President Donald Trump is expected to sign an executive order Thursday to close the Education Department, fulfilling a years-long pledge to dismantle the federal agency, the White House confirmed.
Trump will hold an event at the White House to sign the order directing Education Secretary Linda McMahon to “take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure the Department of Education and return education authority to the States, while continuing to ensure the effective and uninterrupted delivery of services, programs, and benefits on which Americans rely.”
USA Today first reported Trump’s plans to sign the order on Thursday.
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Formally closing the department requires an act of Congress. But even without formally shutting it down, the Trump administration could effectively make it nearly impossible for employees to carry out their work, as its done with the U.S. Agency for International Development.
McMahon recently moved to drastically reduce the size of the Education Department by cutting its workforce in half. She called the job terminations the first step toward shutting down the department.
“That was the President’s mandate,” McMahon said last week in an interview with Fox News. “His directive to me, clearly, is to shut down the Department of Education, which we know we’ll have to work with Congress, you know, to get that accomplished.”
McMahon similarly vowed at her Senate confirmation hearing to work with Congress to advance Trump’s plan to dismantle the department. She telegraphed in an email to employees earlier this month that major changes were coming.
“Our job is to respect the will of the American people and the President they elected, who has tasked us with accomplishing the elimination of bureaucratic bloat here at the Department of Education—a momentous final mission—quickly and responsibly,” she wrote, according to a copy obtained by NBC News.
Trump has previously suggested that he could garner enough congressional support to formally close the department, characterizing teachers unions as more of a threat to that plan than lawmakers.
The Education Department is one of the smallest Cabinet-level federal departments. Its $268 billion appropriations last year represented 4% of the U.S. budget.
The department does not dictate curricula used in classrooms. It is largely a funding and civil rights enforcement organization, distributing money for schools with high rates of impoverished students and to assist children with disabilities.
The department also runs the public student loan program, which has more consumer protections and lower interest rates than private education loan programs.
Trump’s executive order will direct McMahon to ensure the agency’s funds do not go toward programs or activities that advance diversity equity and inclusion or gender ideology.
The Education Department last week announced investigations into more than 50 universities it accused of “engaging in race-exclusionary practices in their graduate programs.”
Diversity, equity and inclusion practices, or DEI, is a widely used label applied to efforts to improve workplace culture and create more opportunities to disadvantaged groups, and are not inherently discriminatory.
National Education Association President Becky Pringle said in a statement Wednesday that Trump’s effort to close the Education Department could have disastrous implications for students across the country.
“If successful, Trump’s continued actions will hurt all students by sending class sizes soaring, cutting job training programs, making higher education more expensive and out of reach for middle class families, taking away special education services for students with disabilities, and gutting student civil rights protections,” Pringle said in a statement.
She accused Trump and Elon Musk, the de facto head of the Department of Government Efficiency, of aiming “their wrecking ball at public schools and the futures of the 50 million students in rural, suburban, and urban communities across America to pay for tax handouts for billionaires.”
McMahon said last week that at least three DOGE staffers had been auditing the Education Department.
Trump has long pledged to dismantle the Education Department, first mentioning the idea during his previous term and campaigning on the promise extensively throughout the 2024 election. He has suggested that states should take over the administration and that management of educational policy and current agency responsibilities, like overseeing federal students loans, could be absorbed by other parts of the federal government.
“Your state is going to control your children’s education. We’re moving it out of Washington immediately,” Trump said at a campaign event last year in Saginaw, Michigan. “We’re going to do that very fast, and it’s going to be great.”
