Flanked by students and educators, US President Donald Trump on Thursday signed an executive order intended to essentially dismantle the federal Department of Education, making good on a longstanding campaign promise to conservatives.

The order is designed to leave school policy almost entirely in the hands of states and local boards, a prospect that alarms liberal education advocates.

“We’re going to be returning education, very simply, back to the states where it belongs,” said Trump in front of a colorful backdrop of state flags.

Young students invited to the event sat at classroom desks encircling the president and signed their own mock executive orders alongside him.

The signing followed the department’s announcement last week that it would lay off nearly half of its staff, in step with Trump’s sweeping efforts to reduce the size of a federal government he considers to be bloated and inefficient.

Education has long been a political lightning rod in the United States. Conservatives favor local control over education policy and school-choice options that help private and religious schools, and left-leaning voters largely support robust funding for public schools and diversity programs.

But Trump has elevated the fight to a different level, making it part of a generalized push against what conservatives view as liberal indoctrination in America’s schools from the university level down to K-12 instruction.

He has sought to re-engineer higher education in the United States by reducing funding and pushing to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion policies at colleges and universities, just as he has in the federal government.

Columbia University, for example, faced a Thursday deadline to respond to demands to tighten restrictions on campus protests as preconditions for opening talks on restoring $400 million in suspended federal funding.

The White House also argues the Education Department is a waste of money, citing mediocre test scores, disappointing literacy rates and lax math skills among students as proof that the return on the agency’s trillions of dollars in investment was poor.

Local battles over K-12 curricula accelerated during the coronavirus pandemic, which saw parents angrily confront officials at school board meetings nationwide. It was a discontent that Trump, other Republican candidates and conservative advocacy groups such as Moms for Liberty tapped into.

Trump was joined at the ceremony by Republican governors such as Greg Abbott of Texas and Ron DeSantis of Florida.

Democrats acknowledged on Thursday that Trump could effectively gut the department without congressional action.

“Donald Trump knows perfectly well he can’t abolish the Department of Education without Congress - but he understands that if you fire all the staff and smash it to pieces, you might get a similar, devastating result,” US Senator Patty Murray said in a statement.

SEEKING CLOSURE

Trump suggested on Thursday that he will still seek to close down the department entirely, and that he wants Education Secretary Linda McMahon, who attended the White House event, to put herself out of a job.

The department oversees some 100,000 public and 34,000 private schools in the United States, although more than 85% of public school funding comes from state and local governments. It provides federal grants for needy schools and programs, including money to pay teachers of children with special needs, fund arts programs and replace outdated infrastructure.

It also oversees the $1.6 trillion in student loans held by tens of millions of Americans who cannot afford to pay for college outright.

For now, Trump’s executive order aims to whittle the department down to basic functions such as administering student loans, Pell Grants that help low-income students attend college and resources for children with special needs.

“We’re going to shut it down and shut it down as quickly as possible,” Trump said. “It’s doing us no good.”

Though Republicans control both chambers of Congress, Democratic support would be required to achieve the needed 60 votes in the Senate for such a bill to pass. At the event, Trump said the matter may ultimately land before Congress in a vote to do away with the department entirely.

Trump has acknowledged that he would need buy-in from Democratic lawmakers and teachers’ unions to fulfill his campaign pledge of fully closing the department. He likely will never get it.

“See you in court,” the head of the American Federation of Teachers union, Randi Weingarten, said in a statement.

A majority of the American public do not support closing the department.

A Reuters/Ipsos poll found last month that respondents opposed shuttering the Department of Education by roughly two to one - 65% to 30%. The Reuters/Ipsos poll, which was conducted online and nationwide, surveyed 4,145 US adults and its results had a margin of error of about 2 percentage points.

Federal aid tends to flow more to Republican-leaning states than Democratic ones. It accounted for 15% of all K-12 revenue in states that voted for Trump in the 2024 election, compared with 11% of revenue in states that voted for his Democratic rival Kamala Harris, according to a Reuters analysis of Census Bureau data.

Two programs administered by the Department of Education — aid for low-income schools and students with special needs — are the largest of those federal aid programs.