The Trump administration is implementing a plan to transfer critical responsibilities of the Department of Education to other federal agencies, and its impact will be felt in schools throughout the country.

Trump and many of his supporters view the department as “ineffective and idealogical” according to Ken Thomas’ and Matt Barnum’s reporting for The Wall Street Journal.

President Trump appointed Linda McMahon to Secretary of the Department of Education with very little experience in the field, the intention to make McMahon a “yes man” carrying out the president’s wishes. This is seen in other departments like Department of Defense secretary Pete Hegseth.

Hegseth served as an infantry officer in the Minnesota Army National Guard. After his time in the military, Hegseth was a TV personality for Fox news for 11 years before being appointed. Previous Secretaries of Defense not only have life-long military experience, but also were high ranking in the military.

In March of 2025, President Trump signed an executive order directing McMahon to dismantle the Department of Education. Since then different responsibilities of the Department have been transferred to other agencies. 

With the ideology that education merely exists to prepare kids for jobs, the Department of Education moved the office of elementary and secondary education- which holds $28 billion in grants for K-12 programs- to the Department of Labor. The goal of moving this will be to better align funding for workforce and college programs. This will put less emphasis on the K-12 education and the funding it gets.

In addition to moving around the responsibilities to other departments, the transfers will have an important effect on “diluting union power over a centralized education bureaucracy,” according to Kimberly Strassel’s column for the Wall Street Journal. With many of the department’s programs now spread across government, they are run by officials that have greater priorities than giving in to the teachers’ unions demands.

The dismantling of the Department of Education can affect more than just teachers and students. Federal aid for graduate degrees is harder to find with the Grad PLUS program being eliminated. This program allowed students to borrow the full cost of attendance for graduate degrees like nursing, teaching, and engineering. These careers labeled as unprofessional are capped at only being able to borrow $100,000 whereas professional degrees can get up to $200,000. Still, the average cost of a medical degree is between $200,000-400,000.

Students should see all this happening and be terrified. Seniors looking at pursuing a career in education or the medical field or any of the fields deemed unprofessional will be without the federal loans that most people rely on to get through these degrees. The government is trying to dumb down the country by making these changes to the Department of Education and as students we should do our best to call out and oppose these changes to protect our right to education in the future.