The real drivers behind Trump's education agenda
- Jack Walsh
- Mar 14
- 3 min read
This week, the Trump administration pushed towards one of their big pre-election claims- that they would abolish the Department of Education. Half of the employees (1300 of them) in the department were dismissed, with the hardest hit being those in civil rights enforcement which has entirely shut down in some areas.
How far Trump’s administration can go with this remains unclear, he declared his hope that Education Secretary, Linda McMahon will “put herself out of the job”, but with 20 states now taking the administration to court over cuts, it appears any chance of that happening is going to drag on for a while. The important question then is why does the Trump administration have such a commitment to abolish the Department of Education?
The public face of this is the Elon Musk-led “efficiency” drive. Musk has spoken previously on how the government could function with 99 federal agencies, compared to the 428 agencies it currently has. For education, this has already involved the Department of Education announcing the withdrawal of $1Bn worth of government contracts in February 2025. The effect of that was to render the research and statistics office obsolete. In this instance, the cuts have hit civil rights enforcement hardest, leaving areas such as New York with the civil rights branch of the department essentially shut down. From Musk and his supporter’s angle, education is simply an agency that the government does not need to do and so could be cut in the name of “efficiency”. This is part of a wider attack on federal bureaucracy, which Musk has accused of being riddled with fraud.
However, this also represents a wider ideological project for Conservatives. That project, led by groups such as Moms for Liberty, has been to bring control of education back towards a local level. The centre of this is the idea of “parents' rights”. This represents the idea of parental control over what students are shown in schools. Already this has played out in the banning of books such “The Handmaid’s Tale” in Orange County, and the attacks on drag show readings. Ultimately, conservative activists here are seeking local power in an effort to move schools away from what they perceive as liberal values, and towards Conservative ones. Already, the state of Oklahoma is heading to the Supreme Court to defend its right to approve a publicly funded religious charter school. The more decentralised education is, the more influence Republican lawmakers and Christian activists have over the education system. As such, the Trump administration may mask this policy push in the language of “efficiency” but the truth is this represents a decades long Christian nationalist push for greater control of education policy.
Trump’s first term education policy was marked by a similar play to this base of activists. In response to Obama-era attempts to impose some level of core curriculum standards on states, Trump rescinded the Every Student Succeeds Act, pushing the balance of power toward local school boards. Thus, for all the new talk of efficiency, this push for local control of education has deeper roots in a Christian nationalist base. If the Trump administration gets their way and the Department of Education is abolished, this base will consolidate huge power over education in red states. Clearly then, further challenges to the first amendment’s establishment clause may come, as education in Republican controlled states trends closer to religious institutions and away from federal influence.
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