President Donald Trump is wielding the sledgehammer of Elon Musk's efficiency program to fulfill conservatives’ wildest dreams of dismantling the Department of Education.
But unlike the Department of Government Efficiency's other, more secretive bureaucracy-slashing efforts, this one is happening in broad daylight. Trump is signing an executive order Thursday afternoon surrounded by a cadre of GOP governors, Republican members of Congress and conservative organizations — as well as kids, teachers and families — in the White House’s East Room.
The careful choreography underscores the White House’s public ownership of the Education Department changes — which they argue will return more power to state and local governments — after a post-Covid pandemic political campaign that emphasized a strong parental and local control of schools. But the administration’s cutting spree is also taking on a political risk, with much of the general public wary about sweeping changes that may have consequences for school funding, college financial aid and special education.
“As long as investment in the state and local level continues, and as long as this is seen as a deduction in bureaucracy, [Republicans] will benefit,” said GOP messaging guru Frank Luntz. “But if the local and state funding efforts don’t increase, Republicans will be accused of slashing funding for education.”
At least eight Republican governors — including Ohio’s Mike DeWine, Indiana’s Mike Braun, Florida’s Ron DeSantis, Texas’ Greg Abbott, Virginia’s Glenn Youngkin, Tennessee’s Bill Lee, Idaho’s Brad Little and Iowa’s Kim Reynolds — are expected to attend the event. Representatives of Moms for Liberty, The Heritage Foundation and Concerned Women for America will be in the room as well.
That showcase of conservative intellectual and political firepower appears at least in part aimed at mitigating some of the potential political peril by soothing the public’s fears over a major shakeup of the country’s education system, and pushing back on assertions from Democrats and others that the moves will harm children. An NPR/PBS News/Marist poll taken in late February found that 63 percent of respondents oppose getting rid of the department, with only 37 percent supporting its closure.
“Opportunity is always a funny word, because opportunities can turn out well or poorly,” said Frederick Hess, education director at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. “The old adage of Colin Powell was, ‘You break it, you buy it’.”
The Education Department dismantling is arguably one of the biggest bureaucracy-slashing efforts to date and may foreshadow moves to come at other agencies. The department last week began the process of laying off nearly half of its workforce, including hundreds of attorneys, student aid workers and civil rights office staff, and is terminating some of its office leases across the country, part of the administration’s broader effort to cull the size of the U.S. government’s smallest Cabinet agency.
Yet where DOGE’s efforts have at times been divisive, even within the GOP, the efforts targeting the Education Departments have been largely unifying. It has brought together a broad swath of diverse elements of Trump’s coalition from the budget hawks and social conservatives, longtime GOP mainstays, to the Republican Party’s new techno-libertarian contingent.
Even so, the White House has underscored that despite Trump’s long standing promises to abolish the department — which date back to his first presidential campaign — this executive order merely shrinks the agency. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters Thursday morning that the Education Department will, for instance, retain oversight of student loans and Pell Grants, though she declined to answer a question about whether Trump would ask Congress to fully dismantle the department.
Without enough votes to overcome a Senate filibuster or formal administrative rules that can survive a court challenge, federal law limits the White House’s ability to farm out Education Department programs elsewhere across the government — including popular programs such as Pell Grants, federal special education funding, and aid for impoverished students that the administration said would be spared by Trump’s order.
“I have no confidence that those services will not be affected,” said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers. “If nobody’s there to answer the phone, or if no department exists to make sure that Truman High School in New York City gets the funding it’s supposed to get and that Mayor [Eric] Adams doesn’t put it somewhere else — who is going to do that?”
“This will be a terrible Hobson’s choice for local communities,” she added. “Democrats should make sure that local communities know that.”
The White House had initially intended to announce the Education Department executive order two weeks ago but scuttled plans after the Wall Street Journal and others published details of a draft version, said a White House official, granted anonymity to discuss behind-the-scenes planning around the order. The day after those reports, Leavitt dismissed them as “fake news,” as officials worked behind the scenes to plan for a bigger event surrounding the order.
The leak prompted White House officials to reconsider the rollout to underscore its political support and attempt to own the narrative.
“The best way to move forward was to one, finalize the document, and instead of backing away from what we were doing, to embrace it,” the White House official said. “Why are we going to allow the left and the media to characterize an executive order and its so-called impact, when we can host an event that forces them to cover people who actually support what we're doing?”
“When you have a room full of governors, superintendents, moms and kids, it's hard to say that this is some radical policy," the official added.
Still, Hess, the AEI education director, said the challenge with ambitious public reforms is convincing the public they will like the result.
“It seems very likely in races this fall that Democrats will cut ads with Elon Musk waving that chainsaw, and then you’ll see some mom talking about how her child with special needs can’t get the support they used to get,” he said.
Hess noted that the administration’s efforts to dismantle the Education Department were well underway even before Thursday. In addition to cutting workers, the department is already aggressively cutting contracts and grant spending and issuing guidance that pushes states and schools to fall in line with its political and policy priorities at the direction of its secretary, Linda McMahon.
The executive order, however, ties Trump personally to the effort.
“It underscores that the president is personally committed to trying to do this. That would seem to help energize those looking to abolish the department,” Hess said. “And it will also energize those pushing back.”
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