What we can VERIFY about Trump’s plan to close the U.S. Department of Education

President-elect Donald Trump is set to return to the White House in January after winning the 2024 presidential election.

He campaigned on promises to overhaul the federal government and change how school funding is distributed. Now that he’s been elected, many are looking for more specifics about how his administration might change public education.

For example, many people on social media claim Trump has pledged to shut down the U.S. Department of Education during his second administration. One viral video that was posted on X on Nov. 11 suggests the former president recently announced plans to shut down the agency “to allow local states and counties and cities decide their education policy.”

Claims like these have led many VERIFY readers to ask us questions about whether Trump really plans to close the Department of Education, how he could shut it down, and if it’s connected to Project 2025.

THE SOURCES

• The U.S. Department of Education
• Agenda47, Trump’s policy agenda
• 2024 Republican Platform
• “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise,” published by The Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank behind Project 2025
• Karoline Leavitt, Trump-Vance transition spokeswoman
• Education Data Initiative 
• FindLaw

WHAT WE FOUND

President-elect Donald Trump has promised to transform the education system in the United States during his second administration. This includes a proposal to “close the Department of Education in Washington, D.C., and to send all education work and needs back to the States.”

Threats to eliminate the Department of Education are not new. It would take congressional approval to completely close the agency, and it’s unclear at this time if Trump will get enough support to shut it down in his second term.

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What is the Department of Education and what does it do?

The U.S. Department of Education is a “federal agency that establishes policy for, administers, and coordinates most federal assistance to education.” The agency assists the president in executing national education policies and in implementing laws enacted by Congress.

The Department of Education also provides support for K-12 education as well as funding for college students through loans and grants. It currently provides about 14% of the funding for public K-12 education in the United States.

In 1979, former President Jimmy Carter signed legislation that made the Department of Education a cabinet-level agency. Since then, many Republican presidents and presidential candidates, including former President Ronald Reagan and Trump himself, have tried but failed to shut down the agency, according to Education Week.

What Trump and the GOP say about shuttering the Department of Education

Trump announced his most recent plan to close the federal Department of Education on Sept. 13, 2023, in a video posted on his official campaign website under the Agenda 47 policy platform.

“One other thing I’ll be doing very early in the administration is closing up the Department of Education in Washington D.C. and sending all education and education work and needs back to the States,” Trump says. The former president mentioned his plan to shutter the agency multiple times on the campaign trail.

The official Republican Party platform, which was published after the Republican National Convention in July, includes similar language: “We are going to close the Department of Education in Washington, D.C. and send it back to the States, where it belongs, and let the States run our educational system as it should be run.”

This is not the first time Trump has attempted to close the Department of Education. In 2018, during his first term, his administration proposed merging the agency with the Labor Department. The Republican majority Senate rejected the proposal.

Closing the agency would require congressional approval, and a supermajority of 60 votes in the Senate as long as its filibuster rules remain in place, according to a Washington Post report.

At this time, it’s uncertain if Trump will have enough support to close the agency, but some Republican members of Congress, including Florida Sen. Rick Scott, have embraced Trump’s plan.

“Why do we have the Department of Education? Why? Our states should be doing that. Our federal government should not be involved in the education system,” Scott said in a Nov. 12 interview on Fox Business.

VERIFY reached out to the Trump transition team with questions about how the president-elect’s plan to close the Department of Education would work. They did not offer any new details but provided the following statement: 

“The American people re-elected President Trump by a resounding margin giving him a mandate to implement the promises he made on the campaign trail. He will deliver,” said Trump-Vance transition spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt.

What Project 2025 says about closing the Department of Education

Project 2025, an initiative launched in April 2022 by conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation, and which has ties to Trump, also calls for shutting down the Department of Education in its 922-page how-to guide for the next conservative president called the “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise.”

“Federal education policy should be limited and, ultimately, the federal Department of Education should be eliminated,” writes Lindsey Burke, Ph.D., the director of the Center for Education Policy at The Heritage Foundation.

Project 2025 proposes ending two major K-12 funding streams the Department of Education oversees — the Head Start program and the Title I program. It also recommends reducing the free lunch program.

But it does not call for eliminating Individualized Education Programs (IEPs), which are education plans for students with disabilities funded by the Department of Education. Instead, it would change how federal funds for IEP are distributed and allow different uses for the funds, including letting parents put the money into savings accounts or use it for private schools.

Although Trump has never publicly endorsed Project 2025, he does have multiple connections to the authors.

Trump’s other education proposals

In addition to eliminating the Department of Education, Trump proposes using federal funding as leverage to pressure K-12 school systems to abolish tenure and adopt merit pay for teachers. He also calls for pulling federal funding “for any school or program pushing Critical Race Theory, gender ideology, or other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content on our children.”

Trump also says he “will again be a champion for the fundamental right to pray in school” in his second term. During his first term, his administration updated federal guidance regarding protected prayer and religious expression in public schools, which had not been issued since 2003 during the Bush administration.

Mandatory prayer, teacher-led prayer, prayer at school functions and student-led prayer during class time is not allowed under the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, according to FindLaw. But prayer is not completely banned on public school grounds.

The Department of Education says that public school students and teachers, regardless of their religion, are free to privately pray “when not engaged in school activities or instruction” or during “moments of silence.” The agency also says that “teachers, school administrators, and other school employees may not encourage or discourage private prayer or other religious activity.”

In other policy areas, Trump proposes taking over accreditation processes for colleges, which is a move he describes as his “secret weapon” against the “Marxist Maniacs and lunatics” he says control higher education.

Trump also calls for redirecting confiscated endowment money from schools that don’t follow his plans into an online “American Academy” offering college credentials to all Americans without tuition charges.

The Associated Press contributed to this report. 

This story is also available in Spanish / Lee este artículo también en español:  Lo que podemos verificar sobre el plan de Trump de cerrar el Departamento de Educación de EE.UU.