Overview

Dismantling the Department of Education

Background and Executive Action

Trump signed the executive order calling for the dismantling of the Department of Education in a move he described as 45 years in the making, referring to the agency's founding in October 1979. The order itself was carefully worded. It avoided claiming a disputed legal authority to dissolve the agency and instead required Education Secretary Linda McMahon to "take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education and return authority over education to the States and local communities while ensuring the effective and uninterrupted delivery of services, programs, and benefits on which Americans rely."

The legal constraint was plain. A president cannot close a congressionally established agency: there is a statute that created the Department of Education, so eliminating it requires Congress to amend or repeal that statute. The executive order was therefore a directive to do as much as possible within executive authority — and to generate political pressure for Congress to do the rest.

Workforce Reductions

The workforce cuts preceded the executive order itself. On March 11, 2025, the Department of Education announced the layoffs of around 1,300 employees, nearly halving the agency's workforce. This was in addition to approximately 600 employees who had taken voluntary resignation or early retirement in the weeks prior, with the layoffs and early departures affecting all divisions within the agency, including the National Center for Education Statistics.

The human toll fell unevenly across the department's offices. Among offices losing the most people was Federal Student Aid, which students depend on to determine their eligibility for federal grants and loans for college. The Office for Civil Rights was also severely affected: out of hundreds of OCR employees fired, a significant number were civil rights attorneys and equal opportunity employees, leaving the office with a skeletal crew to oversee more than 12,000 currently open investigations.

Additional layoffs followed later in 2025. The Education Department had about 4,100 employees when Trump took office; after subsequent cuts, it was down to fewer than 2,000. Earlier layoffs in March had roughly halved the department, but some employees were hired back after officials decided they had cut too deep. Courts intervened at multiple points, and the pattern of layoffs, reversals, and renewed cuts produced ongoing instability for the agency and its staff. Department staff, a repeated target of the administration's efforts to wind down the agency, remained skeptical that they could return to work as usual; the department had been resistant to reinstating employees when ordered to do so, at times paying out millions of dollars each week to employees on paid administrative leave who were not working.

Program Transfers and Reorganization

Beyond staffing cuts, the administration pursued a parallel strategy of transferring specific functions to other agencies. By November 2025, six interagency agreements had been announced, followed by two more in February 2026, transferring programs such as career and technical education to the Department of Labor and school safety grants to Health and Human Services. The reported transfer of two core Education Department functions — the Office for Civil Rights to the Department of Justice and special education responsibilities to Health and Human Services — raised broader questions about whether a president can effectively shut down a Cabinet department that Congress created, without Congress itself acting. The Federal Student Aid office, managing $1.7 trillion in loans, was slated for transfer to the Treasury Department.

Significance and Impact

The practical consequences for students, states, and institutions were significant even absent formal abolition. Civil rights enforcement capacity contracted sharply: the Office for Civil Rights had 605 people and 12 regional offices when the Biden administration ended; the office was one of the hardest-hit by the March layoffs, losing almost half of its staff and seven of its 12 regional offices. Subsequent rounds of cuts reduced the office further still.

The restructuring also affected the quality of federal education data. The National Center for Education Statistics — the primary federal entity that collects and reports data on education in the United States — was among the offices affected by layoffs and early departures. Critics argued this would impair the country's ability to track educational outcomes, achievement gaps, and program effectiveness for years.

For higher education, the consequences centered on student aid and loan administration. Within Federal Student Aid, cuts were most severe among teams that work directly on policy and higher education oversight, including the Ombudsman Office, which investigates complaints into student loan practices and financial aid. Meanwhile, new rules capping graduate and professional loans took effect starting July 2026 under the budget reconciliation package, affecting more than 160,000 students, and income-driven repayment plans became less generous.

Congress, for its part, provided some constraints. The administration's proposed FY2026 budget cuts were rejected by Congress, which maintained student aid levels. And in enacted appropriations language, Congress made it unequivocally clear that the administration has no authority to strip programs and functions from the Department of Education without an act of Congress.

Reactions and Debate

Opposition came from multiple directions simultaneously. Attorneys general from 21 Democratic states filed suit against McMahon and the Trump administration over the layoffs, arguing they were "equivalent to incapacitating key, statutorily-mandated functions of the Department, causing immense damage to Plaintiff States and their educational systems." Federal courts at the district and appellate level largely sided with challengers: both a district court and a court of appeals sided against the Trump administration, ordering it to rehire affected employees while litigation proceeded, with the judges agreeing that the administration could not close the department because only Congress has the power to create or close federal agencies.

The Supreme Court, however, allowed the administration to proceed. The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to pause those lower court orders so layoffs could go forward while the case was ongoing, and the Court allowed the administration to continue firing essential federal employees at the department. Because the decision was an emergency, or "shadow," docket ruling, there was no public hearing and no opinion explaining the reasoning. Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, described the majority's decision to lift the lower court's injunction as "indefensible."

In Congress, Democratic lawmakers organized a sustained counter-effort. Senators Elizabeth Warren and Chuck Schumer, along with more than 170 members of Congress, filed an amicus brief arguing that only Congress has authority to create, restructure, and abolish federal departments by constitutional mandate and through long-established legal precedent. Supporters of the dismantling, meanwhile, framed it as a long-overdue correction. Republicans had been trying to abolish the department for decades, including through legislation introduced in the House in January 2025. One House bill, H.R. 899, would formally terminate the Department of Education on December 31, 2026.

Public opinion remained a complication for the administration. The idea of closing the department was largely unpopular with voters: nearly 60 percent of all voters opposed closing it entirely, according to a fall 2024 poll.

Outlook

As of early 2026, the Department of Education remains operational but has undergone substantial reductions in staff and scope under the administration's reform agenda. The central legal question — whether executive action alone can functionally eliminate a congressionally established agency — has not been definitively resolved. Courts blocked specific actions, the Supreme Court allowed others to proceed on an emergency basis, and the underlying merits cases continued to wind through the judiciary.

The legislative path to formal abolition remains narrow. The president cannot unilaterally abolish the department without congressional approval, and a bill to close it would require support from some congressional Democrats, which is not expected. The administration's strategy has therefore relied on administrative attrition — reducing staff, transferring functions, and contracting the agency's reach — while maintaining formal deniability about full closure. Democratic appropriators have responded by inserting language into spending bills asserting Congress's exclusive authority over the department's structure, and a June 2026 House Appropriations Committee statement indicated that the administration was continuing to transfer programs despite that prohibition.

What remains unresolved is whether the cumulative effect of staff reductions, interagency transfers, and budget constraints will prove effectively irreversible, even if the department nominally survives. Rebuilding institutional capacity — particularly in civil rights enforcement, special education oversight, and education data collection — would require sustained investment and political will that a future administration may or may not choose to provide. In that sense, the effort to dismantle the Department of Education may have longer consequences than the legal battle over its formal existence.