Under the second presidency of Donald Trump, the federal government of the United States has sought to influence many aspects of education. President Donald Trump appointed Linda McMahon, a co-founder and former CEO of WWE, to be the United States secretary of education. McMahon was confirmed by the U.S. Senate by a vote of 51–45 on March 3, 2025. Trump and McMahon have sought to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education; on March 20, Trump signed an executive order directing the secretary of education to "facilitate the closure" of the department, and the Trump administration has sought to cut nearly all of its employees. Trump has said that the disbursement of student financial aid and student loans would be transferred to the Small Business Administration, while the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services would assume responsibility for the education department's special needs and nutrition programs.
The Trump administration has also sought to crack down on universities that it accuses of antisemitism and that it perceives as having a left-wing bias that discriminates against conservative students. The administration paused billions in federal funding to universities. Multiple universities have reached settlements with the administration, agreeing to its demands, including the suspension or expulsion of students who participated in 2024 pro-Palestinian campus occupations, taking steps to adopt pro-Israel policies (such as adopting the IHRA definition of antisemitism), paying fines, and enacting changes to its admissions policies. Harvard University publicly refused and criticized demands made by the Trump administration, filing a lawsuit against them and saying that the demands were an illegal overreach of government authority. In response, the administration paused over $2 billion in funding for Harvard. On September 3, 2025, Judge Allison D. Burroughs found the funding freeze illegal, writing that the government had infringed upon Harvard's free speech rights and that it was "difficult to conclude anything other than that defendants used antisemitism as a smokescreen for a targeted, ideologically-motivated assault on this country's premier universities".
Simultaneously, the Trump administration's science policy resulted in the cutting or freezing of large amounts of funding used for research on topics such as climate change, vaccines, LGBTQ topics, and COVID-19. The administration's policies against initiatives for diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) has resulted in the removal of thousands of online resources as well as the removal of around 400 books from the U.S. Naval Academy library. The Trump administration has also targeted many non-citizen activist students and academics for deportation, revoking over 300 student visas for those that it accuses of promoting antisemitism or of supporting U.S.-designated foreign terrorist organizations such as Hamas. Some efforts to deport activists have faced court challenges of their legality.
The administration opposes public education (Executive Order 14191 and One Big Beautiful Bill Act), has sought to reduce the separation of church and state, scaled back civil rights enforcement for "students with disabilities, students of color and those facing sex discrimination" while prioritizing "allegedly discriminated against white and Jewish students", reduced support for English learners, and promoted historical negationism (Executive Order 14190).
Background and campaign
Donald Trump, previously the president of the United States from 2017 to 2021, campaigned in 2024 largely with a promise to expand the U.S. federal government's power to manage education in the United States. Additionally, he pledged to fulfill his first-term promise to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education, a federal executive department established in 1980, which Trump said had been infiltrated by "radicals, zealots and Marxists". Many in his Republican Party have also criticized the department, accusing it of pushing "woke" ideology onto children, including ideology relating to gender and race, and have said that individual U.S. states should have authority over education. He said that he would limit federal funding to certain schools and universities, including those that imposed mask mandates or vaccine mandates during the COVID-19 pandemic, and those that he said teach curriculums that include "critical race theory, gender ideology, or other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content". Trump said he wished to establish a "patriotic education" in the United States that "teach[es] students to love their country", "defend[s] American tradition and Western civilization", and promotes the nuclear family. His campaign also advocated universal school choice. Regarding college accreditation, Trump promised to "fire the radical-left accreditors that have allowed our colleges to become dominated by Marxist maniacs and lunatics".
Personnel
On November 19, 2024, two weeks after Trump won the 2024 U.S. presidential election, Trump announced that Linda McMahon would be nominated by him to be the United States secretary of education in his second term. McMahon is the co-founder and former executive of World Wrestling Entertainment and was the administrator of the Small Business Administration during Trump's first term. Trump said that, during her tenure as the chair of the board at the America First Policy Institute, a conservative think tank, McMahon had "been a fierce advocate for parents' rights" and that she would "spearhead" the effort to "send education back to the states" by closing the Department of Education.
On February 20, 2025, one month after Trump's inauguration, the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee voted 12–11 in favor of advancing McMahon's nomination. On March 3, the full U.S. Senate voted 51–45 along party lines to confirm McMahon as secretary of education. She was sworn in as secretary later that day.
White House deputy chief of staff for policy Stephen Miller, current director of the Domestic Policy Council Vince Haley, senior policy strategist May Mailman and White House attorney Gene Hamilton have emerged as the leading officials behind Trump administration's policies toward universities.
Education Department dismantling effort
Trump said that McMahon's primary objective as education secretary would be to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education. He said of her role at the department that: "I want her to put herself out of a job." When asked if the Department of Education was necessary for the United States, McMahon said that it was not needed. On March 20, 2025, Trump signed an executive order directing the secretary of education to "facilitate the closure of the Department of Education and return authority over education to the States and local communities".
The closure of a federal department such as the Department of Education requires an act of Congress, because Congress created the department. However, the Republican Party's narrow majority in Congress makes an effort to officially close the department unlikely to succeed. McMahon has said that congressionally appropriated funding for department services such as student financial aid will be unaffected by the plan to downsize or close the department. Trump said in March 2025 that the Small Business Administration would assume responsibility for student loans, and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services would take over the department's special needs and nutrition programs. On May 22, 2025, U.S. district judge Myong Joun in Boston blocked the mass layoff and the dismantle attempt.
In February 2025, as a part of widespread layoffs across the federal government, the Department of Education offered all of its employees $25,000 if they agreed to resign or retire. The next month, the department announced a plan that would reduce its workforce by half. The majority of layoffs took place in the Federal Student Aid office that oversees the disbursement of financial aid and student loans, and the Office for Civil Rights that protects students and teachers from discrimination. In April 2025, the Trump administration announced that the Department of Education would resume collecting defaulted student loan debt on May 5, for the first time since March 2020.
In July 2025, the Trump administration moved to revoke access to the Head Start subsidized preschool program for undocumented immigrants and their families. The administration also made undocumented immigrants ineligible for postsecondary career and technical adult education programs.
Universities Actions against universities
In February 2025, Leo Terrell, the head of the Trump administration's Task Force to Combat Antisemitism, announced that he would investigate Columbia University, Harvard University, George Washington University, Johns Hopkins University, New York University, Northwestern University, University of California, Berkeley, UCLA, the University of Minnesota, and the University of Southern California as part of the Department of Justice's investigation into antisemitism on college campuses.
Trump and many Republican officials have advocated for new laws and policies that crack down on campus curriculum and protests that they believe perpetuate a left-wing bias in universities and discriminate against conservative viewpoints. In March 2025, the Education Department's Office for Civil Rights contacted 60 colleges and universities across the United States to inform them that it had begun investigations of alleged violations of civil rights law "relating to antisemitic harassment and discrimination". This was followed by an investigation of 45 universities for allegedly using racial preferences. The Trump administration announced that month that it was cancelling $400 million in federal funding for Columbia University, "due to the school's continued inaction in the fact of persistent harassment of Jewish students" and "other alleged violations of Title VI and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964".
The Trump administration issued a demands to Columbia, saying that in order for it to begin negotiations on restoring the lost funding, it should place its Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies Department under academic receivership, suspend or expel students who had participated in Columbia's 2024 pro-Palestinian campus occupations, take steps to combat antisemitism at the university, change its admissions policies, ban face coverings meant to hide the wearer's identity "or intimidate others" (with an exception for religious and health reasons), and acquiesce to other demands. Several academic associations condemned the demands as an attack on academic freedom; however, the university agreed to the demands, and announced that it would "overhaul disciplinary processes, ban masks at protests, add 36 officers with the authority to make arrests and appoint a new senior vice provost to oversee academic programs focused on the Middle East". Despite Columbia's agreement, , the federal funding has not yet been restored.
Subsequently in March and April 2025, the Trump administration paused billions of dollars in federal funding for universities in express defiance of existing laws prohibiting such actions without following the proper legal processes which did not happen. It froze $1 billion in funding for Cornell University, $790 million for Northwestern University, $175 million for the University of Pennsylvania, threatened $9 billion for Harvard University, $510 million for Brown University, and paused academic grants to Princeton University. The administration justified the funding pauses by saying that the universities had not done enough to comply with the government's priorities, such as the combatting of antisemitic discrimination.