“One thing I'll be doing very early in the administration is closing up the Department of Education in Washington, D.C., and sending all education and education work and needs back to the states.”
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Trump personally drove this effort: Executive Order 14242 (March 20, 2025) directed Secretary McMahon to facilitate the Department of Education's closure, the administration cut roughly half the department's staff (the Supreme Court allowed the layoffs to proceed on July 14, 2025, in McMahon v. New York), and by November 2025 the department had signed interagency agreements moving major K-12 and postsecondary programs to Labor, HHS, Interior, and State. However, only Congress can abolish the department; as of July 2, 2026, it still exists in law, and most transferred functions went to other federal agencies rather than to the states. A hard, sustained personal push that has fallen short of the promised closure.
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