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Secretary of Education Linda McMahon said her agency took the first steps Tuesday to eliminate "bureaucratic bloat" at the federal level and bring more power to the states during an interview Tuesday on "The Ingraham Angle."
The Department of Education announced it will cut nearly half of its workforce as President Donald Trump moves to eliminate the agency. Impacted department staff will be placed on administrative leave beginning Friday.
McMahon said the decision was part of the president’s mandate. "His directive to me, clearly, is to shut down the Department of Education, which we know we'll have to work with Congress, you know, to get that accomplished," she told Fox News host Laura Ingraham.
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Morning sun lights the front of the Department of Education building, amid reports that U.S. President Donald Trump's administration will take steps to defund the federal Education Department, in Washington, U.S., February 4, 2025. (REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque)
Trump vowed on the campaign trail to shutter the federal department and give parents the option of school choice.
"We’re going to end education coming out of Washington, DC. We’re going to close it up – all those buildings all over the place and people that in many cases hate our children. We’re going to send it all back to the states," he said in a campaign video.
The commander-in-chief is expected to sign an executive order officially instructing McMahon to look for ways to dismantle the Education Department. Trump, however, likely cannot eliminate it entirely without an act of Congress.
The education secretary said the roughly 2,000 remaining staff members will make sure outward-facing programs like grants and appropriations from Congress are being met and handled appropriately.
United States Secretary of Education Linda McMahon visits "Fox & Friends" at Fox News Channel Studios on March 07, 2025 in New York City. ((Photo by Noam Galai/Getty Images))
"None of that’s going to fall through the cracks," she vowed.
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President of the American Federation of Teachers Randi Weingarten told MSNBC in an interview over the weekend that shutting down the Education Department is a "disaster symbolically as much as a disaster in reality."
"The federal government does not control education, the states do, local school boards do. This is about opportunity," she argued. "That is why so many people are so mad about it because they’re just taking opportunity away from kids who don’t have it."
McMahon pushed back on Weingarten’s claims, saying the Trump administration doesn’t want to take education away.
Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers during a town hall with 2020 presidential candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and members of the American Federation of Federation of Teachers, in Philadelphia, PA, on May 13, 2019. ((Photo by Bastiaan Slabbers/NurPhoto via Getty Images))
"The president never said that. He's taking the bureaucracy out of education so that more money flows to the states. Better education is closest to the kids, with parents, with the local superintendents, with local school boards," she told Ingraham.
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"I think we'll see our scores go up with our students when we can educate them with parental input as well."
Ashley Carnahan is a writer at Fox News Digital.
