After constant teasing, the possibility of the Department of Education (DOE) shutting down during the Trump presidency is more real than ever.
On March 20, President Trump signed an executive order that would give the green light to begin the process of dismantling the DOE, as he and Elon Musk have done to numerous federal organizations and institutions since January of this year. This marks another harrowing blow to the already-crippled Congress and their jurisdiction over whether a government agency shutters or not, as it was announced that half of the agency will be put on administrative leave beginning Friday, March 31st.
The order 一 titled “Improving Education Outcomes by Empowering Parent, States, and Communities” 一 claims that “Closing the Department of Education would provide children and their families the opportunity to escape a system that is failing them.” It also claims that the “closure of the Department of Education would drastically improve program implementation in higher education.”
Related: Can Trump Really Dismantle the DOE?
Among the numerous changes to the agency and how the federal government will approach education in the future, it was noted by Trump that federal Pell Grants, which many students from lower-income backgrounds commonly receive for financial aid, “Title I funding and resources and funding for children with disabilities would be ‘preserved in full and redistributed to various other agencies and departments,’” NBC reports.
Trump’s administration is set on giving individual states full power to decide what is taught in their schools without setting a national standard of education 一 such as the Common Core State Standards, which were put in place to set clear development and learning benchmarks for each grade.
President Trump claims that one of the main reasons for the dismantling of the DOE is due to the consistent low mathematics and reading proficiencies from the last few years recently reported in The Nation’s Report Card by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), when a major portion of current fourth and fifth graders were first learning how to read and do math remotely during the pandemic and did not have access to the proper resources, even after returning to school in person.
States and school districts across the country will begin to feel more of the impacts of a dismantled federal department of education as federal funding will come under tight scrutiny and be pulled as “the allocation of any Federal Department of Education funds” will be terminated if there is found to be “illegal discrimination obscured under the label “diversity, equity, and inclusion” or similar terms and programs promoting gender ideology.”
Along with federal funds from the DOE being cut, POLITICO reported on March 10, 2025, that the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) cut two federal food programs that provide a collective $1 billion or more to help schools and food banks across the country buy food from local farms and ranchers to feed children.
Over 40 states in the US participate in the Local Food for Schools (LFS) Cooperative Agreement Program in efforts to make sure that all of their students and children are fed. Without this program, as well as the Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Agreement Program, children from families who cannot afford to provide them lunch everyday will only continue to suffer. Feed the Children, an organization dedicated to ending childhood hunger, reported that “not having enough food or not eating enough nutritious foods puts children at a disadvantage,” and that “children who experience food insecurity in their first years lack the same opportunities to be successful in school as children who were not food insecure.”
By pulling all sorts of important and needed federal funding and support in favor for bolstering a state’s individual ability to choose the right kind of education on the basis of what President Trump views to be “anti-American, subversive, harmful, and false ideologies,” school districts in the poorer states, as well as children from lower-income areas, will continue to underperform, perpetuating the lower math and reading scores that president Trump and his administration are meant to be fighting.
Congress has yet to hold a vote to approve the DOE’s official shuttering, as Republicans do not yet have enough votes to legally greenlight it.