After President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Thursday ordering the elimination of the Department of Education (DoE), Education Secretary Linda McMahon is reiterating that the president is “not looking to defund services that go to the states.”
During a Friday appearance on Breitbart News Daily, McMahon clarified how states will continue to receive funding, even as she works to wind down the Department of Education. Host Mike Slater asked the Education Secretary about states panicking because many receive anywhere from ten to twelve percent of their funding from the federal government.
“I said before that the president is not looking to defund the services that go to the states,” McMahon said.
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Slater specifically asked her about money that goes to programs for students with disabilities and special needs, noting that many callers have been concerned about what will happen to funding for those programs.
“That comes under IDEA, which is the Individual Disability Education Act. Before the Department of Education was established in 1980, IDEA was already in place. It was what was then HEW (The Department of Health, Education, and Welfare), and Title I funding was already in place — it was long before there was the Department of Education,” she explained.
“I think that IDEA funding could very well, perhaps, be returned to what is now HHS. And I’ve had a preliminary conversation with Secretary Kennedy about that,” she said. “I would like to let those parents know that the president was very specific yesterday, that there would be no decreases in funding for those services. In fact, he said he hoped he would see increases in some of those fundings because we would be saving dollars in bureaucratic overhead.”
Indeed, before signing the executive order, President Trump emphasized that Pell Grants, Title I funding, and resources for children with disabilities and special needs will be “fully preserved” and “redistributed to various other agencies and departments that will take very good care of them.”
“It’s very important to Linda [McMahon], I know, and it’s very important to all of us. But beyond these core necessities, my administration will take all lawful steps to shut down the department,” Trump said. “We’re going to shut it down and shut it down as quickly as possible. It’s doing us no good.”
McMahon talked about firing half of the department and emphasized that only inward facing roles were cut so as not to interfere with much needed services.
“We fired about one half of the personnel there that had inward facing abilities, not outward facing responsibility, so that we didn’t detract at all from the services that are being provided through Title I funding, or through the funding for IDEA, our disability and special needs students,” she said. “We made sure that our Office of Civil Rights is still adequately staffed to proceed with a lot of the investigations that we were doing, ongoing, and some new ones that we started.”
Slater asked McMahon to react to claims from Randi Weingarten, leader of the American Federation of Teachers, the second-largest teachers’ union in the United States, that the administration is supposedly abandoning students. Weingarten was notably at the forefront of fighting against schools reopening during the pandemic, at one point reportedly calling the Trump administration’s effort to end school closures “reckless” and “cruel.”
“Well, Randi Weingarten also said last week that the president is looking to take away education. I think a lot of her statements are very far-fetched, and she clearly knows that the president is not looking to take away education,” McMahon responded.
“We’re not abandoning students. We want to provide better education for students, better facilities for them, and better opportunities for them to flourish and succeed,” she continued. “So I think that she’s just trying to create a lot of fear and a lot of dissension. I think we should sit down. I’m very willing to sit down and talk to her. She’s just making statements out of the blue and she shouldn’t be doing that.”
Fully eliminating the Department of Education will take an act of Congress since Congress created the department under President Jimmy Carter in 1979. After Trump signed the order, Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA), chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, said in a post on X that he will “submit legislation” to accomplish Trump’s goal of shutting down the department “as soon as possible.”
McMahon said she has already met with members of Congress and hopes to have them “as a partner in this process.”
“They certainly have looked at the scores that our students have across the country. Democrats and Republicans basically look at how education is failing our children, and no one is pleased with the kind of scores that they are seeing in the latest Nation’s Report Card,” she said. “Everyone wants to see improvement in education. We cannot be a country that is coming in almost last in the world.”
“Now, Congress, by statute, set up the Department of Education. There are some of these programs that are governed by Congress and the president was very clear yesterday in the executive order that we would be moving legally, working with Congress to do the things that we were allowed to do,” she continued.
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“In the end, we’re going to have to have Congress agree to shut down the department,” she said. “I hope by that time, I will have shown to them that our partnership has resulted in improvements with the department. I believe that if we shut down the department and have the states responsible for the education of their children, and that we are providing the states with the tools and best practices, that they will see that it’s in the best advantage to our students to let the states handle this.”
Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. Eastern.
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