Trump to Sign Order Aimed at Dismantling Education Department

The order, which President Trump may sign on Thursday, will lay the groundwork for eventually shuttering the agency, reassigning some of its primary duties.

President Trump plans to sign an executive order on Thursday instructing Education Secretary Linda McMahon tobegin dismantling the agency, according to two White House officials.

The department cannot be closed without the approval of Congress, which created it. But the Trump administration has already taken steps to narrow the agency’s authority and significantly cut its work force while also telegraphing plans to try and shutter it.

The White House officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the plans, said the order instructed Ms. McMahon to return authority over education to the states.

USA Today was first to report Mr. Trump’s intent to sign the order on Thursday.

Republican attempts to shutter the agency date back to the 1980s. But the push gained steam in recent years after a parents’ rights movement grew out of a backlash to school policies and shutdowns during the coronavirus pandemic.

That movement, which includes key pro-Trump, grass-roots activists, expanded around opposition to progressive agendas that promoted mandating certain education standards and inclusive policies for L.G.B.T.Q. students. Activists contended that these policies undermined parental rights and values.

But the hyper-partisanship around education issues has been present for decades, from progressive-leaning teachers’ unions who organized against President George W. Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” policies to conservative Republican presidential candidates in 2016 who ran against the Common Core standards elevated by President Barack Obama’s “Race to the Top” program.

Caught in the middle are the nation’s 50 million public school pupils, 15 percent of whom have disabilities. Also watching the debate are undergraduate students who receive Pell Grants because they qualify as low-income (nearly one-third of all college students) and those who receive federal student loans (about 28 percent).

Public schools are mostly funded by taxes collected by states and municipalities that, by definition, already have control over that money. The federal government accounts for about 10 percent of total school funding, but that is distributed by the Education Department largely according to federal law — not the discretion of the president.

That balance of power in Washington explains, at least in part, why no modern president has ever tried to unilaterally shut down a federal department. The Education Department was created by an act of Congress in 1979, and federal lawmakers would have to approve of eliminating it.