Adversarial re-check: all three cited sources were fetched live and are real, reachable, and quoted accurately. (1) The White House presidential action of March 20, 2025 (EO 14242) verbatim directs the Secretary of Education to 'take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education and return authority over education to the States and local communities' — Trump signed it personally, which is direct leadership, not a passive vote. (2) The ED press release of July 7, 2026 confirms Arkansas became the FIFTH state to receive a 'Returning Education to the States' waiver, consolidating over $8.8M in federal funding — concrete devolution to states actually delivered. (3) The ED press release of July 15, 2026 confirms Secretary McMahon responding to the House Education and Workforce Committee's 'Less Bureaucracy, Better Education' package, i.e. Congress had still not abolished the Department as of the rating date. Corroborating record (Wikipedia, U.S. Dept. of Education): a March 2025 RIF cutting staff from ~4,100 to ~2,100, blocked by a Boston federal judge May 22, 2025 and allowed to proceed by the Supreme Court 6-3 on July 14, 2025; student-loan servicing announced for transfer to SBA and special-needs/nutrition programs to HHS on March 21, 2025. Outcome test: FULL is excluded — the Department demonstrably still exists in July 2026 with a sitting Secretary issuing press releases and approving waivers, and the promise's added claim that it would 'cost less than half' is unsubstantiated by any spending record located. ATTEMPTED is too low — this went far beyond a failed try: half the workforce was actually eliminated, functions actually moved, and five states actually received waivers. The real boundary is CHAMPIONED vs PARTIAL, since both leadership and partial delivery are present. CHAMPIONED is correct because the rubric reserves it for actively LEADING/driving an effort 'even if not fully enacted,' and Trump led it end to end (signed the EO, installed a Secretary with an explicit closure mandate, drove the RIF through litigation, launched the state-waiver program); the one terminal step not taken — statutory abolition — is the step that requires Congress, not the President. Partisanship check: applying the identical standard to the opposite party, a Democratic president who promised to cancel student debt, signed executive actions, delivered relief to a large subset of borrowers, had the flagship program struck down, and never got Congress to codify it would also be rated CHAMPIONED. The label is symmetric, neither lenient nor harsh. Note: independent WebSearch was unavailable (session search budget exhausted), so verification was done by direct fetch of each cited URL plus an encyclopedic cross-check; the three primary sources returned matching dates and quotes, so the ≥2 real-source bar is met with margin.