Conservatives’ decades-long quest to destroy the Department of Education

Conservative activists have been dreaming of dismantling the Department of Education for decades.

They’re closer than ever to achieving their goal.

On Thursday, President Donald Trump signed an executive order that he said would “begin eliminating the federal Department of Education once and for all.” That comes after, earlier this month, the Department of Education announced mass firings of its workforce, which would cut the department staff down to about half of what it was when Joe Biden left office — from about 4,000 to about 2,000.

Trump had promised to abolish the department on the campaign trail, but since it was established by Congress and many of its functions are legally required, he can’t make it go away with a stroke of a pen. Instead, his team is slashing its personnel and will likely try to cut back its spending to the greatest extent they think they can get away with.

Now, it’s very unclear how big the policy impact of these layoffs will actually be. The biggest things the Education Department does in practice are sending money to public schools that have many low-income students, sending money to help educate students with disabilities, and running the federal student loan program. Education Secretary Linda McMahon has said that the department would keep doing all these things — though staff cutbacks seem likely to make such services more dysfunctional.

But all this is an important symbolic victory for ideological conservative activists. Because, ever since the Education Department was created as a standalone agency in 1979, they’ve wanted it gone.

These activists generally argue that education should be a local matter without federal “interference.” Many of them also disdain the public school system and support bolstering private alternatives (or home schooling).

For 45 years, they kept on failing to get their way, even when Republican presidents were in power. For much of that period, the GOP was split on education: Anti-government conservatives wanted the federal government to stay away, but other Republicans saw a federal role in improving public schools.

Plus, it was widely believed that abolishing the department would lead to political backlash and was likely impossible without congressional approval — so why bother trying?

But the past decade, and especially the past few years, have seen major shifts in the politics of public education and inside the conservative coalition — shifts that have finally made the time right for a full assault on the department.

The first shift was a bipartisan disillusionment with the federal efforts to boost learning in public schools that were embodied in the No Child Left Behind Act of 2002. NCLB was championed by Republican George W. Bush, but was ultimately criticized by both the left (too much focus on testing) and the right (too much government interference).

Once NCLB was repealed in 2015, Republicans essentially abandoned the idea that the federal government should try to improve public schools, which removed one rationale for keeping the Education Department around. (Back in 2018, Trump announced a plan to merge the Department of Education with the Department of Labor, but it went nowhere.)

The second, more recent shift is backlash among rank-and-file Republicans against public schools, due to anger over their handling of the Covid-19 pandemic and culture war issues in the past few years. The right frames this as parents recoiling against the incompetence or ideological extremism of educators, administrators, and unions; the left frames this as conservatives targeting public schools with an exaggerated campaign of vilification.

But the result was that typical Republican voters became more open to shaking up the status quo on public education. That can be seen in the flurry of “universal school choice laws,” which allot families public funds to pay for private school tuition, that have passed in red states in the 2020s.

So abolishing the Education Department became a frequent applause line for Trump during his 2024 campaign — his newfound focus on this was no secret. Eliminating the department was the main theme of Project 2025’s education chapter, too — though this was no surprise, as the think tank behind the project, the Heritage Foundation, has been calling for that for decades.

Still, even after Trump won another term, there was widespread skepticism that he could actually do it, given the belief that congressional approval would be necessary, and that Democrats would never agree.

That’s where the third change comes in: the entry of Elon Musk and DOGE to the conservative coalition. They have modeled a new approach to dismantling the agencies they dislike, something that has never really been tried at this scale. And now it’s the Department of Education’s turn in the barrel.

Update, March 20 at 4:50pm ET: This article was originally published on March 12 and has been updated to reflect Trump’s new executive order.