Trump To Order Former WWE Promoter to Dissolve Education Department

This EO would cause immeasurable harm to students, teachers, and public education—here are 6 ways we can and must fight back to protect our children

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Donald Trump is expected to issue an Executive Order (EO) instructing former WWE promoter and current Secretary of Education Linda McMahon to shut down the Department of Education. This move is both unconstitutional and catastrophic for America’s students. And while Trump’s supporters will likely cheer this as an attack on “big government,” the reality is much darker: this is a direct assault on our children and teachers, on educational equity and access, and serves as a major giveaway to billionaires. Let’s Address This.

Photo Credit: REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque/File Photo

An Executive Order Cannot Undo Legislation

Let’s start with the basics—Trump either doesn’t understand or doesn’t care about how the law works (probably a combination of both). The Department of Education was not created by executive order. It was established through legislation passed by Congress. Specifically, in 1979, President Jimmy Carter signed the Department of Education Organization Act, which elevated education to a Cabinet-level priority. This move ensured that the federal government could provide equal access to education, enforce civil rights protections, and allocate resources to schools in need. Therefore, while Trump cannot actually dissolve the Department of Education, he can still cause immense harm by defunding it, and effectively making it useless. It is important we understand how devastating these spending cuts will actually be.

Trump’s EO Will Harm Low Income and Black and Brown Children The Most

Irrespective of a formal shutdown of the DOE, Trump’s attacks on public education are devastating to the futures of tens of millions of children by denying them equal access. In fact, the top line mission of the Department of Education is:

1. to strengthen the Federal commitment to ensuring access to equal educational opportunity for every individual;

Before the Department of Education existed, states and localities controlled all aspects of education, which led to rampant racial and economic disparities. Jim Crow laws had just ended 14 years prior, and many of the legacies of Jim Crow remained in tact. The federal government stepped in to ensure that education was not a privilege reserved for the wealthy and white, but a right guaranteed for all children. Sadly, much work remains in this space, and Trump is trying to undo the progress made. Another reminder that the “again” in MAGA refers to Jim Crow America.

Without a federal education department, the most vulnerable children—Black and brown students, disabled students, low-income students—will suffer the most.

For example, even now, a study by the non-profit org, EdBuild, found that white-majority school districts receive $23 billion more in annual funding than school districts serving mostly Black and brown students—even though they serve the same number of children. That gap is the result of a broken and discriminatory local funding system, which the Department of Education helps to correct through federal funding programs like Title I. If Trump succeeds in shutting down the DOE, this funding disparity will only grow, making it even more difficult for children in marginalized communities to receive the education they need and deserve. Trump’s Executive Order will also impact enforcing Title IX protections, providing student loans, and ensuring Special Ed compliance.

So why is Trump pushing this? In part because he knows a uninformed populace is an easier to control populace. In part to pay for his $4.5T tax cut for his billionaire cronies. And in part because he wants to privatize education through the school voucher scam strategy, and in doing so, further enrich his billionaire friends. Remember, this is the same man who ran the scam Trump University, from which he was forced to pay a $25 million dollar fine for scamming students in a private online university. Trump has long bragged about how he "loves the poorly educated"—and now, he’s making sure there are more of them.

The Attack on Public Education is an Attack on Truth

This move also fits perfectly into the conservative push for book bans, censorship, and historical erasure. Without a DOE, states will have even more unchecked power to whitewash history, ban books about race and gender, and restrict discussions on topics like climate change and reproductive rights. This isn’t just an education issue—it’s an attack on knowledge itself.

We are already seeing what happens when schools are left to their own devices. A critical recent report by the Columbia Daily Spector provides a perfect example of this point. The Spector reports that just last week, the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights opened an investigation into Columbia University following a complaint filed by Palestine Legal alleging a pattern of anti-Palestinian discrimination in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. This is now the third investigation the Department has opened into Columbia since November 2023.

A letter sent from the Department of Education to Palestine Legal attorneys confirmed that the department will investigate whether Columbia:

• Responded appropriately to alleged harassment

• Violated Title VI by engaging in disparate treatment

• Violated Title VI by engaging in retaliation against Palestinian affiliates

Trump has made no secret that he vehemently opposes pro-Palestine protests on college campuses. A quick reminder of his unhinged tweet posted earlier this week:

We are already seeing an unprecedented level of book bans enforced by the MAGA cult. If the Department of Education ceases to exist, who will hold universities accountable for violating free speech and civil rights? Without this federal oversight, universities will be able to discriminate against students based on race, ethnicity, and political beliefs with zero repercussions.

This isn’t free speech or freedom, this is fascism.

And it is designed to push Americans into school privatization via voucher programs to religious schools. With public education tax dollars now available for private school vouchers, right wing evangelicals can use public tax dollars to fund their private religious schools. They will nationalize the plan indoctrinate children using tax dollars, and exclude Black and brown children by denying them access to tax dollars. What started in the 1970s with Ronald Reagan ending funding for California’s public universities to restrict the ‘undesirable’ Black, brown, and female student, is now coming to a head with Donald Trump ending federal funding for all public schools. Jim Crow never left America, and conservatives are trying to bring it back in full force with sanitized words like ‘school choice.’

Democrats Must Go Beyond Symbolic Gestures And Take (At Least) These 6 Steps

Trump’s efforts to destroy public education demand serious opposition—not just Democrats dressing in pink and holding arts and crafts sessions at his next speech. We need a real strategy to protect education at all levels, including but not limited to these six acts:

1. Block Trump’s EO through legal challenges. Democrats should have lawsuits filed in every Federal district and state court to block this defunding of public education. Bring out the students and teachers this defunding harms, and tell their story to the public. Be relentless in using the legal safeguards still available to us to our advantage.

2. Mobilize local and state governments to uphold education standards. Every Democratic Governor should join these lawsuits, and allocate additional state funding to ensure children in the children in their states have their needs met. State Attorneys general should also be filing lawsuits against the Federal government to slow down this degradation and demand accountability.

3. Demand Congress safeguard the DOE’s role in protecting civil rights and funding equity. Contact every member of Congress and demand they block attempts to defund education. Then contact them again. Then again. Light those phones up.

4. Members of the House and Senate should deny quorum on future votes. Deny unanimous consent. Deny cloture. Conduct sit ins. Bring government to a crawl and make Republicans own their failure. Even now, Republicans are asking Elon Musk for permission to vote (yes, really). So much for Trump’s claim that we will “no longer be accountable to unelected bureaucrats.” And I would say Democrats should raise their voice, but they might turn on each other and censure each other as they did to Rep Al Green (TX) for daring to speak out against Trump’s attempts to gut Medicaid. Bottom line, give Republicans no leeway.

5. Tell the story effectively with your best story tellers. Unleash Rep Crockett, Rep AOC, Rep Raskin, Rep Pressley, Senator Sanders, Senator Warnock, and Senator Hayes. Go on a national media tour and bombard the airwaves with accurate information on how gutting the Department of Education will harm our children, our teachers, and our public schools. Why can Trump so effectively use a 13-year-old child to push his propaganda narrative but we cannot elevate actual stories of children suffering under Trump’s policies?

6. Win the messaging game by investing in content creators to tell this story and let the American public know. Pew reports that at least 54% of Americans get their news at least sometimes from social media. Republicans invested heavily in social media content creators during the 2024 election, and it paid off big for them. Democrats need to invest tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions, of dollars in content creators to win the public narrative on this crisis. It is an unforced error to not invest massive resources in the content creators putting out accurate content to stop the advancement of fascism in the United States.

In short, this isn’t just another one of Trump’s empty promises—it’s a calculated attack on the very foundation of an informed society. We cannot afford to sit back and watch. The fight for education is a fight for democracy itself. Democrats can adopt all six of the above, and several more strategies, to block Trump’s anti-education plan from advancing.