Trump reportedly aims to order the dismantling of the Ministry of Education.

President Donald Trump plans to sign an executive order directing Education Secretary Linda McMahon to “take all necessary steps” to close the agency, Wall Street Journal and other media reports.

The president’s order – scheduled to be signed in the Oval Office at 2 p.m. – is the first step to implementing his controversial campaign promise to repeal the 45-year-old department. Draft order provided Internal Advanced ED Criticizing the department’s spending “more than $1 trillion without generating any improvements in student reading and math scores”. Trump’s press secretary called the report on the order “fake news.”

Education advocates have shown strong opposition to administrative actions. The American Teachers Federation, a key senior union, was one of the earliest groups to be removed when the news was released Wednesday night, saying the order was a government attempt to “relinquish responsibility to all children, students and working families.”

“The Ministry of Education and its laws that should have been enforced have a primary purpose: to balance the playing field and fill the opportunity gap to help every child in the United States succeed,” union president Randi Weingarten said in a statement. “No one likes bureaucracy, everyone favors efficiency, so let’s find ways to achieve this. But don’t use “wake up war” to attack children living in poor and disabled children to pay billionaires’ vouchers and tax cuts.”

Since the early stages of the 2024 campaign, the president and his allies have advocated for the idea of ​​demolishing the agency, saying the department has become too big and interfered with the best things local and state authorities have done. They also believe that the institution’s existence is a constitutional violation (because the document does not mention education), which is a good example of federal inflation and overeating.

Rumored orders have been around for weeks, and higher education officials have been waiting for shoes to drop since Senate Monday afternoon. However, the secretary broke up in a confirmation last month or reduced the department’s plans, and soon after taking office, she wrote to agency staff about their “major final tasks”, which included overhaul of the agency and eliminating “an outbreak of bureaucracy.” She never used the term “demolition” or “repeal” directly, but promised to “return education back to the United States.”

“As I learned so many times throughout my career, disruption leads to innovation and results,” she wrote. “We must start thinking about the final mission in the department, which is a major overhaul, the last opportunity to restore a culture of freedom and excellence to make American education great.”

Eliminating the education sector and sending key programs such as the Office of Civil Rights to other institutions is a key part of the 2025 conservative Blueprint Project Reshapes the U.S. policy plan to reshape education. But recent public opinion polls have been supported by the agency.

A survey of progress conducted by the Student Borrower Protection Center of the Left Advocacy Group on behalf of the Student Borrower Protection Center showed that 61% of all respondents “some” or “strongly” opposed the idea of ​​eliminating the department. Another poll by Morning Consul, a data-driven insight firm, showed that the majority of voters (41%) actually want to increase their funding to the department.

The order does not mean that the department will be closed tomorrow or even this month, as it requires the secretary to develop a plan to reduce action. McMahon told the senator when confirming the senator that only Congress can close the agency completely.

Senior emergency officers make an impact

As the demise of the department in recent weeks has been talked about, lawmakers, student advocacy groups, civil rights groups and left-leaning think tanks have warned how destructive the department could be.

House Democrats began re-proposing the idea as early as February 10 when they walked straight to the front door of the department and demanded a meeting with then-Education Secretary Denise Carter. They refused to enter, and they believed that the presence of the department was key to supporting students with disabilities and making higher education accessible to all.

The same week, several major senators wrote to the department outlining their “serious concerns” about their behavior.

“We won’t master and allow the demolition of the Department of Education’s impact on the state’s students, parents, borrowers, educators and communities,” the lawmakers wrote.

Derrick Johnson, president of the National Association for the Advancement of Color, issued a statement just minutes after McMahon was confirmed, expressing similar concerns about students of color. NAACP played a key role in the 1954 Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education, which banned segregation in public schools and has been advocating for equality and opportunity in education. He said protecting the Ministry of Education is crucial because the institution not only provides funding for public schools, but also “enforces basic civil rights laws.”

“This is an institution that we cannot remove,” he said.

Edtrust, a nonprofit policy and advocacy group, said Tuesday morning that the United States has reached a “dangerous turning point in public education.”

“Simply put: if we really reach the ‘golden age’ of America, we need to build a better, stronger education sector, rather than completely demolish it,” the organization wrote in a statement.

Kevin Carey, vice president of New America Education, left-leaning think tank, said in a statement that eliminating the department was a “deeply unwelcome idea” citing the organization’s own new poll data.

The survey found that only 26% of adults supported the closure of the department. Although the Trump administration says it is fulfilling the will of the people elected to him, only half of Republicans want to close. Republican members support less specific consequences of closing departments, such as transferring federal financial aid to institutions without experience overseeing the program.

“This is part of a standard authoritarian script for potential dictators to demolish democratic institutions,” Carey wrote. The removal of the department would be “a kind of nihilistic act of civil vandalism carried out by ideological fanatics.”

Collect Congressional Support

But Carey and others also point out that ultimately, the Trump administration lacks legal authority to actually close the Education Department, making a complete abolition much more complicated than the president’s suggestion.

The closure of the agency will require 60 votes in the Senate and House majority, as the existence of the department is written into the regulations. With a 53-seat majority in the Senate, Republicans are currently not voting unless some Democrats support the plan.

Still, Trump continues to promote the concept, which red countries across the country support. Although the president has not disclosed specific details about how he will try to overcome political and legal barriers, higher education policy experts predict that he will likely leave the skeleton of the department and that he may stand in all aspects of institutions except for his statutory protection duties.

Conservative groups, most notably the Heritage Foundation, recommend reallocating responsibilities by transferring the program to other agencies. For example, the federal student loan system could be transferred to the Treasury Department and the Office of Civil Rights could be moved to the Justice Department.

Critics’ ideas say such suggestions require more details to illustrate exactly how the plan works, which plans will stay, which plans will disappear, and which agencies will take over the responsibility of the department.

But senior policy experts at the liberal think tank Kato Academy said it was “a good idea” to get rid of the department. They described the department as “unconstitutional”, and in the specific, enumerated powers given to the federal government, education was not mentioned and called it “ineffective”, “incompetent”, “expensive” and “unnecessary”.

The Founding Fathers chose to exclude education from the Constitution: “Because education is best left in the Constitution by parents and civil society (families and communities closest to children) and certainly not in the distant national government,” Neal McCluskey, director of the Cato Center for Education Freedom, wrote in a policy manual. “The nearly 60 years of professional experience, until recently, the continuous expansion of federal interventions in K-12 education has proved that they are correct.”