While Republican President-elect Donald Trump has promised to overhaul many parts of the U.S. government, he’s said he wants to eliminate one entirely: the U.S. Department of Education (DOE).
Trump vowed to shut down the DOE, echoing calls from the conservative Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 to terminate the agency, which it calls a “convenient one-stop shop for the woke education cartel.” Throughout his campaign, Trump distanced himself from Project 2025 and has claimed that he had no idea who wrote it — however, recent cabinet picks may suggest otherwise.
The DOE has been a point of contention among politicians on both sides of the aisle since its creation in 1979. The conservative push to abolish the DOE comes from the Republican Party’s long-standing belief in smaller-scale government intervention into daily life. Republicans believe that education, like other mainstream issues like abortion and voting rights, should be up to states to decide.
In Wisconsin, Republican lawmakers have championed school choice, and have called for education policy to return to state and local governments. On the campaign trail, both Trump and U.S. Senate candidate Eric Hovde voiced their support for the elimination of the DOE and the localization of public schools.
At a campaign visit to Milwaukee in October, Trump singled out the city as the “home of the first and oldest school choice” program and declared education is “the civil rights issue of our age,” according to the New York Post.
Roughly 63% of Wisconsin Republicans said they were dissatisfied or very dissatisfied with Wisconsin’s public schools, according to an August 2024 Marquette Law School poll.
Republicans champion school choice, advocate for the localization of schools
Republicans have strongly advocated for school choice, which they define as the right for parents to choose where their child goes to school, public or private, and what their school teaches them.
Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson spoke in favor of school choice and advocated for education policy to be handled at a local level during a Moms for Liberty event held at the Republican National Convention in July.
“I’m hoping that one result from Moms for Liberty is we start moving away from these massive, large schools, and we start moving more toward the old one-room school,” Johnson said at the event.
Former Wisconsin governor Tommy Thompson supported Wisconsin’s first school choice movement of the 1990s, which saw Milwaukee’s private school population increase from 341 students in 1990 to 29,000 students in 2021, according to School Choice Wisconsin,
Many conservative families fear public educational institutions are “woke,” meaning schools prioritize teaching children about social injustice and traditionally liberal values over actual educational material. This pushes families toward private or Christian schools that are privately run and funded.
Wisconsin offers options for parents who do not want to send their child to public school. Private schools service 13.5% of Wisconsin students, while homeschooling options service 2.96%, according to Johns Hopkins School of Education.
Additionally, Wisconsin’s private school voucher program services 43% of privately educated students, and this number is expected to grow by 60% once the voucher program’s enrollment cap sunsets in 2026.
Trump’s current pick for Secretary of Education is Linda McMahon, wife of former WWE chairman Vince McMahon. She has advocated for school choice and said she will be a “fierce advocate for Parents.” The National Education Association has disavowed McMahon, saying she “has an agenda to privatize public education — much like Betsy DeVos before her.”
What is the state’s role in education, and what does the DOE actually do?
Wisconsin schools allocate state and local taxes to state and local schools, which are run by a board of elected or appointed officials who decide what is taught within the school district. What information is disseminated in schools is also not typically decided by the federal government.
Gov. Tony Evers recently signed a partial veto boosting school funding for the next 400 years. Evers provided the state of Wisconsin with 400 years of ongoing, predictable funding increases which aim to better fund Wisconsin’s public schools. State superintendent Jill Underly hopes to use the extra funding to boost mental health, school nutrition and special education resources.
One of the DOE’s responsibilities is distributing federal aid for K-12 schools and key federal student loans and aid for college and university students. For example, the DOE provided $190 billion to schools for emergency relief during the pandemic. Financial aid programs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison benefit 58% of first-year students, and the average financial aid package for first-year students is over $12,000.
Without the DOE, the responsibility of financial aid distribution would go to another federal department. Project 2025 suggests sending this responsibility to the Department of Treasury, though officials said moving the Office of Federal Student Aid out of the DOE would create chaos worse than the rollout of the 2024-2025 FAFSA form last fall.
Additionally, the DOE regulates programs created under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act that ensure children with disabilities and students ages 3 to 21 from low-income families have equitable access to educational resources. In Wisconsin, 14.1% of students have an Individualized Education Plan, 3% of students have a specific learning disability and 1.1% of students have a 504 plan.
Without the DOE, these programs may lose regulation and disabled students’ rights to an equitable education may be violated, according to nonprofit education reporting organization Chalkbeat.
People suggesting public schools are “woke” take issue with the DOE’s Office for Civil Rights, which addresses allegations of race, gender and sexuality-based discrimination. It also handles investigations of sexual assault. But guidelines introduced during President Barack Obama’s administration to enhance the handling of assault cases were rolled back by the Trump administration following criticism that the policies were “too harsh.”
Political experts said it’s unlikely Trump will follow through on his claims that he would close the DOE. The DOE could be divided and given to other government agencies to take care of, and Title I, the federal government’s main funding stream for K-12 schools, would be given to the states. States would be allowed to use this funding in different ways as they see fit, leading to an uneven distribution of educational material across the country, according to US News.
The process to eliminate the agency would take roughly 10 years, according to the New York Times. The resulting extreme funding cuts for public education would be unpopular, with Congress likely to vote against it.
