Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., the top Democrat on the Appropriations Committee, accused Trump and Elon Musk, the de facto head of the Department of Government Efficiency, of “robbing our students and families of critical funding.”
“The effects of Trump and Musk’s slash and burn campaign will be felt across our state—by students and families who suffer from the loss of Department staff working to ensure their rights under federal law, school districts who have to lay off teachers, students who can’t get the help they need to get financial aid, and families who get ripped off because the watchdogs were fired,” Murray said in a statement Wednesday night. “This issue is personal for me, and for every single family. We cannot relent in this fight.”
A coalition of 21 Democratic attorneys general filed a lawsuit last week arguing any attempt by Trump to eliminate the department is unlawful.
"Because neither the President nor his agencies can undo the many acts of Congress that authorize the Department, dictate its responsibilities, and appropriate funds for it to administer, the President’s directive to eliminate the Department of Education—including through the March 11 decimation of the Department’s workforce and any other agency implementation—is an unlawful violation of the separation of powers, and the Executive’s obligation to take care that the law be faithfully executed," the lawsuit reads.
The Education Department is one of the smallest Cabinet-level departments. Its $268 billion appropriations last year represented 4% of the U.S. budget.
The department does not dictate curricula used in classrooms. It is largely a funding and civil rights enforcement organization, distributing money for schools with high rates of impoverished students and to assist children with disabilities.
It also runs the public student loan program, which has more consumer protections and lower interest rates than private education loan programs.
Trump's executive order will direct McMahon to ensure the agency's funds do not go toward programs or activities that advance diversity, equity and inclusion goals or gender ideology.
The Education Department last week announced investigations into more than 50 universities it accused of “engaging in race-exclusionary practices in their graduate programs.”
Diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, is a widely used label applied to efforts to improve workplace culture and create more opportunities for disadvantaged groups, and they are not inherently discriminatory.
National Education Association President Becky Pringle said in a statement Wednesday that Trump's effort to close the Education Department could have disastrous implications for students across the country.
"If successful, Trump’s continued actions will hurt all students by sending class sizes soaring, cutting job training programs, making higher education more expensive and out of reach for middle class families, taking away special education services for students with disabilities, and gutting student civil rights protections," Pringle said in a statement.
She accused Trump and Musk of aiming "their wrecking ball at public schools and the futures of the 50 million students in rural, suburban, and urban communities across America to pay for tax handouts for billionaires."
McMahon said last week that at least three DOGE staffers had been auditing the Education Department.
Keri Rodrigues, the president of the National Parents Union, said dismantling the department would disproportionately affect the most vulnerable communities.
“Let’s be clear: Before federal oversight, millions of children—particularly those with disabilities and those from our most vulnerable communities—were denied the opportunities they deserved,” Rodrigues said in a statement Wednesday night. “The Department of Education was created to ensure that every child, regardless of background or zip code, has access to a public education that prepares them for their future. Eliminating it would roll back decades of progress, leaving countless children behind in an education system that has historically failed the most marginalized.”
Trump has long pledged to dismantle the Education Department, first mentioning the idea during his previous term and campaigning on the promise extensively throughout the 2024 election. He has suggested that states should take over administering educational policy and that other parts of the federal government could absorb current agency responsibilities, like overseeing federal student loans.
"Your state is going to control your children’s education. We’re moving it out of Washington immediately," Trump said at a campaign event last year in Saginaw, Michigan. "We’re going to do that very fast, and it’s going to be great."
