Why do the Republicans want to dismantle the Department of Education?

Two months after the Department of Education officially opened in 1980, the Republicans approved a political platform calling on the Congress to close it.

Now, more than four decades later, President Trump could get closer that any other republican president to make this dream a reality.

Although the deletion of the agency would require an act of congress, Trump devoted himself to the objective and could prepare a decree in order to dismantle it.

The fixing of Mr. Trump invigorated the debate on the role of the federal government in education, creating a powerful point of unity between the ideological factions of his party: the traditional republicans of the establishment and the pure and hard members of his Make America Great Again movement.

“This is a counter-revolution against a hostile and nihilist bureaucracy,” said Christopher F. Rofo, principal researcher at the Manhattan Institute conservative reflection group and administrator of the New College of Florida.

Here’s how the party arrived at the time.

The conservatives make their argument.

From the start, the Republicans opposed the signing of President Jimmy Carter on a 1979 law creating the ministry, invoking beliefs in the limited control of the government, budgetary responsibility and local autonomy.

They argued that education should be mainly managed at state levels and local rather than through federal mandates.

A year later, Ronald Reagan won the White House, his third attempt at presidency, thanks to a promise that he was going to slow down a federal government which, according to him, had exceeded his limits on a myriad of problems, including education. In 1982, Mr. Reagan used his speech on the state of the Union to call on the congress to eliminate two agencies: the Department of Energy and the Department of Education.

“We have to cut more non-essential public spending and eliminate more waste, and we will continue our efforts to reduce the number of employees in the federal workforce,” said Reagan.

He was unable to persuade the Democrats in the control of the Chamber to accompany his plan, and the problem began to fade as an absolute priority for the Republicans – but has never disappeared.

Newt Gingrich, then president of the House of Representatives of the United States, called for the agency’s abolition in the mid-1990s. During the 2008 presidential primary, representative Ron Paul and former Governor Mitt Romney supported either ending the Department of Education, or considerably reducing its size.

Last year, a proposal to eliminate the agency was elected in the house under republican control despite a large majority within the party, while 161 Republicans supported the measure while 60 opposed it.

The main role of the education department has been to send federal money to public schools, administer financial assistance to college and manage federal student loans. The agency applies civil rights laws in schools and supports programs for disabled students.

“The history of the Department of Education is as an agency of civil rights, the place which guarantees that students with disabilities obtain the services they need, that English actors obtain the help they need,” said John B. King Jr., who was an education secretary on Thursday during the Obama administration and is now chancellor of New York State University. “Remove this harms students and families.”

Trump invigorates the debate.

Trump rarely mentioned education during his first presidential campaign in 2016, apart from criticizing common basic standards, which aimed to create a certain coherence between states. He sometimes called for the elimination of the Department of Education, although his administration has not made an objective.

But Mr. Trump is able to grasp questions that resonate with his conservative base. During his campaign in 2024, this meant adopting the concerns of the parents’ rights movement which was born from the reaction of school closings and other restrictions during the coronavirus pandemic.

This movement has gained steam by organizing itself on opposition to progressive programs that have favored the mandate of certain education standards and inclusive policies for LGBTQ students. The activists argued that these policies have undermined parental rights and values.

In this way, Mr. Trump’s desire to eliminate the Department of Education has become linked to his emphasis on the eradication of diversity, equity and inclusion programs of the federal government, a dynamic that took place alive through his purge of staff and policies at the agency in the weeks that followed his return to power.

In a project of an executive decree aimed at dismantling the department which circulated in Washington this week, the only specific instructions of Mr. Trump for the Secretary of Education Linda McMahon were to end any program of diversity, equity and remaining inclusion.

On Mr. Trump’s campaign website, he criticizes gender or transgender problems eight times in his list of 10 principles for “grandes écoles”.

“One of the reasons why this question has so much momentum was definitely the pandemic and populist frustration that Washington was not on the side of the parents,” said Frederick Hess, director of studies on education policies at the American Enterprise Institute. “The Ministry of Education has really become emblematic of a large part of what was going on which was bad.”

The 2025 project also called for the dismantling of the department.

A multitude of Trump’s actions during his first six -week in power was on in the 2025 project, the right plan for revised the federal government.

This includes an excoriation of the Department of Education, which is controlled in the preface to the 992-page document to be made up of workers who “inject racist, anti-American and anhistoric propaganda into American classrooms”.

The document maintains that schools should be sensitive to parents rather than “leftist defenders determined at indoctrination” and that students’ test results have not improved despite 45 years of federal spending. But that does not explain how it could change by giving more power to the school and locals, which spent exponentially more education during this same period.

“This department is an example of federal intrusion in a traditionally state and local area,” says BluePrint Project 2025. “For the sake of American children, Congress should close it and make it control of education.”