Conservative activists have dreamed of dismantling the Ministry of Education for decades.
They are closer than ever to achieving their goals.
On Thursday, President Donald Trump signed an executive order saying that he would “begin to completely eliminate the exclusion of the federal department of education.” Then, earlier this month, the Ministry of Education announced mass shootings of the workforce. This has brought the division's staff from about 4,000 to about 2,000 until about half of the time Joe Biden took office.
Trump had promised to abolish the department in the campaign trajectory, but it was established by Congress and many of its functions are legally necessary, so it cannot be eliminated with pen strokes. Instead, his team is cutting staff and will try to cut spending to the extent that they think they can get away.
Now it is very unclear how much of these layoffs will actually be impacted on policies. The biggest thing that the education sector actually does is send money to public schools with many low-income students, send money to educate students with disabilities, and run a federal student loan program. Education Secretary Linda McMahon said the department will continue doing all this.
But this is all an iconic victory that is important for ideological conservative activists. Because since the education sector was established in 1979 as an independent agency, they have disappeared.
These activists generally argue that education should be a local issue without federal “interference.” Many of them also downplay the public school system and support the strengthening of private alternatives (or homeschooling).
Even if Republican presidents were in power for 45 years, they continued to fail to go the way. For most of that period, GOP was divided into education. While anti-government conservatives wanted to stay in the federal government, other Republicans saw the federal government's role in improving public schools.
Moreover, it was widely believed that abolishing the department led to political backlash and was not possible without Congressional approval.
However, over the past decade, particularly in the past few years, there have been significant changes within the politics of public education and the conservative coalition.
Why conservative activists are finally getting their way now
The first shift was bipartisan disillusionment with the federal government's efforts to boost public school learning, embodied in the 2002 No Child Lefted Act. The NCLB was defended by Republican George W. Bush, but was ultimately criticized by the left (too much focus on the test) and right (too much government interference).
When the NCLB was abolished in 2015, Republicans essentially abandoned the idea that the federal government should try to improve public schools. (In 2018, Trump announced plans to merge the Department of Education and Labor, but he didn't go anywhere.)
The second most recent change is the backlash between class and filed Republicans against public schools due to rage over the handling of the Covid-19 pandemic and culture war issues over the past few years. This frames this because parents react against incompetent or ideological extremism of educators, administrators, and unions. The left frames this as a conservative who targets public schools in a slanderous, exaggerated campaign.
But as a result, the typical Republican voters have become more open to shaking the current state of public education. It can be seen in the gust of the “universal school choice law” in which families allocate public funds to pay tuition fees for private schools that passed by in the Red State in the 2020s.
So, abolishing the education sector has resulted in Trump's frequent applause during the 2024 campaign. This was no secret that the new focus was on. Eliminating this department was also a major theme in the Education chapter of Project 2025, but this was not surprising as the Heritage Foundation, the think tank behind the project, has been seeking it for decades.
Still, there was widespread skepticism that he could actually do that, given his belief that Congressional approval would be required and that Democrats would never agree.
That's where the third change comes. It's the gateway to the conservative coalition of Elon Musk and Duge. They modeled a new approach to dismantling the institutions they disliked. This is something that has never been tried on this scale. And now it's the Ministry of Education's transformation at Barrel.
Updated March 20th at 4:50pm ET: This article was originally published on March 12th and updated to reflect Trump's new executive order.
