The Daily - Trump Takes Aim at the Department of Education

Episode Date: March 10, 2025

In the coming days, President Trump is expected to sign an executive order that would follow through on one of his major campaign promises: to abolish the U.S. Department of Education. The catch is that he still needs the department to impose his vision on American schools.Dana Goldstein, who covers education for The Times, explains how Mr. Trump is balancing his desire both to dismantle and to weaponize the Education Department.Guest: Dana Goldstein, a reporter covering education and families for The New York Times.Background reading: Here’s why Republicans want to dismantle the Education Department.Video: What does the Department of Education actually do?For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. Photo: Kevin Lamarque/Reuters Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

From the New York Times, I'm Kim Severson. This is The Daily. In the coming days, President Trump is expected to sign an executive order that would, at least on paper, follow through on one of his major campaign promises, to abolish the U.S. Department of Education. The catch is he still needs it to impose his vision on American schools. Today, my colleague Dana Goldstein on how Trump is balancing a desire to both dismantle

and weaponize the Education Department. It's Monday, March 10th. Dana, over the past few days, we've been hearing that President Trump has plans to abolish the Department of Education. And even for an administration that's been dismantling agencies across government, this felt pretty big. You're a veteran education reporter. Talk to us about what's happening.

So a draft executive order attempting to dismantle the federal Department of Education has been circulating in Washington. And we have seen it. And it's no surprise to us that this draft is out there. We've been hearing for many weeks now that President Trump will sign an order like this. In fact, several times we were sort of poised watching video of him sitting at the resolute desk in the OVA office with executive orders that he was about to sign thinking, is this the day? Is one of these pieces of paper the one that will attempt to abolish the agency? And so far he hasn't done it.

But it does seem that this is something that is in very serious consideration for him. Okay, this all sounds pretty drastic, eliminating the entire Department of Education. And I wanna understand why he wants to do that. But before we get there, it might be helpful to understand, and I hate to admit that I don't know this, what exactly is the Department of Education

responsible for? Well, I think it's important to step back and understand not just what it does, but also what it doesn't do. It does not set the curriculum of local public schools or reading lists or decide how many teachers to hire or what teachers are paid or what student discipline policies should be or what standardized tests should be given. All of that is controlled by state and local governments. So there's not like a federal rule about how much history a kid needs to graduate from high school. The feds do none of that. They do not do that. In fact, 90% of the funding for local schools comes from local and state

governments and only about 10% comes from Washington and flows through the federal Department of Education. That 10% is important because it focuses on low income students and children with disabilities. And what a lot of people may not realize is that over 70 percent of what the Department of Education does is administer the Student Aid program. So grants and loans that help students pay their college tuition. And they also fund education research. So attempts to figure out what are the best ways to teach students how to read

better. They fund efforts to measure how American students are doing academically compared to students around the world. Okay, so we've got loans and research. Exactly. That's right. And finally, the last thing they do is enforce anti-discrimination or civil rights laws. So these are the laws that attempt to make sure that students are not being discriminated against based on their gender, their race, their ethnicity, their religion. So for instance, if a school is not giving black or Hispanic students equal access to gifted programs or advanced placement classes, they might be investigated. And that is very inconvenient. It is a pretty big deal for any school system.

And they would essentially be pressured into changing these practices. So if the department got eliminated, would all those things just poof go away? Well, not really. I think we have to say, first of all, that only Congress can vote to abolish a cabinet agency. So President Trump, by signing an order like this, does not have the ability to abolish the Department of Education.

But even if he somehow was able to abolish the department, it's not like all of these functions I just laid out would suddenly cease to exist. One way to think of the Department of Education is that it's like a bucket. And inside of it are all these programs and money that are appropriated and created by Congress. So if you do get rid of this bucket,

you still have to deal with all the contents of the bucket. But why even sign the executive order then? I mean, Trump's not exactly mister follow the law all the time, but this seems pretty open and shut. It's a cabinet agency. So why sign an executive order abolishing it if it stands to be overturned in the courts? In a lot of ways, Kim, it's symbolic.

And like a lot of these executive orders, it's less about their legal force and more about announcing this administration's priorities. This particular order would be allowed and bold way of signaling that this president wants to majorly overhaul education in this country and drastically change the federal government's role. And what do we imagine overhauling education would look like? Well, I think to figure that out, we have to look at what President Trump has actually done

so far with the agency because that gives us a lot of insight into how the next four years will go with him in office when it comes to education. OK, so what has happened? To get a sense of that, we can actually look at what is going on inside the Department of Education building in Washington, DC. There are people in there embedded from Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency group.

And what they are doing is really looking to slash budgets to decimate the research efforts of the agency. They are looking to lay off workers and they have done so. And they are looking to replace some human work with artificial intelligence. Our reporting showed that they are particularly focused there on the call center that answers students' and parents' questions about federal financial aid, which you can imagine is super complex, gets into some really personal and private information about families. They are interested in handling way more of that with an AI chatbot, and they are actually

attempting to build it internally. So they are very busy inside of the Department of Education right now. OK, so this is part of the overarching idea, like streamline the government, take things out of the federal government's hands as much as possible, save a bunch of money, get rid of workers who maybe are perceived to not be needed. This is basically kind of a doge operation. Is that right?

Yeah, that's part of it. But Kevin's about a lot more than just that. President Trump has a broader sort of MAGA vision for public education, which is really about battling what he and his allies see as woke ideology that has pervaded the nation's schools around issues like race, gender, sexuality, and American history. And we are already seeing this play out. And I will give you a couple of examples. Remember that investigative power of the Department of Education that I mentioned, which enforces anti-discrimination laws, they, the Trump administration, are already using that power, but in a very different, really

polar opposite way. So for instance, they are investigating the Denver public schools because they had transformed a single girl's restroom in one high school into a non-binary restroom. And they are investigating whether this could potentially be considered a violation of girls' civil rights. They are looking into the Ithaca Public Schools, investigating a series of conferences that were held there that were for students of color, and looking into an allegation that white students were not invited to these conferences, which were about diversity issues, and considering whether that could

be considered a violation of white students' rights. And they also, just late last week, President Trump signed an order that would attempt to withhold federal student loan forgiveness for public service careers from workers who are working at nonprofit organizations whose policies around immigration or around transgender issues buck President Trump's ideas on those issues. So people who took jobs at these nonprofits that Trump doesn't like, with the promise of having their loans forgiven, would no longer get that benefit?

Well, we don't know if this will stand up legally in the courts, but that is the attempt, yes. So Trump is already infusing the American education system with his new vision of what public education should be. Yes, absolutely. And part of why this is such a big change is that it used to be not that long ago that both Republicans and Democrats agreed that the federal government had a big role to play

in education and holding schools accountable for doing a good job in educating students and raising test scores in math and in reading. That consensus, which was not really controversial, has fallen apart with President Trump's Republican Party. The new highest value is not raising test scores, not holding schools accountable, but giving as much control as possible to individual parents. And in many ways, Kim, this is a vision that is at odds, with the very reason the Department of Education was founded to begin with.

We'll be right back. So, Dana, I imagine that when any new administration comes in, the priorities of each department will change a little or even a lot. But it sounds like what you're saying with regards to Trump and the Department of Education is that something much deeper and much more fundamental is going on here. Help me understand how we got here. So the federal government has played a role in education since the 19th century, researching education, trying to disseminate best practices for how teachers can do their jobs better.

But there was no federal Department of Education as a separate cabinet agency until 1979. And the idea was controversial. It was signed into law by President Jimmy Carter, but even some Democrats opposed the idea. They didn't think it was necessary to have a whole separate bureaucracy to deal with education issues. And for President Ronald Reagan, the Department of Education was a huge sign of federal bloat, and he constantly talked about abolishing it. However, over the decades, the Department of Education really became part of the firmament in Washington and enjoyed plenty of support

from both Republicans and Democrats. And that's because the programs that it works on, like Pell Grants that help students pay for college and money for disabled students' educational supports in public schools are really popular. So essentially, the Department of Education got woven into the body politic as we know it, right? Yeah, absolutely.

And for many years, this discussion, which had existed in the 70s and 80s about whether we need it, whether we want it, had kind of quieted down until the point under the Republican President George W. Bush in the early 2000s, the Republican Party was really united around the idea of a bigger federal role in education. Public schools are America's great hope and making them work for every child is America's great duty. You know, one of the things that's helpful to remember is that George W. Bush, with his

idea of compassionate conservatism, was really focused on education. He had the idea that there was, quote, The soft bigotry. The bigotry of low expectations. Of low expectations. For many students in our nation's public schools, for low income students, for Black and Hispanic and Native American students. While all can enter our schools, many, too many, are not learning there.

And he really wanted to push out standardized tests into the nation's schools so he could measure how kids were doing and require teachers and principals to help kids do better. The new education reforms we have passed in Washington give the federal government a new role in public education. This was the law no child left behind. It is conservative to let local communities chart their own path to excellence. It is compassionate to insist that every child learns

so that no child is left behind. Which of course today is remembered for being really controversial. Kind of draconian, really. Yes, because it required kids to take tests every year in math and reading, and it threatened to punish schools if the students didn't do well on the tests. And so it led to a lot of teaching to the test and nobody likes that. Teachers don't like that, parents don't like that, right? But it was a really big bipartisan push

under a Republican president to strengthen the federal role in education. So exactly the opposite of what's going on now with President Trump. I always have an image in my mind of, you know, what a big issue education was for President George W. Bush. You know, he was sitting on the morning of 9-11, 2001, reading a book to public school students.

And it was part of his general emphasis on education. And it was at that moment, reading the book to the children that an aide whispered in his ear to inform him of the attack on the World Trade Center. Yeah, that is an image that has just seared into the minds of a lot of people. Mm-hmm. Okay, so after George W. Bush, we come to Obama. And what was his vision for American public education?

Yeah, President Obama agreed on a lot of the fundamentals with President Bush. He agreed that the federal government needed to hold schools accountable. He wanted to make those tests better and higher quality, but he also added some additional pressure around them. He created incentives for states to evaluate teachers according to how well their individual students did on those tests. So in other words, whether you got

a positive or negative employee evaluation at the end of the year would be based around this. That was also incredibly controversial, but it's just notable to talk about how Republican and Democratic presidents for many years were really in support of a big federal role. Okay. So what happened? What changed? Yeah. So what happened is that under President Bush and President Obama, all of this emphasis on standardized testing really became super unpopular. Democrats hated it. Republicans hated it. Teachers hated it. Parents hated it. And that's why for years I have called on Congress to come together

and get a bipartisan effort to fix No Child Left Behind. So in 2015, A Christmas miracle, a bipartisan bill signing right here. President Obama signed a law that was passed by Congress called the Every Student Succeeds Act. The goals of No Child Left Behind, the predecessor of this law, were the right ones. But in practice,

it often fell short. And it rolled back a lot of this federal pressure around teacher evaluation and testing. And it returned a lot of the power over education to states and school districts. It's not as if there weren't some significant ideological differences on some of these issues. No, there were. But I think that this is really a good example of how bipartisanship can work. Which was the status quo when President Trump came into office for his first term. Okay. So how did we go from there to where we are now?

So when President Trump came into office for his first term, he appointed an education secretary, the billionaire philanthropist Betsy DeVos, who really embodies the term that Republican politics have taken on education. Betsy DeVos was not interested in beefing up public education or beefing up the federal role. She had two main things, cultural conservatism, which was a big interest of hers, and also her goal, which she has said many times, was to get as much funding for public schools as possible in the hands of parents so they could make

choices to go to private school or homeschool their kids. And since then, those ideas have only become much more popular in Republican politics. And that's in large part because of the COVID pandemic. The fields are empty, the playgrounds deserted, and all across the United States, school buildings sit empty. Remember, schools were shut down in some parts of the country for a year and a half. Many parents were angry about that. Open up, open up.

And many parents, when their kids were doing remote learning from home and they watched what was being taught, did not like what they saw. Parents' rights activists say they oppose critical race theory and explicit books in school curriculum. So the parental rights or parent empowerment movement really took off over the past five years.

Don't mess with America's moms. Does that make sense? Groups like Moms for Liberty, for example, was crusading against what they saw as woke, liberal ideology about race. I will sign a new executive order to cut federal funding for any school pushing critical race theory, transgender insanity. Or teaching students about transgender identities.

And other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content on our children. President Trump astutely observed that this was a powerful cultural movement. In addition, I am proud to have laid out by far the most aggressive, most visionary plan to liberate our children from the Marxist lunatics and perverts who have infested our educational system. They're perverts. And in his campaign for president in 2024, he embraced all of this. And I will defend, I can't even believe I have to say this, I will defend parental rights. Can you believe it?

And he has become a lot more sophisticated, we think, in the second term and actually using the federal government to achieve these goals. Okay, Dana, you told us about the investigations. The Department of Education has already opened. So Trump is actually embracing the powers of the Department of Education, even as he's talking about eliminating it. Absolutely, Kim. That is the fundamental contradiction here. Even as he talks a lot about wanting to dismantle or even abolish the Federal Department of Education inside the building with his new Education secretary, Linda McMahon, they are hard at work using the investigative powers of this agency in a muscular way to achieve these sort of culture

war goals. And I think where this could all end up is that he can drastically cut this agency, he can strip it down, he can reduce it and dismantle it and roll some of its responsibilities over to other parts of the federal government, but he can keep a core sort of heart of the agency in place that will help him pursue his goals and fulfill his agenda. This feels like a big change and for many parents who send their kids to public schools, should they strap in for a radical shift in what public school is in America?

So I don't think that there will be much immediate impact on public school students across the country or educators in K-12 schools. And the reason is, as we discussed, the 10% of K-12 public school funding that does come from the federal government is guaranteed to keep flowing unless Congress makes a major change. And we don't see that sort of happening right now. But I do think that understanding where President Trump's Republican Party is on education does indicate where state and local education policy may be going because

Republicans across the country share these goals. And this, by the way, was all telegraphed in Project 2025. Remember that conservative blueprint that came out during the campaign for what should be done in President Trump's second term. In the Project 2025 report, they lay out a clear plan for completely abolishing the federal role in K-12 education over the course of 10 years. Right now, we're just at the beginning of the process

that they envision. However, if President Trump's movement is successful, if they keep winning elections, if he can bring Republicans in Congress along with his vision, it is possible that down the line, we really would see a vast reduction in federal support for public education. And remember, that's going to most impact low income students and students with disabilities

because that's where the money's going. Right now, we're still pretty far from that. 84% of American children are in traditional public schools. But President Trump's actions on education over the past weeks and months make clear he is driving toward a drastically different vision for education in America. Dana, thanks for coming on the show. Thank you, Ken. We'll be right back. Here's what else you should know today. On Sunday, Canada's resurgent Liberal Party chose a new leader, Mark Carney, to succeed

Justin Trudeau and to take over the country's response to an ugly trade war with the United States. Carney is a business executive who's never held elected office. In his acceptance speech, he took direct aim at President Trump by rejecting Trump's call for Canada to become America's 51st state. America is not Canada. And Canada never, ever will be part of America in any way, shape or form. And by declaring that Canada would not shrink from a fight over tariffs.

We didn't ask for this fight. The Canadians are always ready when someone else drops the gloves. So the Americans, they should make no mistake, in trade as in hockey, Canada will win. Carney will become Prime Minister in the coming days and is expected to quickly call for an election to ride the wave of anti-Trump sentiment that's energized the Liberal Party in recent days. The race against Canada's Conservative Party is expected to be close. Today's episode was produced by Eric Krupke, Sydney Harper, and Nina Feldman. It was edited by Devon Taylor.

Research assistance by Susan Lee. Contains original music by Pat McCusker, Diane Wong, Alicia Baitut and Marian Lozano and was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. Our theme music is by Jim Brownberg and Ben Landsberg of Wonderly. That's it for The Daily. I'm Kim Seberson. See you tomorrow.