Trump Signs Executive Order to ‘Eliminate’ Department of Education

Donald Trump signed an executive order on Thursday intended to “eliminate” the Department of Education, effectively reducing the department to its most bare-bone functions. He did so at a White House ceremony, surrounded by children sitting at school desks.

“My administration will take all lawful steps to shut down the department,” Trump said. “We’re going to shut it down and shut it down as quickly as possible. It’s doing us no good. We want to return our students to the states.”

Trump continued to tout other nations “doing a good job in education,” including China. “We can’t now say that bigness is making it impossible to educate, because China is very big.”

The president believes eliminating the Department of Education will help America compete. “It sounds strange, doesn’t it, the Department of Education — we’re going to eliminate it.”

Trump has had it out for the Department of Education dating back to his first term in office. He did what he could to undermine it then, and is now moving to axe it entirely. It was reported earlier this month that the administration had drafted an executive order that would do just that, but the White House denied these reports. The department announced a week later that it was lopping off nearly half of its workforce, cutting 1,300 employees.

The administration can’t flat-out eliminate the department without congressional approval, and the order Trump signed on Thursday will likely be the subject of legal challenges.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters ahead of the signing that the remaining shell of the department the administration is keeping in tact will continue to oversee some grant and loan programs: “When it comes to student loans and Pell grants, those will still be run out of the Department of Education, but we don’t need to be spending more than $3 trillion over the course of a few decades on a department that’s clearly failing in its initial intention to educate our students.”

CNN reported on Thursday that the department had struggled to find another agency that would take over the management and oversight of its massive, $1.8 trillion student loan portfolio. “The Treasury doesn’t want it,” one source told CNN. 

White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy Stephen Miller told Fox News shortly before the signing that “the Department of Education here in Washington, D.C., is overwhelmingly staffed by radical left marxist bureaucrats. Who are in every way hostile to western civilization, hostile to American interests, and hostile to our founding documents and culture.”

“We’ve cut the number of bureaucrats in half,” Trump gloated during the signing ceremony.

Miller also accused the department — in his mind run by a cabal of communist loving leftists — of infusing American curriculums with evil doctrines such as diversity and inclusion, and not being an asshole to LGBTQ+ people. 

In reality, the Department of Education has very little to do with creating state-level curriculums. Its primary function is overseeing federal funding for public schools, student loan programs, and Pell Grants, as well as overseeing civil rights enforcement and collecting education data. 

“The history of the education department is as a civil rights agency, the place that ensures that students with disabilities get the services they need, and English learners get the help that they need, that women are protected against sexual assault and sexual harassment on campuses,” former Education Secretary John King said in a virtual press conference earlier this month. “That’s where this happens, in the Office for Civil Rights at the department taking that away harms students and families.”

In fact, one of the first actions the Trump administration took against the Department of Education was to direct their Office of Civil Rights to halt thousands of ongoing investigations, in favor of focusing their work on the presence of transgender youth in schools and sports. 

While Trump’s sycophants and coattails will celebrate the executive order as a major accomplishment for the America First president, even Fox News found itself having to throw cold water on Trump’s authority in this matter. “At some point this effort has to run up against the fact that Congress created the Department of Education,” said Fox News Contributor and longtime conservative commentator Byron York. “You can’t get rid of — the president cannot by fiat — get rid of an executive department created by Congress.” 

American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten responded to the Trump administration’s plans on Wednesday with a simple statement: “See you in court.”