Why Trump Aims to Put His Secretary of Education Out of Work

President Donald Trump said Thursday he hopes his executive order to begin eliminating the Department of Education will put Secretary of Education Linda McMahon out of a job.

“It’s tremendous to have you, and hopefully, you won’t be there too long,” Trump said of McMahon, “but we’re going to find something else.”

Trump signed the order surrounded by children at desks and facing an audience of education leaders and Republican governors and lawmakers.

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The executive order is “the first step toward doing what has to be done in education, which is to return the authority and resources to places near the students, parents, and teachers,” Hillsdale College President Larry P. Arnn, a guest at the signing, told The Daily Signal.

The order will preserve some useful functions of the Cabinet department while eliminating waste, Trump said.

“The department’s useful functions and such as they’re in charge of them, Pell Grants, Title I, funding resources for children with disabilities, will be preserved, fully preserved,” he said.

Trump’s scaled-back Education Department should reform student loans “so they’re not methods of control by the government over the process,” said Arnn, who in 2020-2021 chaired Trump’s 1776 Commission, an advisory panel established to support what Trump called “patriotic education.”

“The accountability for the student loans should be in the student and in the institution that receives the money,” Arnn said. “Right now, the institution that receives the money is not on the hook if the student doesn’t perform.”

He also said Trump needs to give block-grant funding to the states to encourage them to decentralize education.

“Right now, most of the bureaucrats and most of the money is at the state level,” he said, adding that the federal government is a force for them to build more central authority. “It should be a force for them to devolve authority down toward the schools. That’s where education happens.”

“We’re going to eliminate [the Education Department], and everybody knows it’s right, and the Democrats know it’s right,” Trump said, “and I hope they’re going to be voting for it, because ultimately it may come before them, but everybody knows it’s right, and we have to get our children educated.”

His administration will take all “lawful steps” to shut down the department “as quickly as possible,” Trump said.

He praised red state governors, including a former Republican presidential primary rival, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who “want education to come back to them, to come back to the states.”

The president also thanked teachers as “among the most important people in this country” and promised to take care of them.

“We want to have our children well-educated,” he said. “We want them to love going to school.”