As Washington prepares for President-elect Donald Trump’s second inauguration, federal agencies are bracing for a wave of anticipated cuts — perhaps none more so than the Department of Education.
Trump promised the total destruction of the long-standing federal agency in a September 2023 campaign video, with an announcement that he would be “sending all education and education work and needs back to the states.”
Since the brash pronouncement, the former president has refused to offer calcifications about whether he still plans to shutter the department and how he plans to get Congress to buy in. He has, however, named someone to shepherd his vision for the agency: Linda McMahon.
For those with only a glancing familiarity with McMahon, Trump’s decision to appoint her to run the Department of Education could appear baffling. She is best known for her career as a professional wrestler and as co-founder of the World Wrestling Entertainment corporation, the billion-dollar company known as the WWE.
The current secretary of the Education Department, Miguel Cardona, was the youngest principal ever in Connecticut, earned a doctorate in education, then served as the state’s Education Department commissioner.
“Linda McMahon is a AAA Trump donor, loyalist, and loyal soldier for Trump.”
McMahon’s expertise on education, however, is much spottier. Before serving on the Board of Education for Connecticut, where WWE was based until this year, she falsely claimed on a questionnaire that she had a bachelor’s degree in education. When it was revealed that her degree was in French, she said she’d mistakenly thought she had an education degree. McMahon quit the board the day after a local newspaper told her it was going to run a story on the false statement.
McMahon’s selection, though, wasn’t about experience; it was about absolute loyalty. She’ll be a foot solider for Trump who, on his orders, will stop at nothing to dismantle the department to the best of her ability, said Will Ragland, a vice president of research at the liberal Center for American Progress who served as a top adviser at the Education Department during the Obama administration.
“Linda McMahon is a AAA Trump donor, loyalist, and loyal soldier for Trump,” Ragland said, “and is going to carry out whatever he needs her to carry out.”
“Battle of the Billionaires,” Cont.
While most of Trump’s appointments are drawn from more recent additions to his orbit, his relationship with McMahon spans decades. In the late 1980s, Trump hosted two consecutive WrestleManias in his Atlantic City hotel. From there, the relationship blossomed not only between McMahon and Trump, but also with Vince McMahon, Linda’s husband and controversial WWE co-founder.
Trump routinely appeared on the McMahons’ wrestling programming, at one point stage-fighting Vince McMahon in the “Battle of the Billionaires.” The couple also poured millions into Trump’s foundation and political aspirations.
While Vince McMahon stuck to the wrestling stage, Linda McMahon had clear political ambitions. In 2009, she was appointed to the Connecticut School Board, where she served less than two years before — on the cusp of the revelations about her falsely claiming to have an education degree — leaving to pursue two unsuccessful runs for U.S. Senate.
Her luck changed in 2016 when Trump was elected president and appointed her to lead the Small Business Administration. After Trump lost the 2020 election, McMahon kept pouring herself into the former president’s political movement as a major donor and chair of the board of America First Policy Institute, a conservative think tank whose driving purpose is to advance and develop far-right policies for the next Trump administration.
Now, that support has McMahon poised to rise to a new position of power, trying her hand again in education to impose Trump’s will on the Department of Education.
Six Percent of Teachers
Eliminating the Department of Education entirely is a tall order. It would require an act of Congress and likely a supermajority in the Senate, which Republicans will control next year but without such overwhelming numbers.
McMahon, however, doesn’t have to eliminate the entire department to do serious damage to its mission of leveling the playing field for children across the country.
“Linda McMahon will be somebody who’s not really a thought leader in the education space.”
“Linda McMahon will be somebody who’s not really a thought leader in the education space,” said Ragland, “but will be more of someone who can execute the elimination of the Department of Education, at least in function, if not in name.”
One major area of concern is funding for Title I, a federal program that provides money to school districts and schools with higher levels of low-income students. It’s the “bread and butter of K-12 federal funding,” explained Ragland.
Although Trump hasn’t personally announced plans to cut the funding, a plan created by figures from Trump’s inner circle calls for effectively doing just that. The controversial right-wing policy agenda for a new Trump term, Project 2025, which was written in part by the incoming president’s budget director, recommends eliminating Title I funding.
Cutting the program would result in nearly 6 percent of teachers nationwide losing their job, according to a report from Ragland’s Center for American Progress, but the toll varies widely by region. In Louisiana, for example, over 12 percent of teacher positions would be eliminated.
Ragland said, “We’re talking about hundreds of thousands of teacher jobs lost because of this cut that they’re proposing.”
“Defunding Public Schools”
School choice is another area likely to see movement from McMahon. McMahon isn’t exactly a wealth of education policy proposals, but school choice — meaning public funding directed out of regular public schooling — is one of the few areas where she has had more to say.
McMahon and her policy shop, the America First Policy Institute, have routinely championed voucher programs. The programs take money out of the public school system to give parents cash to use toward independently run public charter schools, private schools, and homeschooling options.
While proposed as a way to let parents get their kids out of low-quality public schools, many education policy experts argue that they do far more harm than good for the children by diverting critical funding to schools that aren’t accessible to all students.
“It means that fewer students will be able to get equal access to education, that students who are in public school systems will have fewer resources at those schools, will be less resourced, and that ultimately harms all students,” said Shiwali Patel, who works on schooling at the National Women’s Law Center.
School choice is actually about taking resources away from public schools, said Randi Weingarten, the head of the influential American Federation of Teachers union.
“We have watched the word ‘choice’ to mean, in this context, the defunding of public schools,” said Weingarten. “If it’s really going to be the parent’s choice and kids’ choice, then you have to fund public schools so that they’re a great choice. Not defund them.”
“Failure to Ensure Accountability”
Civil rights advocates like Patel have concerns with McMahon and one of the agency’s most important functions: enforcement of Titles VI and IX, the statutes protecting against racial and gender discrimination.
During Trump’s first term, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos issued a series of decisions scaling back protections for a wide variety of groups, including transgender youth, survivors of sexual violence, and racial minorities.
“They were really not prioritizing civil rights, and then they took actions to weaken and in some ways weaponize civil rights laws to harm students,” said Patel, an expert on anti-discrimination laws in schools. “So I think that’s an indication of what’s to come.”
The America First Policy Institute has echoed many of these same policy priorities, routinely railing against diversity, equity, and inclusion in public education.
McMahon’s history with the WWE also gives Patel pause. A recent lawsuit alleges that McMahon and her husband knowingly turned a blind eye to the sexual exploitation of children by an employee at WWE. (The McMahons deny the allegations.)
“Everything happening with the WWE is concerning,” said Patel, noting that the Department of Education plays a key role in ensuring that colleges and universities take sexual violence seriously. “I think that really speaks to her kind of failure to ensure accountability within an institution for preventing and addressing sexual abuse.”
All in all, Patel said McMahon could rapidly diminish the Department of Education’s reach.
“I think here we’re going to see more immediate action toward dismantling or undoing certain parts of the Department of Education, also just based on plans from Project 2025 for the department … and the agency itself being a target for Republicans,” she said. “I imagine that they will be taking more steps to undo or weaken a lot of the critical functions of the Department of Education.”
