With President-elect Donald Trump announcing his pick for secretary of Education amid plans to wind down the federal agency, experts say the incoming administration is moving closer toward shifting more power to direct education to the states, thereby increasingly empowering parents to make educational decisions regarding their children at the local level.

On Tuesday, Trump announced the appointment of Linda McMahon, former administrator of the Small Business Administration, to lead the Department of Education (DOE). “Linda has been a fierce advocate for Parents’ Rights, working … to achieve Universal School Choice in 12 states, giving children the opportunity to receive an excellent Education, regardless of zip code or income,” Trump stated. “As Secretary of Education, Linda will fight tirelessly to expand ‘Choice’ to every state in America, and empower parents to make the best Education decisions for their families.”

Meg Kilgannon, senior fellow for Education Studies at Family Research Council, concurred that McMahon would work for much-needed reforms to the DOE. “I think that we need someone who is not a part of the educational industrial complex to be in charge of this department so that it can do the work that the American people want it to do until we try to shut it down,” she contended during “Washington Watch with Tony Perkins” Thursday. “I think that she is obviously a very trusted member of the Trump team. … I think that’s a good sign for education. I think it’s going to be an important topic for the president, and I think that she is going to hit the ground running.”

On numerous occasions on the campaign trail and in an online video, Trump has promised to shut down the Department of Education in order to send education “back to the states.” Vivek Ramaswamy, who will help lead the newly established Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), has also alluded to the closure, posting on social media, “Will entire agencies be deleted? Answer: yes.”

However, Kilgannon acknowledged that completely eliminating the DOE would be uniquely difficult, but it could be possible through bipartisan bargaining.

“[Y]ou need an act of Congress to eliminate the Department of Education and to send the money directly to the states,” she explained. “So it’s going to be a heavy lift. And the people running the Department of Education aren’t going to necessarily be in charge of that part of it. … I think that it might be possible to get to 60 votes on a bill to undo the Department of Education if you … sweetened this deal with the idea of increasing Title I spending and increasing spending for special needs students under the Individuals with Disabilities Act. … I think that that is something that the Left is sleeping on a little bit here. … I think you could find a coalition of the willing on this with the right sweeteners.”

Kilgannon went on to argue that some of the functions that DOE currently performs can be handed off to other agencies.

“[Y]ou could spin off the student loan portion of the work of the department, for example, to an agency like the Department of Treasury, which is really where that kind of thing should be housed in the first place,” she asserted. “That would greatly lessen the budget of the department itself. You could offer the Office of Civil Rights — which is a huge, huge problem for Christian universities [because] anytime a Democrat is in control of the department they tend to go after Christian universities relentlessly — you could put that at the Department of Justice. Now, that doesn’t necessarily help you in terms of having bad actors in charge of legal offices, but it takes it out of the hands of the Department of Education. … It makes it easier and easier to wind it down and then eventually to shut it down.”

Family Research Council President Tony Perkins further emphasized that giving states more educational autonomy would have a positive domino effect in other areas.

“What this would accomplish if you send back education authority and the responsibility for education to the states, this [will] further strengthen our federalist system because you are empowering these states … and through that, when they succeed, people around the country are going to be voting with their feet by going to states that are successful economically, states that have [a] strong moral foundation, they’re safe, [have] strong families because they have got good policy. So you’re going to see states like California, New York, people are going to be continuing to flock out of those states.”

A recent Institute for Family Studies report confirmed that this migration is already happening. “Blue states that voted for Democratic presidential candidates in both 2016 and 2020 lost 213,000 families with children in 2021 and 2022 (a 0.7% net decline), while red states that voted for President Trump in both elections gained 181,000 families (a 0.6% net gain),” the study found.

President-elect Trump’s campaign promise to give tax breaks to homeschooling families could further the trend. The plan would “allow homeschool parents to use 529 education savings accounts to spend up to $10,000 a year per child, completely tax-free to spend on costs associated with homeschool education.”

Kilgannon gave additional reasons why the incoming administration should deal severely with DOE. “[T]hey were part of the reason why we had COVID restrictions for longer, because the teachers’ unions were in there lobbying at the beginning of the Biden administration to keep the schools shut down, which just delayed everybody’s recovery and our economic recovery from COVID. And then in terms of foreign policy, we had the whole crisis of campus protests last year after the horrible October 7th attack. Working on fighting anti-Semitism on college campuses is a really high priority. And I think you’re going to see that from the new administration.”

“[T]he appointments that we’ve seen coming out of this transition are indicating [they want to] disrupt the federal stranglehold on the nation, so to speak,” Kilgannon concluded. “We need to cut back regulations. … [T]he actual closing of the [DOE] is a big lift. It’s time to really think about how are we going to run this department? Because we can’t let it run us. When our team is in charge, we have to be running the government.”