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BySRSam Reyes·CMCal Morrow·EQEliza Quinn·DPDana Park
BREAKINGApril 23, 2026

Inside Linda McMahon's effort to dismantle the Department of Education

Linda McMahon, Trump's Secretary of Education and former pro-wrestling executive, is systematically dismantling the Department of Education from within, cutting approximately 50% of its workforce and transferring its functions to other agencies within weeks of her confirmation. A new New Yorker profile by staff writer Zach Helfand, titled 'The Executor: How Professional Wrestling Prepared Linda McMahon For Trump's Cabinet,' details her rapid and aggressive approach to the department's deconstruction. Courts have already ruled that some of the personnel actions she took were not carried out legally.

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⚡The conservative argument represents the dominant position. A significant conservative faction disagrees — see The Divide below.

Linda McMahon wants to eliminate the federal Education Department. Does Washington actually improve schools, or does it impose one-size-fits-all mandates that drain resources from classrooms? Her answer could reshape how 50 million students get educated.

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Courts ruled actions illegal already
Liberal
Courts have already ruled that what McMahon is doing is illegal — not contested, not pending, not subject to reasonable debate. What you're calling bold executive action is an administration that lost in court and kept going anyway. That is not governance; that is contempt for the rule of law dressed up in the language of mandate politics.
Conservative
The rulings to date have addressed the procedural execution of specific layoffs — improper notice periods, RIF classification errors — not the president's authority to restructure or reduce a department. That's a meaningful distinction. A speeding ticket doesn't mean you lack the right to drive.
Liberal
The administration didn't slow down and fix the procedure — it kept going. At some point 'we'll clean up the process later' stops being a legal defense and starts being a description of willful noncompliance.
Conservative
Courts haven't halted the restructuring itself, only specific personnel actions — that's the legal system working as designed, not evidence that the entire enterprise is illegitimate.
IDEA enforcement cannot be improvised
Liberal
Roughly 7.5 million children with disabilities hold legal rights under IDEA — specific children, with IEPs, with parents who went to federal court to secure those rights. The people responsible for enforcing those rights are now gone, and 'states will handle it' is not an answer when the entire point of IDEA was that states weren't handling it, which is exactly why Congress passed the law in the first place.
Conservative
You're actually making the surgical-reform argument for us. If the defense of the entire Department of Education ultimately narrows to IDEA enforcement, that concedes the rest of the apparatus is negotiable. The answer is to transfer IDEA to an agency with clear statutory authority and genuine enforcement capacity — not to hold the whole bureaucracy hostage to it.
Liberal
You can't 'transfer IDEA enforcement' in the same week you eliminate half the staff who understand what IDEA enforcement actually requires. The transition plan has to exist before the demolition, not as a promise issued afterward.
Conservative
That's a sequencing criticism, not a constitutional one — and sequencing can be corrected without reversing course on whether a 45-year-old cabinet agency should continue to exist in its current form.
Executive power versus congressional authority
Liberal
Congress created the Department of Education in 1979. Congress funds it. Congress alone can abolish it. Ronald Reagan wanted to do exactly this and had eight years to try — and didn't, because executive will does not override legislative authority. The precedent McMahon sets — that any president can destroy any congressionally created agency by firing everyone and stopping its functions — should alarm process conservatives as much as anyone.
Conservative
Reagan couldn't abolish the department legislatively, and McMahon isn't trying to — she's reorganizing it, reducing staff, and transferring functions, all of which sit squarely within presidential discretion. The Obama administration restructured agencies. Clinton 'reinvented government.' None of it required a congressional vote. The line is abolition; this isn't that.
Liberal
When you eliminate ninety percent of a department's workforce and transfer its core functions elsewhere, calling what remains 'reorganization' rather than 'abolition' is a distinction without a practical difference — the statute is being nullified in everything but name.
Conservative
Courts draw that line, not political optics — and so far they've drawn it at procedural execution, not at the president's authority to reshape the executive branch.
Student loan transfer disrupts borrowers mid-repayment
Liberal
Tens of millions of borrowers are mid-repayment, mid-forgiveness application, mid-income-driven-repayment plan — their financial futures depend on continuity of administration that is now being deliberately disrupted. These are systems that took decades to build, administered by people who spent careers understanding their complexity, and McMahon eliminated half of them in a week. You cannot build a responsible transition plan in seven days; you can only blow things up.
Conservative
Student loan administration is fundamentally a financial services function — intake, repayment calculation, servicer contracting — and Treasury's core competency is exactly that. The argument that complexity makes transfer impossible would also prohibit every federal reorganization ever attempted. Complexity is an argument for careful execution, not for permanent institutional paralysis.
Liberal
Treasury has never administered income-driven repayment pipelines or PSLF certifications — those aren't generic financial products, they're policy-laden eligibility determinations. 'Treasury does finance' doesn't make this a safe handoff.
Conservative
Treasury absorbed Social Security's financial infrastructure, IRS tax administration, and TARP loan management — the institutional capacity to handle complex, policy-laden repayment systems is there; the question is whether the transition is executed responsibly, and that's a reason to demand rigor, not to reject the move.
Spending more produced worse outcomes
Liberal
The department's mixed track record on student outcomes is a real argument — critics can point to genuine evidence that federal involvement has sometimes produced compliance theater rather than learning. But 'the institution underperformed' does not give any president the authority to dissolve it unilaterally. The mechanism for fixing a failing congressional creation is Congress, not an administrator with a mandate and a moving truck.
Conservative
You're essentially arguing that an institution is entitled to perpetual existence as long as its abolition requires the correct paperwork. Real spending up 375 percent, outcomes flat or declining, and the defense is procedural. At some point the legitimacy argument requires the institution to be worth defending on the merits.
Liberal
The merits case is legitimate and worth having — but it has to happen in Congress, where the votes would tell us whether the country actually agrees. Running that argument through a unilateral executive action skips the one check that would validate it.
Conservative
States like Massachusetts and Florida built internationally competitive systems without Washington's architecture — the evidence that local accountability works better isn't a talking point, it's a result, and the department's defenders have never satisfactorily explained why fifty years and three-hundred-percent more spending didn't replicate it.
Conservative's hardest question
The legal rulings that some of McMahon's personnel actions were not carried out lawfully are not trivially dismissible — if the executive branch cannot demonstrate it can execute even a reduction-in-force within existing legal constraints, it undermines the credibility of the entire restructuring effort and hands courts legitimate grounds to halt or reverse the broader agenda. A conservative who genuinely believes in rule of law cannot simply label every adverse ruling 'activist' without grappling with the possibility that the execution, not just the opposition, is flawed.
Liberal's hardest question
The honest vulnerability is that the Department of Education's track record on student outcomes over fifty years is genuinely mixed, and critics can point to real evidence that federal involvement has sometimes produced compliance theater rather than learning. If I'm arguing from institutional legitimacy rather than institutional performance, I need to own the fact that legitimacy arguments are stronger when the institution is working — and the department's defenders have not always made a compelling case that it is.
The Divide
*Even as progressives unite against McMahon's education overhaul, some conservative institutionalists worry that executive fiat—not law—is driving the purge.*
MAGA/POPULIST
Full abolition of the Department of Education is the mandate; McMahon's aggressive restructuring aligns with Trump's promise to return control to states and parents.
“We're going to close it up and send education back to the states where it belongs.” — Donald Trump
ESTABLISHMENT/PROCESS-CONSERVATIVE
Gutting the department by executive order rather than legislation bypasses constitutional process and risks disrupting protections for disabled students under IDEA.
The Verdict
Both sides agree
Both sides accept that the Department of Education's performance record on student outcomes over the past 45 years is genuinely mixed and defensible as neither triumphant nor catastrophic.
The real conflict
FACT/LAW: Whether court rulings that McMahon's personnel actions were unlawful represent a disqualifying violation of rule of law (liberal view) or a procedural correction that leaves the underlying restructuring authority intact (conservative view) — this is not ambiguous; one interpretation makes the administration lawless, the other makes it sloppy.
What nobody has answered
If the executive branch can functionally dismantle a Cabinet agency by exhausting its staff and halting its functions without legislative action, what prevents a future administration from doing the same to departments conservatives value — and if the answer is 'courts will stop it,' why should those same courts not be stopping this now rather than just fixing individual personnel violations?
Sources

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