding schools through regulatory compliance and interpreting civil rights laws.
Mr. Trump told the audience, which included several Republican governors, that the order’s goal was to “return our students to the states.”
“Democrats want federal bureaucrats to control your child’s school,” Representative Jim Jordan, an Ohio Republican who chairs the House Judiciary Committee, said Thursday on social media. “Republicans want to give parents the choice to do what’s best for their children.”
Senator Bill Cassidy, a Louisiana Republican who chairs the chamber’s Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, said he would submit legislation to eliminate the Education Department.
“I agree with President Trump that the Department of Education has failed its mission,” Mr. Cassidy said in a statement. “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.”
In remarks before signing the order, Mr. Trump signaled he might press lawmakers to move on the issue, adding that he hoped Democrats would join Republicans in supporting the department’s elimination.
But any Democratic support appears unlikely. And in the last session of Congress, one-fourth of House Republicans voted against a measure that would have eliminated the agency.
“I hope they’re going to be voting for it,” Mr. Trump said, “because ultimately it may come before them.”
Mr. Trump’s plans to gut the department have drawn fierce criticism from Democrats and education advocacy groups who say that the measure — even if largely symbolic — signals the federal government’s retreat from its duties of protecting and serving the most vulnerable students.
“Let’s be clear: Before federal oversight, millions of children — particularly those with disabilities and those from our most vulnerable communities — were denied the opportunities they deserved,” said Keri Rodrigues, president of the National Parents Union.
Representative Bobby Scott, a Virginia Democrat who is the ranking member of the House Committee on Education and Workforce, urged his Republican colleagues to join him in opposing the changes in the order.
Mr. Trump, he said, was “implementing his own philosophy on education which can be summed up in his own words, ‘I love the poorly educated,’” Mr. Scott said in a statement, referring to a remark Mr. Trump made in 2016.
Mr. Trump has gone further than any president in seeking to overhaul what Republican administrations have long bemoaned as a bloated bureaucracy. Mr. Trump’s order also amplifies an argument that stagnant student test scores demonstrate that billions in federal spending have not yielded results.
“The status quo has very clearly failed American children and done little more than line the pockets of bureaucrats and activists,” Nicole Neily, president and founder of Parents Defending Education, said.
While it is true that reading scores for 13-year-olds are about the same as they were in the 1970s and math scores are only slightly better, this is because of recent, sharp declines that accelerated during the coronavirus pandemic.
Under the Biden administration, the department was fiercely criticized as being overly deferential to teachers’ unions and overreaching on certain issues, such as student loan forgiveness and its interpretations of civil rights laws on behalf of transgender students.
Frederick M. Hess, the director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a right-leaning think-tank, said that he believes both the right and the left exaggerate the department’s influence, but that the order does little to address those issues.
“We’re going to have this whole huge national debate and not solve the practical problems along the way,” he said. “Because we’re so focused on the 30,000-foot conversation that we’re not changing that we’re not fixing the stuff that’s actually making life tougher for educators and parents.”
Sarah Mervosh contributed reporting.
