The Real Reason Trump Is Gutting The Education Department
President Trump is executing the Project 2025 plan of gutting the Education Department and weaponizing what remains to force schools to bend their policies and curriculums to his far-right vision.
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President Donald Trump stood at a podium in the East Room of the White House and announced his unlawful effort to unilaterally dismantle the Education Department.
"My administration will take all lawful steps to shut down the department,” Trump asserted. “We're gonna 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, and some of the governors here are so happy about this. They want education to come back to the States.”
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and Texas Governor Gregg Abbott were among the Republican governors in the audience of this signing event, cheering on a move that will hurt red states like theirs the most.
Trump then walked over to a signing desk and issued the executive order while surrounded by children being used as political props, arranged around him in school desks, making a mockery of the classrooms this White House will negatively impact.
A few points need to be made upfront before we go any further. 1) Trump does not have the power to unilaterally dismantle a congressionally-created agency, so this move’s intent is unlawful. 2) This is straight out of Project 2025 and the culmination of decades of right-wing advocacy. The goal is twofold: privatization and to exert ideological control over school curriculums. 3) This will harm low-income students, students with disabilities, and red states the most.
The order was released later in the evening on Thursday, providing some details on how this will be implemented.
The order demands that “The Secretary of Education shall, to the maximum extent appropriate and permitted by law, take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education and return authority over education to the States and local communities while ensuring the effective and uninterrupted delivery of services, programs, and benefits on which Americans rely.”
The order seemingly acknowledges that the Trump Administration can’t singlehandedly dismantle the agency, even Trump mentioned this during his remarks, saying that this matter might come before Congress. But what the order does is direct Education Secretary Linda McMahon to escalate their ongoing process of gutting the department.
The next passage of this order has been under-discussed. Trump isn’t simply ordering the gutting of the agency; he’s seeking to withhold federal funding from schools that run Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs or have programs that “promote gender ideology.”
The next part of the order reads:
Consistent with the Department of Education’s authorities, the Secretary of Education shall ensure that the allocation of any Federal Department of Education funds is subject to rigorous compliance with Federal law and Administration policy, including the requirement that any program or activity receiving Federal assistance terminate illegal discrimination obscured under the label “diversity, equity, and inclusion” or similar terms and programs promoting gender ideology.
That part of the order is consistent with Trump’s other threats against universities, seeking to withhold their funds. As we’ve seen so far in Trump’s second term, just as anti-Critical Race Theory (CRT) efforts became a catch-all method to target the teaching of civil rights education more broadly, anti-DEI efforts have become a smokescreen to target fundamental civil rights era anti-discrimination policies. We’re seeing both being targeted in Trump’s recent actions.
The key point here is that Trump is simultaneously seeking to gut the Education Department while weaponizing what remains to fulfill his political culture war agenda.
So, let’s dive into what impact this executive order could have on education in America, what the intent is, and how this fits in with the Project 2025 playbook.
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The Impact Of Gutting The Education Department
President Trump’s new executive order beginning the process of dismantling the Education Department isn’t actually “beginning the process.” That was already in motion.
This move comes after the Trump Administration laid off 1,315 employees at the Education Department last week, nearly 50% of its workforce.
The Office for Civil Rights was hit particularly hard, losing hundreds of staffers. From CNN:
The civil rights office lost the largest proportion of employees of all the programs affected – losing 243 of 557 workers, according to an analysis by the non-partisan Ed Reform Now.
“There was already a case backlog, and now these cases will simply fall to the wayside,” the employee told CNN. “This work cannot be done without staff. The messaging that this will increase efficiency and that OCR will continue to be able to fulfill its statutorily-mandated mission is a lie – students will suffer harm from this that, for many, will have repercussions for the rest of their lives.”
Another team at the Education Department decimated by the cuts included the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), which lost almost all of its staff, according to NPR, going from just over 100 employees to only 3.
Matthew Gardner Kelly, Assistant Professor at the University of Washington, told NPR, "That will have an absolutely devastating impact. It's not just that loss of information, it's what will happen to a school district's budget in the absence of funds that can't be allocated without the necessary staff at NCES."
Without proper staffing and federal tracking of data at schools, funding will be less targeted to those who need it most.
The Department of Education issues $18 billion annually in Title I funding, serving 26 million low-income students. The Rural Education Achievement Program (REAP) delivers $215 million for public schools in rural areas. 7.4 million students with disabilities are helped by $15 billion in annual funding through the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). Not to mention the administration of about $1.6 trillion in student debt.
Red states that voted for Trump rely on this funding more heavily than those who vote Democratic. Axios reported an analysis, finding that “Average federal spending in the 2021-22 school year was 17% in Trump-voting states, compared to 11% in states that voted for Harris.”
During his remarks on Thursday, President Trump said that Title I funding and funding for students with disabilities will continue, but it wasn’t clear where and how that would be maintained if the Department of Education was totally dismantled.
On Friday in the Oval Office, Trump further clarified, stating that Kelly Loeffler at the Small Business Administration will now be responsible for the student loan portfolio and that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will now be handling special needs matters at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
It’s important to note that Project 2025’s Education Department dismantling plan calls for moving oversight and implementation of funding for students with disabilities to HHS. Trump is using Project 2025 as a checklist.
Given this administration’s record of dishonesty and outright disinformation, this will be something we have to watch closely. Will these funds still be faithfully dispersed to schools that need it the most? What functions will remain at the Department of Education, and what other functions will be shut down or delegated to other departments?
Many questions remain, but if we judge this administration by how they’ve behaved so far, in particular in their reckless DOGE-led cuts, they likely won’t move with discernment and look out for the most vulnerable American schools.
84% of America’s K-12 students are in public schools. This isn’t a matter to play politics with, but that’s apparently what the Trump Administration is doing.
Why Trump Is Gutting The Education Department
As I’ve written about extensively, Project 2025 explicitly calls for dismantling the Department of Education. The first sentence of its Education Department chapter (page 319) reads, “Federal education policy should be limited and, ultimately, the federal Department of Education should be eliminated.”
It also pushes school choice, advocates for eliminating teaching CRT in schools (which already isn’t taught in K-12 schools), calls for the elimination of DEI programs, and advocates a conservative curriculum in classrooms. Trump’s moves are straight out of that playbook.
The intent behind Trump’s order is clear.
Trump’s plan is to slash federal oversight, weaponize education funding, and allocate even more control to the states, where Republican governors can impose their own agendas. And where there aren’t Republican governors to push right-wing ideology, Trump will use federal power to do so. This isn’t about improving education—it’s about ideological control.
The goal is twofold: ideological control of school curriculums and privatization. Trump wants to erase federal protections for marginalized students through his anti-DEI push, erode teaching of American history under the guise of targeting CRT, push right-wing ideology in schools, and funnel public education dollars into private and religious institutions. It’s part of a long-term effort to reshape the electorate by influencing what young people learn.
Under the Project 2025 plan, Title I funding, the largest source of federal money to public schools, would be moved to the Department of Health and Human Services and given as block grants to states for them to spend as they please, with no strings attached. The Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights would shift to the Justice Department. As we’ve seen, that will likely also get weaponized.
President Trump has already threatened to withhold $400 million from Columbia University over how they’ve handled protests as part of his effort to suppress dissent and frozen $175 million in federal funding to the University of Pennsylvania over trans issues.
Trump has previously signed an executive order that threatens to divert funding away from schools that teach “discriminatory equity ideology” or “gender ideology.” Just like CRT, these are vague terms that can be used to encapsulate a wide swath of behavior.
President Trump will likely continue to use the threat of freezing funds at both K-12 public schools and universities to try and inflict his far-right vision of America.
Far from giving control back to the states and emphasizing “parental rights,” as Republicans claim, Trump is seeking to further exert control in increasingly authoritarian ways. This latest education executive order is part of that plan.
A very thorough explanation, Ahmed. I would say thank you but honestly I’m so gobsmacked and angry that it seems inappropriate. But your work is very much appreciated.
Why can't we just admit the Republican Party is dead, and that the new party is now the Christian Nationalist party? Let's call it what it is.