# Department of Education The **Department of Education (ED)** is the smallest cabinet department by staff (~4,000 employees) but administers outsized functions: the ~$1.6 trillion federal student-loan portfolio, Pell Grants and federal student aid, Title I funding for low-income school districts, special-education (IDEA) funding, and — through its Office for Civil Rights — enforcement of anti-discrimination law in schools and universities (Title VI, Title IX, disability rights). Established as a standalone department only in 1979 under Carter, it has been a target for elimination almost since its creation. For the KB, Education is the **standing abolition target** of the modern right — the department conservatives most openly want to eliminate, on the theory that education is properly a state and local function and that the federal department is a vector for progressive ideology. This makes it the clearest test case of the dismantling agenda: not capture-and-redirect, but demolition. ## Leadership (2025–) [[Linda McMahon]] — the co-founder of WWE and former Small Business Administration head in the first Trump term — was confirmed Secretary of Education on March 3, 2025, by a 51–45 vote. Her explicit mandate, in Trump's framing, was to work toward winding the department down — administering an agency while preparing for its dismemberment, transferring functions to other departments and the states. ## Major components Tracked as plain references until individual pages are built: - **Federal Student Aid (FSA)** — the student-loan portfolio, Pell Grants, and the FAFSA system. - **Office for Civil Rights (OCR)** — Title VI, Title IX, and disability-rights enforcement in schools; a major reorientation target. - **Office of Elementary and Secondary Education** — Title I funding for low-income districts. - **Office of Special Education Programs** — IDEA funding for students with disabilities. ## The capture lens Eliminating the department is central to the [[Project 2025]] agenda, which would devolve its functions to other agencies and the states, end income-driven loan forgiveness, and sharply redirect Office for Civil Rights enforcement — away from race-conscious and gender-identity protections and toward a different set of priorities (e.g., antisemitism enforcement, parental rights, anti-DEI). The patterns the KB tracks: - **Department wind-down** — moving FSA to Treasury or SBA, special education to HHS, civil rights to DOJ; the legal limits of doing this without Congress. - **Loan-forgiveness reversal** — ending income-driven repayment forgiveness and borrower-defense relief. - **OCR reorientation** — flipping the civil-rights mission's targets and using funding as leverage over universities. - **[[Schedule F]] purge** — thinning the career workforce ahead of dismantling. ## See Also - [[Linda McMahon]] - [[Project 2025]] - [[Schedule F]] - [[Cabinet Departments Hub]] - [[Federal Agencies]]