Trump’s Executive Order on Education: Weak, Illegal, and Doomed to Fail

When it finally arrived, President Trump’s long-promised Executive Order directing Secretary of Education Linda McMahon to take “all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education” was short, weak, and substance-free.

In his spoken remarks, President Trump insisted that “it’s amazing how popular” this idea is—a statement flatly contradicted by extensive public opinion research, including a recent New America poll, which found that only 26 percent of adults favor shuttering the Department.

As he has for many years, Trump simply lied about America’s global standing in education—America is by no measure “on the bottom of the list” when it comes to international achievement. Earlier today, senior White House official Stephen Miller said that the Department is “overwhelmingly staffed by Radical-Left Marxist bureaucrats who are, in every way, hostile to Western Civilization.” A sure sign of the Trump administration’s intellectual and moral bankruptcy is their compulsion to constantly lie about everything they do.

In truth, Department employees—both those who still work there and those who were illegally fired last week—are dedicated public servants who have jobs like “protect the civil rights of children with disabilities” and “make sure students with Pell grants can pay for college.”

The executive order itself simply ignores the fact the U.S. Department of Education was created by Congress and can only be uncreated in the same way, and that Secretary McMahon is legally obligated to carry out its many functions mandated by federal law. She has no authority to move any of the Department’s duties to other agencies, or to impound Congressionally-budgeted funds.

This paltry executive order, which was obviously truncated from many previous and presumably even more lawless versions, contains a paragraph so nonsensical that it’s worth quoting in full.

Closure of the Department of Education would drastically improve program implementation in higher education. The Department of Education currently manages a student loan debt portfolio of more than $1.6 trillion. This means the Federal student aid program is roughly the size of one of the Nation’s largest banks, Wells Fargo. But although Wells Fargo has more than 200,000 employees, the Department of Education has fewer than 1,500 in its Office of Federal Student Aid. The Department of Education is not a bank, and it must return bank functions to an entity equipped to serve America’s students.

The Trump administration has let Elon Musk and the DOGE team rampage through the federal government on a campaign of illegal impoundment and mass layoffs, all under the rubric of increasing efficiency and cutting “waste, fraud, and abuse.” Yet their own justification for shuttering the Department is that the it is managing a huge student loan portfolio with 99 percent fewer employees than a comparable private-sector institution. Perhaps one reason Wells Fargo employs so many more people is they’re needed to perpetrate the bank’s shocking and extensive record of stealing money from hard-working Americans.

This executive order was delayed so long and says so little because the Trump administration is unable to match its education rhetoric with action or results. It has neither the will nor the political power to actually close the Department. It knows that Americans will not stand for having their schools and colleges closed and their civil rights denied. Its attempt to indirectly close the Department by illegally firing half the people who work there was immediately met with an enormous lawsuit from 21 state attorneys general.

The president’s many lies don’t change these fundamental truths.

For more on New America’s growing collection of posts and statements on defending the Department of Education, see here.