President Trump set to sign executive order shutting down the U.S. Education Department
By Garrett Haake, Nnamdi Egwuonwu and Tyler Kingkade, NBC News
WASHINGTON (NBC) -- President Donald Trump is expected to sign an executive order Thursday to close the Education Department, fulfilling a years-long pledge to dismantle the federal agency, the White House confirmed.
Trump will hold an event at the White House to sign the order directing Education Secretary Linda McMahon to “take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure the Department of Education and return education authority to the States, while continuing to ensure the effective and uninterrupted delivery of services, programs, and benefits on which Americans rely.”
USA Today first reported Trump's plans to sign the order on Thursday.
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Formally closing the department requires an act of Congress. But even without formally shutting it down, the Trump administration could effectively make it nearly impossible for employees to carry out their work, as it has done with the U.S. Agency for International Development.
McMahon recently moved to drastically reduce the size of the Education Department by cutting its workforce in half. She called the job terminations the first step toward shutting down the department.
"That was the President’s mandate," McMahon said last week in an interview with Fox News. "His directive to me, clearly, is to shut down the Department of Education, which we know we’ll have to work with Congress, you know, to get that accomplished."
McMahon similarly vowed at her Senate confirmation hearing to work with Congress to advance Trump’s plan to dismantle the department. She telegraphed in an email to employees earlier this month that major changes were coming.
“Our job is to respect the will of the American people and the President they elected, who has tasked us with accomplishing the elimination of bureaucratic bloat here at the Department of Education—a momentous final mission—quickly and responsibly,” she wrote, according to a copy obtained by NBC News.
The Education Department is one of the smallest Cabinet-level federal departments. Its $268 billion appropriations last year represented 4% of the U.S. budget.
The department does not dictate curricula used in classrooms. It is largely a funding and civil rights enforcement organization, distributing money for schools with high rates of impoverished students and to assist children with disabilities.
The department also runs the public student loan program, which has more consumer protections and lower interest rates than private education loan programs.
