Donald Trump is Just Asking Questions

Inside the room as the Education Department was abolished. Or was it?

President Trump signs an executive order on the Education Department. (Photo by the White House)

Reporting on Donald Trump is always a bit like drinking from a firehose, with way more news coming out at any given time than one person can possibly cover.

Since returning to office in January, Trump has issued 97 executive orders — which means he’s signed more in 60 days than any president since Harry Truman has in an entire year, according to the Federal Register. And it’s not just what gets published in the Federal Register, of course: there are also tweets, Truths, endless press gaggles, and more to contend with.

There were several points this week where I considered covering Trump’s social media post announcing that Joe Biden’s pardons for the January 6th committee are “hereby declared VOID, VACANT, AND OF NO FURTHER FORCE OR EFFECT,” because Biden signed them using an autopen. This raises a lot of questions that the political nerd in me was interested in, but I opted against writing about it because a) I don’t want to get in the habit of chasing down every single Trump remark and b) in this case, like many others, it felt most prudent to wait and see whether anything substantial would come of the post, or whether it was just the president musing to himself (and 9.3 million followers) shortly after midnight.

In the era where presidents bugged their own offices and recorded everything they said (not too wise, in retrospect), there were tons of examples of Richard Nixon, most famously, mentioning various proposals to his aides, many of which never happened because the advisers ignored him or talked him out of it. A blog post on the Nixon Foundation website refers to that ability to vent to his aides, knowing that his orders would only be followed if they felt he was serious, as a “kind of safety valve that has not been available to subsequent Presidents.” Sometimes it feels like Trump has found a similar safety valve, not in an H.R. Haldeman but in Truth Social (and, before that, Twitter) — except it’s public, for all of us to see.

As a reporter, that transparency is both immensely helpful (as it gives an unprecedented window into what the president is thinking) and fairly complicating (since it’s not always clear what will and won’t actually happen). Two months shy of ten years into Trump’s political career, it still feels like the broader political ecosystem hasn’t adjusted to being so privy to a candidate/president’s innermost thoughts: plenty of commentators can always be counted on to jump immediately on whatever Trump says (in either a positive or negative fashion), even before it’s clear whether the words will be backed by substantive action. (To be clear: the president being the president, sometimes his words are important to cover even if they are detached from action. But sometimes isn’t every time.)

Oftentimes, I feel like people on both the left and right would just have a much better experience of the Trump years — and not find themselves as needlessly frustrated or excited, respectively — if they simply took a beat and waited to see what kind of Trump comment we are dealing with. (There are plenty of examples to cite for the left; one example for the right is the recent release of the JFK and Epstein Files, which many conservative commentators awaited with bated breath only to find that a lot of the “new” documents were duplicates.)

In the end, I was probably right not to devote an entire piece to Trump’s autopen remarks. (Although now you will never get to read my painstaking analysis of a 2005 Justice Department memo on the question!) White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt eventually indicated that no Justice Department investigation was going to spring out of the supposed pardon revocations. Trump was merely “begging the question” of whether Biden had used autopen, Leavitt said, even though his social media post certainly had seemed definitive (it even used the word “hereby”). Trump was trying to troll Biden and move attention back to his enfeebled predecessor, it appears, more than he was trying to prosecute Liz Cheney. (Of course, if that ever changes, I will cover it in full.) Onto the next controversy.

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The autopen incident was on my mind Thursday, when I was at the White House for the signing of Trump’s 95th second-term executive order, which he said would “begin eliminating the federal Department of Education once and for all.”

I wanted to cover the event in-person¹ because I was curious whether Trump would offer any more details of what his changes to the department would look like, in order to separate out what kind of Trump news item this was. He didn’t offer many.

Trump — flanked by several schoolchildren sitting in classroom-style desks — only spoke for 14 minutes, brief by his standards. He took time to call out the dignitaries in the room, including (potential future Supreme Court justice?) Ron DeSantis, who at one point thought that this was the kind of order he’d be signing in his White House. (“Great. Loved it. Awesome,” DeSantis told me as he exited, when I asked him what he thought of the event.)

Ron DeSantis at the White House event on Thursday. (Photo by Gabe Fleisher)

The president also introduced the person who he said would hopefully “be our last Secretary of Education,” Linda McMahon. “It’s an interesting opening,” he acknowledged, although he later promised, “we’re going to find something else for you” once the department is abolished. But it wasn’t exactly clear what that abolition would look like.

The order itself directs McMahon to “take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education and return authority over education to the States and local communities,” while adding the caveat, “to the maximum extent appropriate and permitted by law.” This is not a small caveat. The Education Department was created by the Department of Education Organization Act (DEOA) of 1979, which means it can only be abolished by a subsequent act of Congress.

McMahon has suggested that the various components of the agency could be distributed to other departments, such as placing its civil rights office inside the Justice Department. (Project 2025 makes the same suggestion.) But that will be difficult legally as well: the DEOA mandates that there “shall” be in the Education Department an “Office for Civil Rights.” The law includes the same language for many of the agency’s largest divisions, including the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education, the Office of Postsecondary Education, and several others.

Trump also said Thursday that the “core” functions of the department would continue, naming Title I funding for K-12 schools, Pell Grants for college undergrads, and Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) funding for students with special needs. (These programs are all enshrined in law, as is the federal student loan program, which Trump did not mention. According to CNN, the administration has looked into farming out the student loan program to another agency, but no other department wants to take it.)

If you look at a breakdown of the Education Department’s funding, those are exactly the main programs that the agency operates; once you cross them out from the list of potential changes to the agency, you aren’t left with many major functions.

Trump’s event was framed around promises to de-nationalize education, but states and cities — not the Education Department — already set curricula. (Interestingly, and unusually for a Republican president, Trump cited Denmark, Norway, and Sweden as model countries that outperform the U.S. on education. All three do have national curricula.) A big part of the Education Department’s role is disbursing funding to schools and students, which cannot be adjusted without Congress (and Trump said himself would not be affected).

The rest of what the agency does is more subject to change, including issuing regulations, enforcing anti-discrimination laws, and conducting education research. But those functions were always going to be shrunken back in a Trump administration, even without a flashy order to dismantle the department. If anything, so far, the Trump team hasn’t really been scaling back these sorts of regulations and investigations; it’s simply been redirecting them towards their own ends. The same Office for Civil Rights that McMahon wants to cut off has been quite active during Trump’s term, opening investigations into 45 universities that offer race-based scholarships and sending letters to 60 others about antisemitism.

Trump’s Thursday order also directed the Education Department to ensure that any programs receiving federal funding “terminate illegal discrimination obscured under the label ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ or similar terms and programs promoting gender ideology.” Again, that isn’t a directive that suggests plans to close the agency; it comes off more like a plan to continue the department, but with a new ideological focus.

All that said, even if the aforementioned offices are legally required to stay open, Trump can try to shrink their size — something he was already doing before Thursday, having laid off almost 50% of the department. Those efforts have quickly drawn legal challenges, with a group of parents alleging that the agency cannot carry out its statutory obligations with such a reduced workforce. Ultimately, as with so much else, it will be up to the courts to decide how far Trump will be able to push.

At the White House on Thursday, Trump reeled off statistics to identify a very real problem: “70% of 8th graders are not proficient in either reading or in math,” he noted, using data from the “Nation’s Report Card,” collected, ironically, by the Education Department. “40% percent of 4th graders lack even basic reading skills.”

If Trump wanted to spark a necessary conversation about education reform in the U.S. — about whether the country is getting its money’s worth for all it spends on education, and about whether the state/federal balance on the issue needs to shift — the only forum available to spark real change is Congress. But he has not submitted any legislative proposals on the issue, or indicated any plans to. Trump bragged (correctly) that while several Republican presidents have promised to close the Education Department, he is the first one to make moves towards actually doing so.

But, without trying to involve Congress, his effort will merely join the heap of broken promises; moving through executive action only has the effect of making his own agenda more limited and, ultimately, reversible and ineffectual. This is true on many other issues as well. This week, Politico obtained a document laying out the Trump administration’s proposed changes to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), many of which would require passage of a law, as the document itself acknowledges.

Obviously, different people will take a different view of the merits of the proposal, but if you do take the view that USAID needs reform, then it’s a well-thought-out plan for doing so, in contrast to the administration’s haphazard (and, according to a judge, likely unconstitutional) early moves inside the agency. Now that the administration has a plan, we’ll see if they try to spark a legislative conversation about foreign aid and advance it on the Hill. Otherwise, Trump is once again just “begging the question”: throwing an issue out, but doing little beyond unilateral actions subject to being undone by the courts or by his predecessors. That approach guarantees maximum attention (both negative and positive), but it makes lasting (or even temporary) policy change unlikely. And it only makes his presidency weaker, not stronger.

Similarly, we’ll see if the administration eventually puts forward a plan for reorganizing the Education Department, and actually putting Trump’s words into action. Until they do, I’d recommend refraining from commenting on the impact of the proposal — whether it’s excites you or upset you — since the proposal doesn’t really seem to exist yet.

For all the fanfare I witnessed at the White House on Thursday — and all the cheering attendees, excited at the thought of the department’s imminent demise — I didn’t hear a plan for making it happen. If I do, I’ll be sure to keep you posted.

1. I didn’t do a whole post about this, like I did when I was credentialed to cover Congress, but I recently received a “hard pass” to cover the White House, which gives me daily access to the complex. For what it’s worth, I had requested this several times under the Biden administration, but never received one; it took a matter of days after my request under Trump.

I’m assuming this is part of the administration’s efforts to give increased access to independent media, which I appreciate and think is a positive step forward for transparency. However, it should be noted that such transparency has only been partial.

When we were entering the event on Thursday, each reporter had to name their outlet, so a staffer could check us against the list of those credentialed. As I was standing, I heard a reporter from the Associated Press say, “AP?” The staffer glanced at the list and responded: “No AP today.” A minute before, Real America’s Voice correspondent Brian Glenn, Marjorie Taylor Greene’s boyfriend, walked in as a member of the press pool.