President Donald Trump signed an executive order Thursday directing his Cabinet to “take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education,” fulfilling a 45-year dream of conservatives, restoring constitutional order, and phasing out a federal agency that has returned poor results at high cost to taxpayers and American children.

“When President Carter created the federal Department of Education in 1979, it was opposed by members of his own cabinet, as well as the American Federation of Teachers, The New York Times editorial board, and the famed Democrat Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. History has proven them right — absolutely right,” said Trump at a signing ceremony Thursday afternoon.

“The Secretary of Education shall, to the maximum extent appropriate and permitted by law, take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education and return authority over education to the [s]tates and local communities while ensuring the effective and uninterrupted delivery of services, programs, and benefits on which Americans rely,” the executive order, titled “Improving Education Outcomes by Empowering Parents, States, and Communities,” states. The secretary must also assure schools’ “rigorous compliance” with a federal “requirement that any program or activity receiving Federal assistance terminate illegal discrimination obscured under the label ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ or similar terms and programs promoting gender ideology.” 

“Unfortunately, the experiment of controlling American education through Federal programs and dollars — and the unaccountable bureaucracy those programs and dollars support — has plainly failed our children, our teachers, and our families,” it states.

The document also directs the DOE to divest itself of its student loan portfolio, which amounts to $1.6 trillion. “The Department of Education is not a bank, and it must return bank functions to an entity equipped to serve America’s students,” it states. However, President Trump promised such federal programs as Title I funding of low-income schools will be “preserved in full and redistributed to various other agencies and departments.”

Americans can “completely eliminate the Department of Education, while at the same time maintaining the protections for students that the federal government can provide,” Meg Kilgannon, senior fellow for Education Studies at Family Research Council, told “Washington Watch” on Thursday. “It will mean even more money going to states, not less money, because we won’t have that cut off the top from here in Washington.”

The Trump administration rapped the Carter-era department for wasting taxpayer funds and delivering poor results. The Department of Education has spent more than $3 trillion since 1979, and federal spending per pupil, in inflation-adjusted dollars, has more than doubled today at more than $15,000 per student.

Yet today, “American reading and math scores are near historical lows. This year’s National Assessment of Educational Progress showed that 70 percent of 8th graders were below proficient in reading, and 72 percent were below proficient in math. The Federal education bureaucracy is not working,” says the executive order. Reading scores fell for fourth and eighth grade students in U.S. public schools, and math scores declined for eighth graders since 2022, according to NAEP, which bills itself “the nation’s report card.” All students remained below pre-pandemic levels. On the other hand, studies show children educated through homeschooling tend to be happier, more engaged with their communities, and more likely to be married than public school students.

The critical metrics to measure DOE success come down to two questions: “Are our students achieving? Do parents feel included in the process at their schools?” asked Kilgannon. “Unfortunately, students are not being well educated right now, and that the Department of Education isn’t doing anything to correct that problem. It is actually making that problem worse. Let’s eliminate that and then we’ll get down to business.”

Democrats, Pro-Abortion Movement React: Closing the Department of Education Is ‘Morally Reprehensible’

Conservatives and pro-family advocates praised the Department of Education’s long-sought closure. “It’s time to close it and unleash the amazing potential of parents, state, and local governments,” said the Family Research Council. 

But Democrats and the pro-abortion movement exploded in fits of vulgarity and moral outrage, insisting the president’s action is immoral and would bring back Jim Crow. “This is bulls***!” exclaimed EMILY’s List, which funds politicians who advance the abortion industry’s political agenda. “Not only is this unconstitutional — it would be terrible public policy and morally reprehensible,” asserted Senate Democrats earlier this month, sharing a clip from democratic socialist Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). “This executive order is unconstitutional and ... takes us back to a segregation-era education policy and rips away safety nets for millions of vulnerable students,” claimed the Florida Democratic Party’s far-left chairwoman, Nikki Fried.

The federal government did not segregate schools during Jimmy Carter’s presidency, when the Department of Education was established.

Abolishing the Department of Education Restores Constitutional Governance: Education Expert

Experts say the president’s executive order not only makes education more efficient but helps restore long-lost constitutional governance to Washington, D.C. Education is not among the enumerated powers delegated to the federal government by the Constitution in Article I, Section 8. “That means the feds have no authority to govern in education,” noted Neal McCluskey, director the Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Freedom and author of “The Fractured Schoolhouse.”

“You don’t see anywhere listed in the Constitution where the Department of Education is contemplated,” Rep. Greg Steube (R-Fla.) told “Washington Watch” guest host Jody Hice on Thursday. “This is a states’ rights issue. The state should be determining this. Your local school district should be determining this, not the federal government. And the federal government shouldn’t do an edict from Washington, D.C., on allowing biological men into women’s sports in your K-12” schools.

Trump’s executive order brings to an end the federal government’s 60-year experiment in top-down educational control. Even New Deal liberal Franklin Delano Roosevelt published a 1943 document from the U.S. Constitution Sesquicentennial Commission, which asked, “Where, in the Constitution, is there mention of education?” It answered, “There is none; education is a matter reserved for the states.” Only with Lyndon B. Johnson’s 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) did the U.S. government begin meaningfully funding, and directing, local education.

President Jimmy Carter established the Department of Education in 1979, which began operations in March 1980. The one-term Democrat promised his new department would have little impact on educational control or curriculum. “The establishment of the Department of Education shall not increase the authority of the [f]ederal [g]overnment over education or diminish the responsibility for education which is reserved to the [s]tates and the local school systems and other instrumentalities of the [s]tate,” said the bill establishing the department, which is now federal law (20 U.S. Code § 3403). “It is the intention of the Congress in the establishment of the [Education] Department to protect the rights of [s]tate and local governments and public and private educational institutions in the areas of educational policies and administration of programs and to strengthen and improve the control of such governments and institutions over their own educational programs and policies.”

But federal funding inevitably invites federal control. Federal funding makes up roughly 14% of all local school funding, but much of it flows through other agencies, such as the Agriculture Department’s school lunch program. The DOE provides approximately 9% of local schools’ annual budget on average. “Most education funding already happens at the state level, but the entire system is disrupted by the strings attached to get back the remaining ten percent of funds from the federal government,” explained former Congressman Justin Amash. For instance, the federal government has passed bills such as the No Child Left Behind Act, establishing Common Core curriculum requirements.

“An unconstitutional, ineffective, incompetent, unnecessary, and expensive federal department is not a benefit to the country. It’s a mistake that must go away,” said McCluskey.

‘Promises Made, Promises Kept’

With the executive order to close the Department of Education, President Trump fulfills yet another 2024 campaign promise. In an online video posted July 2023, the Republican presidential hopeful vowed to begin “closing up the Department of Education in Washington, D.C., and sending all education and education work and needs back to the states. We want them to run the education of our children, because they’ll do a much better job of it. You can’t do worse.” Trump reiterated his promise to “close immediately the Department of Education” and “move everything back to the states” that September at FRC’s Pray Vote Stand Summit.

The president prepared the way for Thursday’s order on March 11 by firing half of the Department of Education’s staff, reducing the DOE’s payroll from 4,133 to 2,183 and closing seven of the department’s 12 remote satellite offices.

“I will govern by a simple motto,” said Trump at the outset of his administration: “Promises made, promises kept.”

The president noted that many of his predecessors, such as Ronald Reagan, wanted to close the ineffectual agency “for many, many decades, but no president every got around to doing it. But I’m getting around to doing it,” Trump concluded, shortly before he signed the order, surrounded by children sitting at school desks who hoisted replica versions of the executive order at the same time as the president.

Congress Must Act to Abolish the Dept. of Education: Congressmen

President Trump’s executive order is the first step toward higher educational standards and restored constitutional order. But since Congress established the Department of Education by statutory law, Congress must pass a law abolishing it. Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) has introduced legislation (H.R. 899) to shut down the DOE by December 2026, currently co-sponsored by 32 of his House colleagues, as of this writing. “My father introduced legislation to eliminate the Dept of Education in the early 1980s. Rep. Massie continued the same bill — one sentence — and I’ve introduced the Senate version,” said Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.). “Thanks to President Trump for working to return education to the states.”

Steube told Hice that the election of President Donald Trump, whom polls have ranked as the most popular president among Republicans in modern history, has spurred the Congress toward accomplishing long-sought conservative goals. “With President Trump in the White House, you’ve seen the House move to his position on things, because he’s overwhelmingly supported by the American people,” he said. 

“This is our opportunity to do it. We have to get fiscally responsible. We have to balance our budget. We have to reduce the deficit. We have to do all of those things because we have a Republican House, Senate, and White House. If we don’t do the things that President Trump campaigned on and we said that we were going to do, we’re going to probably lose the House in the midterm,” assessed Steube. “We have to come through for him. Backing him up on all these issues, I think, is very, very important.”

American Educational Decline Stems from Deeper Issues

Abolishing the Department of Education may improve the mechanics of education delivery, but experts warn, children’s success faces threats from deeper structural issues this executive order did not address.

“Over the past four years, Democrats have allowed millions of illegal minors into the country, straining school resources and diverting focus from American students,” White House Principal Deputy Press Secretary Harrison Fields told Fox News. “Coupled with the rise of anti-American CRT and DEI indoctrination, this is harming our most vulnerable.”

Kilgannon pointed to a more fundamental cause behind America’s decades-long educational decline: family breakdown. “The family is in crisis, and as long as the family is in crisis, children are going to suffer,” she concluded.