WASHINGTON — signed an executive order Thursday calling for the dismantling of the , advancing a campaign promise to take apart an agency that’s been a longtime target of conservatives.
Trump derided the Education Department as wasteful and polluted by liberal ideology. However, completing its dismantling is most likely impossible without an act of Congress, which created the department in 1979. Republicans said they will introduce legislation to achieve that, while Democrats quickly lined up to oppose the idea.
The order says the education secretary will, “to the maximum extent appropriate and permitted by law, take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education and return authority over education to the States and local communities."
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It offers no detail on how that work will be carried out or where it will be targeted, though the White House said the agency will retain certain critical functions.
Trump said his administration will close the department beyond its "core necessities," preserving its responsibilities for Title I funding for low-income schools, Pell grants and money for children with disabilities.
The White House said earlier Thursday that the department will continue to manage federal student loans, but the order appears to say the opposite. It says the Education Department doesn't have the staff to oversee its $1.6 trillion loan portfolio and “must return bank functions to an entity equipped to serve America's students.”
President Donald Trump signs an executive order in the East Room of the White House in Washington, Thursday, March 20, 2025. (AP Photo/Ben Curtis)
At a signing ceremony, Trump blamed the department for America’s lagging academic performance and said states will do a better job.
“It’s doing us no good," he said.
Already, Trump's Republican administration has been gutting the agency. Its workforce is being , and there have been to the Office for Civil Rights and the Institute of Education Sciences, which gathers data on the nation’s academic progress.
Education Secretary Linda McMahon said she will remove red tape and empower states to decide what’s best for their schools. Still, she promised to continue essential services and work with states and Congress "to ensure a lawful and orderly transition.”
The measure was celebrated by groups that long called for an end to the department.
"For decades, it has funneled billions of taxpayer dollars into a failing system—one that prioritizes leftist indoctrination over academic excellence, all while student achievement stagnates and America falls further behind," said Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation.
Education Secretary Linda McMahon, left, greets Sen. Katie Britt, R-Ala., before President Donald Trump addresses a joint session of Congress at the Capitol in Washington, Tuesday, March 4, 2025. (AP Photo/Ben Curtis)
Advocates for public schools said eliminating the department would leave children behind in an American education system that is .
“This is a dark day for the millions of American children who depend on federal funding for a quality education, including those in poor and rural communities with parents who voted for Trump,” NAACP President Derrick Johnson said.
Opponents are already gearing up for legal challenges, including Democracy Forward, a public interest litigation group. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., called the order a “tyrannical power grab” and “one of the most destructive and devastating steps Donald Trump has ever taken.”
Margaret Spelling, who served as education secretary under Republican President George W. Bush, questioned whether whether the department will be able to accomplish its remaining missions, and whether it will ultimately improve schools.
“Will it distract us from the ability to focus urgently on student achievement, or will people be figuring out how to run the train?" she asked.
Spelling said schools have always been run by local and state officials, and rejected the idea that the Education Department and the federal government have been holding them back.
Protestors gather during a demonstration at the headquarters of the Department of Education, Friday, March 14, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)
Currently, much of the agency’s work revolves around managing money — both its extensive student loan portfolio and a range of aid programs for colleges and school districts, like school meals and support for homeless students. The agency also is key in overseeing .
The Trump administration has not formally spelled out which department functions could be handed off to other departments or eliminated altogether. It hasn't addressed the fate of other department operations, like its support for for technical education and adult learning, grants for rural schools and after-school programs, and a federal work-study program that provides employment to students with financial need.
States and districts already control local schools, including curriculum, but some conservatives have pushed to cut strings attached to federal money and provide it to states as “block grants” to be used at their discretion.
Block granting has raised questions about vital funding sources including Title I, the largest source of federal money to America’s K-12 schools. Families of have despaired over what could come of the federal department's work protecting their rights.
Federal funding makes up a relatively small portion of public school budgets — roughly 14%. The money often supports supplemental programs for vulnerable students, such as the McKinney-Vento program for homeless students or Title I for low-income schools.
Republicans talked about closing the Education Department for decades, saying it wastes money and inserts the federal government into decisions that should fall to states and schools. The idea has gained popularity recently as conservative parents’ groups demand more authority over their children’s schooling.
In his platform, Trump promised to close the department “and send it back to the states, where it belongs.” Trump has cast the department as a hotbed of “radicals, zealots and Marxists” who overextend their reach through guidance and regulation.
Even as Trump moves to dismantle the department, he leaned on it to promote elements of his agenda. He has used investigative powers of the Office for Civil Rights and the threat of withdrawing federal education money to target schools and colleges that run afoul of his orders on , pro-Palestinian activism and diversity programs.
Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, a Democrat on the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, dismissed Trump's claim that he's returning education to the states. She said he is actually “trying to exert ever more control over local schools and dictate what they can and cannot teach.”
Even some of Trump’s allies have questioned his power to close the agency without action from Congress, and there are doubts about its political popularity. The House considered an amendment to close the agency in 2023, but 60 Republicans joined Democrats in opposing it.
'The kids everyone forgot': The faltering post-pandemic push to reengage teens and young adults not in school, college, or the workforce
'The kids everyone forgot': The faltering post-pandemic push to reengage teens and young adults not in school, college, or the workforce
Lucian O'Donnell sat curled up in the lower bunk in a friend's house, a two-story clapboard in a neighborhood crowded with other faded homes in Southwest Detroit.
Spring was sprucing up the trees lining the narrow one-way street. But on that day in March 2023, in the bedroom where Lucian was crashing, the blinds were drawn, draining the color from the pale blue walls.
In the previous years, he had hustled at long shifts in two restaurants and taken night classes after dropping out of high school. He had brainstormed life goals with his "success coach" at a neighborhood nonprofit working with teens and tried to better manage the diabetic kidney disease that had claimed his mom during the pandemic. He had seen a therapist.
Now, the 18-year-old had surrendered to the screens, reports.
He toggled between "Minecraft" on his laptop—endlessly stacking blocks on a virtual grid—and social media on his phone. He knew the algorithms steered him toward negativity and conspiracy theories. He went along anyway.
The moment felt like a flashback to COVID-19-era isolation, except even lonelier: America had moved on from the pandemic. A resurgent Detroit was getting its swagger back, its population and median income inching up a decade after a bruising bankruptcy. But Lucian felt shut out from that sense of possibility.
At one point, he told his success coach that he thought of harming himself. They made a plan: He'd get in touch immediately if these thoughts escalated. They put together a list of good reasons to be alive.
That day, he glanced at the list. It was short: High school friends. Music. His goal of managing a restaurant.
He sank back into stacking blocks.
Youth advocates call young people like Lucian—16- to 24-year-olds who are not in school, college, or the workforce—"opportunity youth," focusing on untapped potential, not failure. Many are high school dropouts. As many as but flounder after graduation.
If the 4.2 million opportunity youth in the U.S. all lived in one city, it would be the second largest in the country.
They have long been "the kids everyone forgot," as one nonprofit leader put it. But roughly a decade ago, with youth employment ravaged by the Great Recession, the Obama White House made reconnecting these young people a signature issue. Experts decried the lasting toll of even relatively brief stints of disconnection: lower incomes, but also poorer health and personal relationships. Congress passed the Workforce Opportunity and Innovation Act in 2014, tapping hundreds of millions for youth employment efforts.
But the programs that sprang up were often small-scale and insular, with modest, short-lived results. After COVID-19 emerged in early 2020, advocates could turn Lucian's generation into the most deeply disconnected yet. So they pushed to rethink reengagement programs. They argued these efforts had focused too much on quickly steering youth toward a job—any job—often low-skill, unstable work vulnerable to economic downturns. Meanwhile, trauma and mental health issues kept young people from gaining a foothold in the workforce.
In Detroit, the city's Employment Solutions Corporation, an agency reporting to the mayor's workforce development board, enlisted six nonprofits that vowed to bring a more holistic approach to connecting with youth. It's a crucial mission. As Detroit clamors for skilled young workers to power its growth, more than a quarter of Detroiters aged 16 to 24 are not going to school or working, the country's second-highest youth disconnection rate, according to a Chalkbeat analysis of Census Bureau data released last month.
Reconnecting Disengaged Detroit Youth Amid New Challenges
Among the nonprofits that signed contracts worth a collective $3.4 million in federal money to tackle the issue were two groups with different backgrounds.
One, Urban Neighborhood Initiatives, known as UNI, had offered programs to steer students to high school graduation and college for years. But amid the pandemic, it ramped up efforts to help teens who had dropped out of school or had graduated with no clue what to do next. A UNI success coach set out to triage Lucian's complex needs through a turmoil-filled stretch.
Another nonprofit, SER Metro Detroit, has long been the largest local player in working with disengaged youth, offering job training programs and an alternative high school. Here, GED teacher Anthony Tejada—who brought his own backstory of youth disconnection—set out to help a homeless teen named Seth get back on track.
Studies have suggested the empathetic approach is showing some promise. But efforts are running up against perennial hurdles: fragmented programs, fickle funding—and the lack of opportunities in ZIP codes with long histories of disinvestment where many opportunity youths live.
In a highly polarized country preoccupied with the economy, reengaging these young people and forging non-college pathways to good jobs has drawn some bipartisan agreement. After years of deadlock, a lame-duck Congress is on the verge of reauthorizing the sprawling Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act, potentially beefing up funding for youth programs.
But in a moment ripe with uncertainty, will Detroit and other cities around the country be able to help young people like Lucian and Seth forge a path to stability? Or will they remain the kids everyone forgot?
In the spring of 2021, Lucian walked from the home where he was staying at the time to a community garden in Southwest Detroit run by Urban Neighborhood Initiatives.
A group of teens wearing facemasks stood in a circle in the middle of a grassy expanse with just a few raised boxes of tomatoes. Lucian resisted the urge to turn and flee.
UNI had long worked with middle and high school students in the Springwells neighborhood: a 1.3-square-mile, densely populated, and predominantly Latino area. But during the pandemic, Los HQ, the nonprofit's hangar-like space down the street from the garden, welcomed more youth like Lucian—members of the COVID-19 shutdown generation, who bore the brunt of the pandemic's learning disruption and mental health toll.
The nonprofit set out to help them with funding cobbled together from philanthropy, the Workplace Innovation and Opportunity Act, and federal COVID-19 relief. It started offering short-term counseling and referrals to therapists with normally yearslong waits for new patients. It kicked off the gardening and cooking program to expose youth to culinary and green careers—and bring them back together outside.
A friend told Lucian about the culinary program, and he'd come to interview for the last spot left. The teen, who'd dreamt of designing video games, had never considered working with food. But the small stipend the program offered was a big draw.
Lucian had tuned out of high school during remote learning, which dragged on his entire sophomore year at Western High. He returned in 2021 when school buildings reopened, only to find he'd fallen too far behind. So he stopped going.
For most of his childhood, his single mom had been sick and rarely held on to a job or an apartment. Then, around the time COVID-19 hit, her kidneys failed and other ailments reared up, confining her to the hospital for most of 2020. She died in early 2021. Lucian decided he wouldn't let himself mourn her. He was on his own; he couldn't afford to fall apart emotionally.
As he approached the group in the garden, his social anxiety spiked. He had forgotten how to talk to people in person.
Danielle Dillard, the program lead and a trained social worker, stepped aside to talk with Lucian, who stared at his beat-up sneakers and dribbled one-word answers. He felt he was blowing the interview.
Dillard offered the last open spot to Lucian.
SER Metro's Youth Reengagement Center sits on a treeless commercial stretch in southwest Detroit, with a shuttered strip club and boarded-up adult bookstore across the street. The building was unveiled in 2023, remodeled and expanded with $4 million in state and philanthropic dollars.
Earlier that year, Anthony Tejada started working with 19-year-old Seth in the center's GED classroom. The teen—who Chalkbeat is not identifying by his full name to protect his privacy—was coming off a rough couple of years. After dropping out of high school, he faltered in night school and another reconnection program in Flint, where a staffer urged him to give finishing high school one more try at SER. He was jobless and staying with his brother.
Tejada met Seth at a time when efforts to reconnect youth like him were in a new spotlight.
In the years leading up to COVID-19, youth disconnection rates across the country had been steadily declining. Some advocates and practitioners saw it as evidence that their efforts were paying off.
But experts credited a recovering economy, noting that most of have shown modest gains—a single-digit increase in high school completion, say, or several hundred dollars more in annual earnings. And even as the overall rate improved, the disconnection rate for Native American youth, such as Lucian and Black youth, such as Seth remained double or even triple that for Asian American and white youth.
Meanwhile, scientists had been rethinking the very definition of adolescence. The prefrontal cortex is developing well into the mid-20s, they noted, offering a make-or-break window to do the social-emotional repair many young people need to navigate the workplace—and life.
Then COVID-19 hit. The national disconnection rate rose from 10.7% to 12.6%, or about 716,200 more youth, bringing new urgency to building better reconnection programs.
Healing Through Education and Connection at SER Metro
At SER Metro, staff embraced trauma-informed case management and got restorative practices and "healing-centered" training, rooted in the idea that trauma and disconnection feed each other in a vicious cycle.
Tejada wants the young people he works with to take the lead. He lets students, who increasingly come in reading at an early elementary level, do the GED prep class at their own pace and tackle the tests in their chosen order.
In late 2023, Tejada felt Seth had momentum. He'd been coming to class consistently and had passed the science exam. He'd found a social circle in the GED classroom, even dating another student, his first real relationship.
It was easy for Tejada to root for Seth. In high school, Tejada—like Seth—had struggled with ADHD. Tejada graduated and went to college, but in his freshman year, crippling depression set in. He stopped going to classes and dropped out.
Navigating an Uncertain Path to Resilience
But Tejada was a middle-class kid from the Detroit suburbs whose close-knit family rallied around him. Society is much harder on kids like Seth—poor, family scattered—when they take the same detours.
As Seth geared up to take the social studies exam, Tejada told him about his years pulling shifts in his family's Mexican restaurant. Eventually, he made his way back to college. Look at his life now, he told Seth: a home, a family, a job he loved. Stability.
Tejada told Seth he didn't need to stay in lockstep with an arbitrary timeline or a predetermined path: "A lot of us have many twists and turns along the way."
For Lucian, the two years after he turned up at UNI's community garden were full of twists and turns. He slept on a series of couches and beds, then rented a small apartment—only to get evicted a few months later. He worked several jobs, sometimes with pay under the table, which he often spent on expensive gifts for his friends in a bid to cobble together the family he never had.
There was one constant: Danielle Dillard, Lucian's UNI supervisor and "success coach." Dillard sat him down to make a "success plan" with goals for the year and beyond. She pushed him to go back to school—a top goal on his list, but one for which he didn't feel ready. She pushed him to see UNI's new in-house therapist and to address health issues.
After Lucian completed UNI's culinary program in 2021, the nonprofit helped him find a job as a server's assistant at a high-end Detroit restaurant. The shifts were long and fast-paced, but he was learning a lot.
Then the restaurant closed abruptly, a pandemic casualty. He eventually found a job at Family Treat, a Springwells neighborhood fast food fixture. But it was only open in the warmer months. It was after the restaurant closed for the season that Lucian found himself isolated—and sliding downward—in that friend's bedroom in the spring of 2023.
When Family Treat reopened a month later, for a brief moment Lucian felt freed from his entrapment. He loved the bustle and camaraderie of restaurant kitchens. He just wanted a restaurant job with more stability, benefits, room to grow.
For now, he picked up all the shifts he could, working up to 60 hours a week.
After work, his mind descended to the same dark place it had staked out during his jobless stretch. Exhaustion made things worse.
The grief over his mom's death that he'd suppressed two years earlier reared up. By May 2023, that despondency turned to despair.
On Mother's Day, in a park not far from the cemetery where his mom was buried, Lucian slashed his wrists.
Tejada's work day was drawing to a close at the SER Metro reengagement center when a distraught Seth burst through the door. A few weeks earlier, the teen had failed the social studies GED test by just a few points. He had righted himself for a bit, turning his attention to the language arts exam.
For almost a year, he had chipped away at the GED at his own pace as Tejada, his instructor, had urged. But his momentum was fizzling out. He had been wondering if it might be time to get a job—any job.
What sent him pushing through the door minutes after he'd left the center was dropping his phone and cracking it while he was running to catch a bus. Suddenly, Seth found himself beset by all the complications in his life. His girlfriend, a classmate at SER, was pregnant. He was panicking that his baby would have two jobless parents slogging through a GED class.
"Nothing good's ever coming to me," he railed as Tejada and two other staffers sought to calm him down in the lobby. "Every little good thing I get is taken away."
As Seth tried to slam his phone against the floor, Tejada enveloped him in a hug that was part comfort, part restraint.
"You've been through worse things than breaking a phone and missing a bus," he reminded him.
Recent studies suggest that adding social-emotional support to reconnection programs can work. A , which layers mentoring and social-emotional guidance onto existing re-engagement programs, found it increased the odds of youth getting and keeping jobs. A , a summer jobs program that paired minimum-wage jobs with cognitive behavioral therapy and mentorship, showed it significantly reduced teens' involvement in violent crime—a goal that has often fueled efforts to reengage disconnected youth in that city and others.
