Education secretary nominee Linda McMahon told a congressional panel on Thursday that Donald Trump does not want to defund the agency he’s repeatedly said he wants to dismantle. She underscored that Congress would not be left out of the process of deciding on the agency’s future.
“President Trump understands that we will be working with Congress,” McMahon said in her confirmation hearing before the Senate HELP Committee. “We'd like to do this right. We'd like to make sure that we are presenting a plan that I think our senators could get on board with, and our Congress to get on board with.”
“It’s not the president’s goal to defund the programs, only to have it operate more efficiently,” she added, in response to Senate HELP Chair Bill Cassidy’s question about downsizing the agency.
The president is expected to issue an executive order this month to dismantle the Education Department. It is expected to mandate offloading some of the agency's programs to other departments and assessing what laws are needed to move the department’s other duties before closing it altogether.
McMahon, a former business executive who led the Small Business Administration during Trump’s first term, told ranking member Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) that she would continue Pell Grants, which help the neediest students pay for college, and wished to see them expanded for short-term workforce programs. She also told Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) that Title I funds for low-income school districts and IDEA funds for students with disabilities, both appropriated by Congress, would remain.
Title I programs “will continue to be appropriated through Congress,” McMahon said. “Today, they go directly to the state departments of education and then are distributed to the districts. [We’re] not looking to defund or reduce any of those amounts. IDEA is the same, but might it be better served in a different agency? I'm not sure.”
Thursday’s hearing was intermittently disrupted by protesters shouting things like, “can you smell what McMahon is cooking?” in a nod to McMahon co-founding World Wrestling Entertainment. Some protesters identified themselves as teachers and argued that McMahon would be “terrible for my district.”
“I'm struck by the outburst of some of the protesters in the room, and a number of them have told us that they're teachers. Can you imagine them teaching, these people, teaching our kids in classrooms across America and they come here and act like children with helpers?” Sen. Jim Banks (R-Ind.) said.
Lawmakers addressed the president’s plans to shutter the agency early on in Thursday’s confirmation hearing, with Sanders emphasizing the programs housed within the agency.
“I think everybody on this committee wants to see us go after waste and bureaucracy in every agency of government, but what we must understand is that when we talk about the Department of Education, they are providing vital resources for 26 million children in this country who live in high-poverty school districts,” he said in his opening remarks.
“So the goal is not to abolish the Department of Education. It is to make it more effective and to make sure that it addresses the educational needs in this country,” Sanders added.
Cassidy acknowledged that the future of the Education Department would come up in Thursday’s hearing but lamented on the nation’s education landscape, highlighting lagging national test scores and the rise of antisemitism on college campuses.
“You have enormous challenges before you. At the K-12 level, students who were behind before the pandemic are even further behind now,” Cassidy said in his opening remarks. “Colleges and universities are not preparing students to succeed in the modern workforce. The costs of higher education are quickly outpacing the value of the degree students receive.”
Trump, as recently as Wednesday, repeated his desire to close the agency. The president has previously said he’d like to do it by executive order, but has also said “I think I’d work with Congress.”
“I’d like it to be closed immediately,” Trump told reporters Wednesday when asked how soon he wanted the agency to be shuttered. “Look, the Department of Education’s a big con job.”
McMahon’s confirmation hearing comes amid a flurry of activity taking place at the Education Department since Trump assumed office for his second term. Just this week, the Education Department terminated at least $881 million worth of research contracts and moved to fire a swath of civil servants. Sen. Andy Kim (D-N.J.) said he was “alarmed” seeing attorneys and other staff at the Office for Civil Rights put on leave, but McMahon said she isn’t involved in the department yet.
“I know it's not a great comfort for me to say, this morning, that I am not yet confirmed. I've not yet been in the department. I don't know about all the administrative people that have been put on leave. I want to look into that. I want to understand it,” McMahon said.
The department’s civil rights arm has also opened several self-initiated investigations into antisemitism on college campuses and self-directed probes into transgender sports participation, and given schools new guidance on how the department will interpret Title IX, the federal law prohibiting sex-based discrimination, among a litany of other actions.
The Senate HELP Committee is expected to hold a vote to move McMahon’s confirmation to the floor next Thursday.
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