Trump administration officials are weighing executive actions to dismantle the Education Department as part of the campaign by billionaire Elon Musk and his allies to shrink federal agencies and slash the size of the government workforce.
The officials have discussed an executive order that would shut down all functions of the agency that aren’t written explicitly into statute or move certain functions to other departments, according to people familiar with the matter. The order would call for developing a legislative proposal to abolish the department, the people said. Trump’s advisers are debating the specifics of the order and the timing, the people said.
The order would be a step toward fulfilling a Trump campaign promise to eliminate the department, limit federal involvement in education and give more authority to the states. Conservatives were sharply critical of the Education Department under the Biden administration, particularly decisions to forgive student loans and to extend sex-discrimination protections in education to LGBTQ people. The conservative Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 also called for eliminating the department.
Some administration officials, including the team working with Education Secretary nominee Linda McMahon, say the White House should wait to release any executive order until after McMahon’s Senate confirmation hearing, people familiar with the matter said.
McMahon’s hearing hasn’t been scheduled, as the Senate is awaiting her ethics paperwork. Some Trump advisers worried that the White House’s recent freeze on federal assistance complicated Russell Vought’s confirmation as director of the Office of Management and Budget, and they are eager to avoid a similar scenario that could endanger McMahon.
Before Trump took office, the administration’s transition team drafted an executive order that would have directed the education secretary to make a plan to eliminate the department and call on Congress to approve such an effort, according to a person familiar with the matter.
The Education Department is among the agencies that Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency is looking at as part of its efforts to overhaul federal bureaucracy, the people said.
Some of Musk’s representatives were working out of the main Education Department building in Washington.
Fully abolishing the department would require an act of Congress, and lawmakers have for years shown little interest in doing so. Trump unsuccessfully tried to merge the education and labor departments in his first term.
Last week, Rep. Thomas Massie (R., Ky.) introduced a bill to abolish the Education Department by the end of 2026. “Unelected bureaucrats in Washington, D.C. should not be in charge of our children’s intellectual and moral development,” Massie said. “States and local communities are best positioned to shape curricula that meet the needs of their students.”
Trump’s aides could replicate the approach they used to disassemble the core functions of the U.S. Agency for International Development. In recent days, Musk’s representatives have gained access to sensitive documents at the agency, shut down its website, deactivated email addresses and told employees not to come to the office.
Eliminating the Education Department—or even cutting funding to it—could be politically risky. A recent Wall Street Journal poll found that 61% of registered voters opposed getting rid of it. Most Americans preferred to protect funding for education and other domestic priorities over cutting taxes, the same poll found.
The Education Department was created in 1979 under former President Jimmy Carter, urged on by the National Education Association, the country’s largest teachers union. In terms of head count, the Education Department is the smallest of all the cabinet-level agencies.
The existence of the education department is codified in law, and so is much of what it does. Key activities include providing grants for low-income students, regulating how schools serve students with disabilities, enforcing civil-rights laws, and administering the federal student-loan program.
Despite Trump’s interest in abolishing it, the Education Department during his new presidency has already been busy. It has released guidance saying it would evaluate claims of sex discrimination based on the “objective immutable characteristic of being born male or female” as opposed to gender identity.
This effectively ended Biden-era protections for gay and transgender people in education.
Trump signed separate executive orders that instructed the education secretary to work on plans to purge schools of what he described as “radical indoctrination,” to expand school choice and to combat antisemitism within universities.
Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said Trump’s recent executive orders implied that “the federal government should be more, not less, involved in education.” She also noted that the president couldn’t unilaterally abolish the department.
At least 60 employees at the Education Department, along with an unknown number of supervisors, were placed on administrative leave Friday night, said Brittany Holder, a spokeswoman for the American Federation of Government Employees, a federal employee union.
Holder said many of the federal workers had participated in voluntary diversity training or had served on a voluntary community or diversity council within the workplace. A notice informed the affected employees that they had been placed on administrative leave with full pay and benefits.
