By: Isaac Dillard
President Trump is seeking to carry out one of his biggest and most aggressive campaign promises later today.
An anonymous White House source told several news outlets that President Trump was going to sign an executive order that will close the Department of Education. A White House fact sheet gave further instructions as to how Secretary of Education Linda McMahon is to carry out the president’s order.
“(McMahon will) take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure (of) the Department of Education and return education authority to the States, while continuing to ensure the effective and uninterrupted delivery of services, programs, and benefits on which Americans rely.”
The Department of Education has been in conservative crosshairs for years. Many on the right believe that the department has abused taxpayer dollars, become increasingly more woke, and taken away decisions that should be left to the states.
Democrats argue that shuttering the department will be detrimental to low-income communities and children with special needs. McMahon promised during her Senate confirmation hearing that she would seek to preserve certain aspects of the department that offer money to low-income students, such as Title I money, and Pell grants.
Currently, the Department of Education deals more with dispersing federal funds rather than making day-to-day decisions for schools across the United States. According to the Associated Press, the Department of Education oversees $1.6 trillion in federal student loans and distributes billions of dollars to schools across the country annually.
DOE photo Lynn Freeny Oak Ridge Tennessee. Original public domain image from Flickr
The order also says that any institutions receiving federal funding cannot “advance DEI or gender ideology,” according to the White House summary of the executive order. We have already seen institutions such as Columbia University, the University of Maine, and the University of Pennsylvania lose hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding for not complying with the Trump administration’s DEI restrictions.
Fully dismantling a federal department requires a majority vote from both the House of Representatives and the Senate. Republicans hold a majority in both, but don’t have enough of a lead to break the Senate filibuster, meaning a complete shutdown of the Department of Education is unlikely.
The executive order is almost certain to bring strong reactions from both sides of the aisle. The full extent of the future impact this will have on the Department of Education has yet to be determined.