About a year since President Donald Trump was sworn into office for his second term, his administration has made progress on one key campaign promise: downsizing the United States Department of Education (DOE), framed as handing back control of education to the States. Over the course of several executive orders and layoffs, the DOE now exists in a slimmer avatar, with functions handed over to other departments as well.
In reducing the DOE’s role, Mr. Trump follows through on a Republican tradition: the federal government’s role in education has been decried by previous Republican presidents as well, besides party rank and file. Since its creation, the DOE has not been a fan favourite for the Republicans, whose party platform seeks to reduce big government and federal control of state affairs.
The first iteration of the Education department was created by Andrew Jackson after the Civil War in 1867, but it splintered and faded. The current version comes from 1979, where Jimmy Carter set up a cabinet-level department. In 1982, then President Ronald Reagan called for a reduction in non-essential federal workers. Per BBC, Mr. Reagan’s presidential campaign had described the DOE as a new bureaucratic boondoggle that allowed Washington, rather than local needs and preferences to dictate educational standards for American students.
In this century, Mr. Trump targeted the DOE on campaign trails and in speeches. Shuttering the Education Department was also a key component of Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for the new administration.
Also Read |What is Project 2025?: A conservative policy agenda for Trump 2.0
Now, Mr. Trump appears poised to deliver on this metric, with Education Secretary Linda McMahon taking the lead in putting herself out of a job — in its year-end wrap for 2025, the Education Department speculated that Ms. McMahon would be the last Education Secretary. Nicholas Kent, the Undersecretary of Education, has also engaged in several efforts to remake higher education, particularly in the field of university accreditation.
Shuttering of Department of Education
The former head of World Wrestling Entertainment, Linda McMahon was confirmed as Education Secretary on March 3, 2025. Over the course of the year she has vowed to put herself out of a job. Official department statements have reiterated, with reasons, that dismantling DOE would be a priority. In its yearly review of activities in 2025, the DOE wrote, “Since its inception in 1980, the U.S. Department of Education has spent $3 trillion, yet recent national test scores show that just 35% of high school seniors are proficient in reading – these are the lowest scores on record.”
One of the chief reasons cited by the administration is that it seeks to return education to the States. In an article for USA TODAY, Ms. McMahon wrote, “We will also continue to reduce federal micromanagement with every tool at our disposal. The agency has advised states on flexibilities they already have in their Title I funding and school choice measures they can pursue under current federal rules.” She added, “We will continue offering states opportunities such as waivers from burdensome regulations so they can design custom arrangements at the local level, rather than struggle to meet one-size-fits-all mandates.“
The executive order to start dismantling the department was signed on March 20, 2025, following on the heels of multiple layoffs of staffers.
A federal judge blocked the administration from carrying out this executive order and ordered it on May 22, 2025 to reinstate at least 1400 terminated employees. It also blocked the administration from transferring key functions to other agencies. The injunction was issued by U.S. District Judge Myong Joun in Boston after the court was approached by teachers’ unions and representatives from Democrat-led States. However, on July 13, 2025, the Supreme Court lifted the federal judge’s order.
The impacts of the executive order are already visible. Reports notes that the Institute of Education Sciences and several regional offices for civil rights, such as those in Philadelphia and Boston, were shrunk or shuttered.
The changes have also had an impact on other functions. For example, the Department first delayed and then released an abbreviated version of the Condition of Education report after missing a June 1, 2025, deadline. The 2024 Digest of Education Statistics had only 27 tables as contrasted to an average of 270. The report includes important metrics like the college degrees granted at state level and international comparisons of attainment, degrees and outcomes.
During the extended government shutdown in October 2025, about 20% of Education Department staff (about 460) were laid off. It is unclear whether they were reinstated after the end of the shutdown. This follows a series of layoffs and buyouts through the year. More than 1,000 employees had reportedly been fired in March.
Questions have also arisen about whether the department can be gutted sidestepping Congressional approval and processes. So far, the Trump administration believes it can be.
New partnerships
In a press release dated November 18, 2025, the education department announced six new interagency partnerships with the Departments of Labour (DOL), Interior (DOI), Health and Human Services (HHS), where it would hand over or split responsibilities for certain functions. The statement noted that the new approach would “streamline federal education activities on the legally required programmes, reduce administrative burdens, and refocus programmes and activities to better serve students and grantees.”
Partnerships with Department of Labour
ED and DOL: Workforce development partnership
In July, the DOE and Department of Labour (DOL) launched a workforce development partnership to “create an integrated federal education and workforce system.” This will see DOL participating more in the administration of adult education and family literacy programmes, as well as career and technical education programmes
ED and DOL: Elementary and Secondary Education Partnership
This seeks to align K-12 education with workforce and college programmes. The DOL is expected to “manage competitions, provide technical assistance, and integrate ED’s programmes with the suite of employment and training programmes DOL already administers.”
Some of the programmes included under this partnership are:
• Title I, Part A: Improving Basic Programmes Operated by Local Educational Agencies
• Title I, Part B: Improving Academic Achievement of the Disadvantaged—State Assessment Grants
• Title I, Part C: Education of Migratory Children
• Title I, Part D: Prevention and Intervention Programmes for Children and Youth Who are Neglected, Delinquent or At-Risk
• Title II, Part A: Supporting Effective Instruction State Grants
• Title III, Part A: English Language Acquisition State Grants
• Title IV, Part A, Student Support and Academic Enrichment (SSAE)
• Title IV, Part B 21st Century Community Learning Centers
• Title V Small, Rural School Achievement and Rural and Low-Income School Programmes
ED and DOL: Postsecondary Education Partnership
This partnership will involve coordination for postsecondary education and workforce development.
“These grants will help students from all walks of life obtain the credentials and career training they need to prosper and contribute to the American economy, as well as provide institutions of higher education with resources to support innovative strategies for learning and workforce advancement,” the release notes.
Some of the programmes included under this partnership are:
•Title III Part A Strengthening Institutions Program
• Title III Part B Strengthening Historically Black Colleges and Universities Program
• Master’s Degree Programmes at Historically Black Colleges and Universities Program
• Strengthening Historically Black Graduate Institutions (HBGI)
• TRIO
• Transition and Postsecondary Programmes for Students with Intellectual Disabilities (TPSID)
Department of Health and Human Services
ED and HHS: Foreign Medical Accreditation Partnership
This partnership envisages the application of the expertise of HHS staff to evaluate “whether the standards of accreditation for foreign medical schools are comparable with the standards for medical schools in the U.S.” Thus the work of the National Committee on Foreign Medical Education and Accreditation (NCFMEA) will be overseen by the HHS.
ED and HHS: Child Care Access Means Parents in School Partnership
This seeks to improve on-campus childcare for parents who are enrolled in college, particularly for lower-income parents.
“HHS’s Administration for Children & Families administers Head Start, the largest federal child care program, making the agency better positioned to ensure efficient delivery of child care services to low-income students enrolled in postsecondary education,“ the partnership factsheet notes.
Department of Interior
ED and DOI: Indian Education Partnership
This seeks to improve education for Native Americans, and covers elementary, secondary and post-secondary education as well as technical and career education and vocational rehabilitation.
Programmes which are a part of this shift include:
• American Indian Tribally Controlled Colleges and Universities authorized under Title III, Part A of the Higher Education Act, Section 316 and Part F of the Higher Education Act, Section 371
• Indian Education-related Research and Development Infrastructure Grant program components authorized under Title VII, Part B of the Higher Education Act
Department of State
ED and State: International Education and Foreign Language Studies Partnership
The aim here is to increase efficiency for programmes under the Fulbright-Hays grant. The Fulbright programmes are already administered by the Department of State, and it “is best positioned to tailor foreign education programmes with the national security and foreign policy priorities” of the country, the press release notes.
It adds that the partnership allows for the streamlining of international education programme funding and data collection measures. Besides Fulbright-Hays programmes, others impacted under this partnership include American Overseas Research centres (AORC), the Business and International Education (BIE) programme, Centres for International Business Education (CIBE), Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) fellowships, the International Research and Studies (IRS) programme, the Language Resource Centres (LRC) programme, the National Resource Centres (NRC) programme and the Undergraduate International Studies and Foreign Language (UISFL) programme.
The factsheet for the programme lists certain abstracts which received grants under the Fulbright Hays programme for 2024, saying that they “demonstrate that these grant programmes have deviated from the core mission of supporting international education for global competitiveness.”
The examples have been quoted almost verbatim below:
• $37,000 awarded for a dissertation on the relationship between collective movement and systemic conditions of anti-trans violence. This involved a comparison between experiences in Bogota’s red-light district and a boxing club meeting in Los Angeles’s Macarthur Park.
• $27,000 awarded to a doctoral student to investigate the linguistic attitudes and ideologies of non-binary and trans francophones towards inclusive French in Montreal, Canada.
• Over $72,000 awarded for a dissertation on Queer and Trans Community Building in Czechia and Slovakia, allowing the student to travel and create an interactive map of the countries, similar to the Queering the Map project.
• Over $20,000 awarded for a dissertation on transgender surgery in Taiwan.
• Over $34,000 awarded for a project to examine how queer and transgender Thai Buddhist artists in Bangkok and Berlin are re-shaping contemporary Thai Buddhism.
Further discussions underway
As the dismantling of the Education Department continues, Ms. McMahon continues to engage in discussions to further trim down the federal government’s role in higher education. In 2026, she embarked on a 50-State tour to engage with teachers, parents and community leaders about what is working and what is needed for students to prosper.
Two of three planned roundtables have already been held in White House about problems eroding public confidence in higher education.
The first, held on November 19, was titled “Administrative Bloat and Low-Value Programmes: How U.S. Universities are Failing American Families and How They Can Reform.” It focused on affordability of higher education and new provisions in OBBBA aimed at reducing costs and increasing accountability.
The second, held on December 3, was titled “Biased Professors, Woke Administrators, and the End of Free Inquiry on U.S. Campuses.” It focused on the need for reforms to address the far-left ideological capture of American universities, and what it called DEI and woke “monoculture” that now permeates academic life.
Responses
Senate Democrats sent a letter to Ms. McMahon on December 4, 2025 that called the Education Department’s breakup of some of its programmes for students and their families “illegal.”
“Your brazen attempt to dismantle the Department by transferring to other federal agencies complex and foundational responsibilities that Congress specifically charged to the Department — including more than half of all federal funds for elementary and secondary education programmes and billions in higher education funding — will undermine public education,” the letter read.
Dr. Angel Pérez, CEO of the National Association for College Admission Counseling, highlights one of the main issues with dismantling the education department. “The States do not have the same resources that the federal government has, and so there are some States in the United States that are very poor, and so they don’t have the resources of some of the wealthier states that might be able to provide the gap.”
This, in turn, will affect the students who need it most. “We are seeing cuts in disability offices….in food programmes. We are seeing cuts in programmes for mental health…..We know that these are critically important programmes, but the States can’t make up for that. And so I worry that we are going to see the schools where low income students attend become more low income and provide fewer services,” he says.
Some Republican lawmakers may agree. Politico quoted Representative Kevin Kiley, a Republican from California, as saying that although some reorganisational changes made sense for efficient functioning, the Education Department did engage in several important functions. “We need to make sure that it’s able to continue to do them, those services that need to be provided to taxpayers like charter school grants and kids with special needs,” he said.
Several voices from both sides of the aisle also highlighted a key aspect— any move to completely do away with the Education Department would require an Act of Congress. As the DOE continues to shrink, it remains to be seen any further action about education will be taken via another federal agency, executive order or Congressional approval.
(Note: This article is current as of January 30, 2026.)
.