Dismantling the agency is high on the the Trump’s priority list, with the president previously pledging to ‘drain the government education swamp’. Almost five years ago, Donald Trump tried to slash the Department of Education’s budget for a fourth consecutive year. The proposed $5.6 billion cut and, with it, axing of 29 programs that included after-school and summer initiatives for deprived children. His requests subsequently didn’t get past Congress.

Now, Trump isn’t just sending the Education Department to the chopping block, he is attempting to reduce it to nothing. The president is said to be mulling the signing of an executive order to gut the department once and for all. According to the Wall Street Journal, federal officials are in talks about shutting down nearly all of the agency’s functions. Twenty members of Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), an advisory body outside of government, have been deployed to the DOE’s Washington, D.C. headquarters as they look for programs and staff to cull, according to the Washington Post.

Dozens in the department were put on paid administrative leave last week in response to Trump’s order banning DEI programs in the federal government. But why is the dismantling of the DOE so high on the president’s priority list, and can it even be done?. Founded by the late Jimmy Carter in 1979, the cabinet-level department manages funding and programs for education across the nation. It oversees the $1.6 trillion student loan programs, administers Pell grants that help low-income students attend university, funds programs to support students with disabilities and students living in poverty and enforces civil rights law that prevents race or sex-based discrimination in federally-funded schools.

The department's allocation was $238 billion in fiscal year 2024, marking less than two percent of the total federal budget. It is the smallest of all cabinet agencies by number of employees. Its draining of resources could cut crucial funding for schools and colleges, hamper special education efforts and roll back civil rights enforcement. As early as September 2023, when Trump vied to once again be at the top of the GOP ticket, the president said he would close the DOE “very early” in the administration and place education back in the hands of individual states.

The federal government, he said, should not have control over schools as it was staffed with “people that hate our children”. In turn, Trump believes that the federal government is force-feeding children “anti-American” ideologies on race and gender by funding school curricula that he says encourage children to “hate” their country. Educational instruction or curriculum is, however, already the responsibility of state and local governments.

Instead, he wants to champion teachers who “embrace patriotic values and support the American way of life”. While on his campaign trail in 2024, Trump often ranted about declining academic standards and the enforcement of a “woke” left-wing agenda at public institutions. Speaking to supporters in Wisconsin in September, the then-GOP presidential candidate said he was desperate to return to the White House so he could “eliminate” the department.

“We will drain the government education swamp and stop the abuse of your taxpayer dollars to indoctrinate America’s youth with all sorts of things that you don’t want to have our youth hearing,” he told his MAGA faithful. The agency, which was created by Congress, would likely not be shut down as it would require congressional action. Instead, the executive order may diminish its staff and functions.

Closing the DOE would likely require a near-impossible super majority of 60 votes in the Senate as long as filibuster rules remain in place, according to The Post – with Republicans currently holding a slim 53 to 47 seat majority in the Upper Chamber. A 2023 vote in the House to abolish the DEO ultimately failed. It garnered 161 yes votes, but 60 Republicans joined every Democrat in voting no. Many of Trump’s proclamations about rendering the DOE obsolete are in line with the proposals of the controversial Project 2025 – which roughly a third of the president’s executive orders so far have reportedly echoed.

The blueprint suggests drastic overhauls for the DOE, including dismantling the agency and farming out its duties to other departments. The loan program would move to a new sector in cooperation with the Treasury Department, for example. Other programs, the blueprint declares, would move to the Department of Health and Human Services. More than a dozen former White House aides who worked for Trump, along with the Heritage Foundation, have masterminded a 900-page manifesto in a bid to “rescue the country from the grip of the radical left,” its website declares.