President Donald Trump, winner of the Battle of the Billionaires at WrestleMania 23, has maintained close ties with Linda McMahon, the former C.E.O. of World Wrestling Entertainment, for decades. During the President’s first term, she served for two years as head of the Small Business Administration, stepping down in 2019 to lead America First Action, a pro-Trump super PAC. Now McMahon is Trump’s nominee to run the U.S. Department of Education, although she may appear to lack conventional bona fides for the position. (She did spend a year on the Connecticut Board of Education, although it later emerged that she did not have a degree in education, as she had claimed.)
If McMahon is confirmed by the Senate, her odd task will be to take charge of an agency in order to euthanize it. “I told Linda, ‘Linda, I hope you do a great job and put yourself out of a job,’ ” Trump said, on February 4th. His Administration wants to abolish the Department of Education—which would require an act of Congress—or at least to shrink its remit, which encompasses the federal student-loan program, Title I funding for low-income districts, special-education services for students with disabilities, civil-rights complaints, and more.
In fact, this demolition work is well under way. Members of Elon Musk’s slash-and-burn DOGE squad have been inside the agency for the past week, placing staff members on paid leave and, according to the Washington Post, feeding “sensitive data from across the Education Department into artificial intelligence software to probe the agency’s programs and spending.” A.I. may have informed the agency’s decision to cancel nine hundred million dollars’ worth of existing contracts related to education research. NBC News reported that the agency will conduct an internal review aimed at “ensuring that Department grants do not fund discriminatory practices—including in the form of DEI.” On February 7th, Democratic members of Congress attempted to enter the Department of Education building, only to have a security guard block their path. When one of the congressional representatives posted on X about the incident, Musk replied, “No such department exists in the federal government.”
The Department of Education, assuming it exists, has the smallest staff of any Cabinet agency, and its duties aren’t necessarily well understood by the general public; descriptions of its mission tend to rely on words like “administer” and “oversight”—terms which feel sticky with red tape. It does not decide how K-12 students in public schools are taught and evaluated—that’s mostly the purview of individual states and local school districts. In most of those districts, the federal government provides a relatively modest percentage of a school’s budget, usually in the ballpark of thirteen per cent, although it varies state by state. Trump often speaks in terms of “sending all education and education work and needs back to the states,” but most of the work of public education is already being done at the state and local level.
Still, gutting the agency would deliver a terrible blow to public schools, particularly in rural areas and in high-density, low-income urban districts, which receive larger shares of their funding from the federal government. Advocates also fear that dismantling the Department of Education would have an immediate and tangible impact on students with disabilities.
McMahon’s mission is aligned with the school-choice (or education-freedom) movement, which, opponents say, seeks to erode people’s trust in public schools by starving them of resources—most tangibly through the support of charter schools and voucher programs—and by whipping up destabilizing controversies over critical race theory and gender ideology. The weaponry that the school-choice movement wields in its attacks on public schools can be seen in two executive orders which President Trump issued on January 29th.
One of those orders directed Cabinet agencies to review how states can use federal funds to “support families who choose educational alternatives to governmental entities, including private and faith-based options.” In other words, the Trump Administration wants to nationalize the K-12 voucher programs already offered in seventeen states, in which public money is rerouted to parents who want to put it toward tuition at a private or parochial school or toward homeschooling expenses. The other executive order, which addressed “ending radical indoctrination in K-12 schooling,” threatened to withhold federal funding from any school that foists “anti-American, subversive, harmful, and false ideologies on our Nation’s children,” including “steering students toward surgical and chemical mutilation” and “demanding acquiescence to ‘White Privilege.’ ” It also instructed the heads of multiple agencies to devise plans to monitor and punish such schools.
Dan Stewart, the managing attorney for education and employment at the National Disability Rights Network, a legal-advocacy group, told me that, through these executive orders, “this Administration is engaging with education at the micro level as well as the macro level. It’s looking at curriculum, which is traditionally in the power of the local schools and the state, at the same time that it’s looking at different ways of moving public dollars out of the system.”
There’s ample evidence that voucher programs have negative educational outcomes and place an enormous strain on state budgets. They’re not popular at the ballot box, either. In the most recent election cycle, Kentucky voted almost two to one against Amendment 2, which would have permitted the state legislature to put tax dollars toward charter schools and vouchers; strikingly, the measure did not receive a majority in a single county across the state. Pro-school-choice ballot measures also failed in Colorado and Nebraska.
Still, both the America First Policy Institute (A.F.P.I.), the public-policy think tank which McMahon chairs, and the Heritage Foundation, where Project 2025 germinated, have backed the Educational Choice for Children Act, which would introduce a federal tax credit to incentivize charitable donations to voucher programs. The A.F.P.I. estimates that the bill would “enable 85-90 percent of students in the Nation to benefit from school choice via scholarships,” and singled out Arizona’s voucher program as a successful model—one which has “saved taxpayer money and come in under budget.”
This is a mind-bending endorsement by McMahon’s think tank. According to the nonprofit Save Our Schools Arizona, the state’s school-choice program cost nine hundred million dollars over the 2023-24 fiscal year, exceeding its budget by three hundred million dollars; it now accounts for nearly half of Arizona’s over-all budget shortfall. Most of the families who enrolled in the program were not moving their children out of public schools—the vouchers instead serve as a discount on the private tuition they were already paying, and, as S.O.S. Arizona put it, “represent an entirely new cost to the state.”
Even setting aside the grim financial burdens imposed by voucher programs, there are many families for whom education freedom does not offer much in the way of school choice. Some of these families live in rural (and often Republican-dominated) communities where private-school options are limited or nonexistent, and where public schools are major local employers; voucher programs only bleed their budgets. Other families can’t afford to make up the difference between the “scholarship” their child receives through a state voucher program and the actual tuition charged by local private schools. And still others have children with physical, intellectual, or social-emotional disabilities, whose rights in school are guaranteed in the federal law known as the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, or I.D.E.A.
“The vast majority of I.D.E.A. rights only apply to public-school students,” Jessica Levin, who is litigation director at the nonprofit Education Law Center, told me. I.D.E.A. mandates certification requirements for special-education teachers and shields students from being punished for manifestations of their disability. It also enshrines parents’ rights to be involved in developing their children’s education plans and to argue for more or different services, which can range from speech-language or occupational therapy to assistive technology. “These rights are all lost when a student goes to a private school,” Levin said.
Project 2025 proposes rolling federal Title I and special-education funding into block grants, which states can administer without extensive federal oversight. “The states would no longer have a check on how they are complying with I.D.E.A. or other federal laws,” Stewart said. The likely scenario for kids with special needs, he went on, is “fewer teachers, fewer funds, delayed funds, and less certainty.” Of course, according to the school-choice movement, parents who are dissatisfied with their child’s cash-strapped public school should have the opportunity to choose a private one in a thriving educational marketplace. In reality, Levin said, “private schools are legally allowed to not accept students with disabilities or serve them appropriately, and so you end up with a higher concentration of higher-needs students in schools that now have fewer resources.”
A dismal irony of the intersection of school-choice and special education is that not even the most vehement supporter of public schools would argue that the system currently works well for kids with disabilities. Currently, the federal government only provides around thirteen per cent of the average per-student cost of special-education services under I.D.E.A.—down from its original pledge of forty per cent a half century ago, when I.D.E.A. was first passed into law. The vast majority of states do not fully fund special education, leaving districts to cover the gap by dipping into their general-education budgets. Or not—often, they don’t provide the legally mandated services at all.
Public and private schools alike, Stewart told me, are incentivized to view students with disabilities as “a drain on their resources.” Underfunded districts in red, blue, and purple states routinely fail these students, whether they are illegally capping the percentage of children who can receive services or willfully keeping parents in the dark about their constitutional rights. I.D.E.A. is perhaps a law too aptly named, as its protections often seem more theoretical than concrete.
But, if public education devolves into state voucher programs, as it could under the Trump Administration, families will lose support in both theory and practice. And the possible effects on kids with special needs could be compounded by Trump’s radical-indoctrination executive order. Although the order targets diversity efforts which focus on “race, color, sex, or national origin,” the conceptual framework of D.E.I. includes the goal of greater accessibility and inclusion for people with disabilities. It’s not clear whether Trump, Musk, and their supporters realize that an assault on D.E.I. can be logically construed as an assault on rights for the disabled. “The attack on D.E.I. as a whole implicates long-standing interpretations of disability rights that have been ratified by the Supreme Court and federal courts,” Stewart said. “They are changing the underlying legal and social understandings of disability, even though that’s not the primary goal of the attack.”
The future of the Department of Education—and of the students with disabilities who depend on it—will likely hinge less on the person appointed to lead it than on the world views of two billionaires who abhor what they perceive as weakness and waste. Children, alas, are weak and wasteful by nature, to say nothing of a child who needs a wheelchair, a hearing aid, or a paraprofessional. Trump and Musk’s public statements are instructive here. In 2023, Musk fired a longtime employee of his who has muscular dystrophy and then ridiculed him on Twitter, falsely claiming that he “did no actual work.” (Musk later apologized and indicated that the employee could remain at Twitter; he did not.) As for Trump, according to a memoir written by his nephew, the disability advocate Fred Trump III, the President once commented that some disabled people “should just die,” and said, of Fred’s own son, who is nonverbal and uses a wheelchair owing to a rare genetic disorder, “Maybe you should just let him die.”
These remarks may be useful to keep in mind as we watch what befalls the Department of Education in the weeks and months to come. Our leaders don’t want to make public education run more efficiently or to strengthen it through competition. They just think it does no actual work, and that they should let it die. ♦
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