With federal lawsuits flying and Democrat lawmakers vowing to protect the U.S. Department of Education at all costs, President Donald Trump’s long-awaited executive order on education is making big waves. But it doesn’t do what countless conservatives think it does.
It is true that the workforce is being drastically downsized. However, contrary to many of the superficial headlines portraying the historic decree as an end to federal involvement in government schools, many of the department’s most important responsibilities are not actually being shifted to state governments or local school boards.
Instead, just as The Newman Report warned was going to happen a few weeks ago, those duties and the trillions of dollars involved are, in many cases, simply being moved to other federal agencies and departments. Congress will be needed to accomplish much more than that, according to legal analysts.
The March 20 order, titled “Improving Education Outcomes by Empowering Parents, States, and Communities,” calls on U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon to shrink the department as much as legally possible. It also asks her to “return education authority to the States,” but only “to the maximum extent appropriate and permitted by law.”
“We want to return our students to the states, where just some of the governors here are so happy about this,” Trump said at the signing ceremony surrounding by children. “They want education to come back to them, to come back to the states, and they’re going to do a phenomenal job.”
By contrast, Trump’s executive order also demands “uninterrupted delivery of services, programs, and benefits on which Americans rely.” It was not clear how the federal boot print in education would be seriously downsized — much less eliminated — while also perpetuating the very “services, programs, and benefits” it administers.
To fulfill those demands, key functions will be moved to other departments. For example, Secretary McMahon just said publicly that she was exploring moving the “civil rights work” to the Department of Justice. Many other functions will be moved to departments such as Health and Human Services, Labor, State, Interior, and more.
The Education Department itself is acknowledging this. According to a public statement, the department will “continue to deliver on all statutory programs that fall under the agency’s purview, including formula funding, student loans, Pell Grants, funding for special needs students, and competitive grantmaking.”
Trump also admitted as much in the signing ceremony, though few outlets reported it. The department’s main functions are “going to be preserved in full and redistributed to various other agencies and departments that will take very good care of them,” he said, vowing to will take all lawful steps to shut down the department” beyond the “core necessities.”
Still, Trump is making his desire for change known. “Unfortunately, the experiment of controlling American education through Federal programs and dollars — and the unaccountable bureaucracy those programs and dollars support — has plainly failed our children, our teachers, and our families,” Trump said in the executive order, noting that over $250 billion was spent on “schools” at the federal level during Covid.
After offering a brief history of how the teachers union was able to get the department created in 1979 by endorsing Jimmy Carter, Trump presented a small snapshot of just how terrible the system has become at accomplishing its ostensible purpose: helping educate children.
“Today, American reading and math scores are near historical lows,” the order explained. “This year’s National Assessment of Educational Progress showed that 70 percent of 8th graders were below proficient in reading, and 72 percent were below proficient in math. The Federal education bureaucracy is not working.”
“Closing the Department of Education would provide children and their families the opportunity to escape a system that is failing them,” Trump said, without noting that families can already escape the system legally in all 50 states.
The order also calls for all federal funding to be cut to any program or activity that has not ended “illegal discrimination obscured under the label ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ or similar terms and programs promoting gender ideology.” Numerous grants and funding schemes linked to DEI had already been ended before Trump’s new order.
Unsurprisingly, Democrat leaders in Congress are fuming. U.S. Senator Chuck Schumer, who leads the Democrat caucus in the Senate, said Trump’s agenda to shut the department was dead-on-arrival in the upper chamber. Some legal analysts suggest it could take 60 votes to overcome Democrat opposition.
Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who lied about her ethnicity, offered among the most unhinged responses. “This is a code red for every public-school student, parent and teacher in this country,” she said. “Trump is telling public school kids in America that their futures don’t matter.”
“Billionaires like Trump and Musk won’t feel the difference when after school programs are slashed, class sizes go up and help for families to pay for school gets cut,” continued Warren. “But working families, students, and teachers will pay a heavy price.”
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, who only needs a handful of GOP defections to win, issued a similarly apocalyptic statement. “Shutting down the Department of Education will harm millions of children in our nation’s public schools, their families and hardworking teachers,” he claimed.
Rep. Jeffries also vowed to stop Trump’s plan. “Congress created the Department of Education and only an act of Congress can eliminate it,” he said, ignoring that Congress had no constitutional authority to create it. “We will stop this malignant Republican scheme in the House of Representatives and in the Courts.”
Laid off bureaucrats, meanwhile, acting as if they had a right to a government job, are offering suitable sob stories for the far-left establishment media. The goal: tug on the heart strings of Americans to build support for the bureaucracy while painting Trump as a heartless hater of children and education.
“It has been very hard,” an anonymous bureaucrat laid off by the administration told ABC News, which falsely described the sprawling and costly bureaucracy as an “already-lean agency.” “It really has been hard and heartbreaking because I was planning on having a career with the department.”
Lawsuits are already flying, too. The extreme leftwing National Education Association (NEA) representing over 3 million members joined forces with the NAACP and other groups in a bid to have federal courts stop Trump. A group of parents who subject their children to government “education” are also plaintiffs in the case.
“Gutting the Department of Education will hurt all students by sending class sizes soaring, cutting job training programs, making higher education more out of reach, taking away special education services for students with disabilities, and gutting student civil rights protections,” complained NEA President Becky Pringle.
Ending unconstitutional federal involvement in education is a baby step in the right direction, of course. However, it does not represent “cutting off the head of the snake,” as many conservatives claim to believe. Not even close.
Instead, the government “education” monster that is deliberately dumbing down, indoctrinating, and sexualizing children should be seen as a hydra. The federal tentacle is just one among many. Others include teachers’ unions, state agencies, UNESCO, woke publishers, and more.
In any case, while getting the feds out of the classrooms would be a worthwhile effort, that must not be the end of the reforms. Instead, the ultimate goal should be to have parents in charge of their own children’s education — not state or even local government.
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