US President Donald Trump has said that he wants his nominated education secretary Linda McMahon to “put herself out of a job.”

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“I told Linda — ‘Linda, I hope you do a great job and put yourself out of a job,'” Trump told reporters in his Oval Office on Tuesday (Feb 4). “I want her to put herself out of a job [in the] Education Department.”

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This comes after speculations that Trump is planning to issue an executive order to dismantle the government agency as part of his bigger goal of scaling down federal spending and departments.

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According to a USA Today report, a White House official confirmed that Trump is reevaluating the future of the Education Department. McMahon, who was the administrator of the Small Business Administration during Trump’s first term, has expressed similar views for abolishing the department.

Can Trump dismantle education department with executive order?

Legal critics believe that Trump will require Congress to pass new legislation to end the department. 

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When asked whether he could abolish the agency by an executive order, the president said, “There are some people that say I could.”

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“I think I’d work with Congress,” Trump added, as quoted by The New York Post. “We’d have to work with the teachers union because the teachers union is the only one that’s opposed to it.”

“We have to tell the teachers union we’re rated last in the world in education of the top 40,” he said, not clearing about which rating system he was speaking of.

The Education Department was created in 1979 under the late former President Jimmy Carter. Last year, the department had $241.66 billion in budgetary resources, according to USASpending.gov data.

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Trump argued that returning the power from the department back to the states is better suited for education systems.

“I think that if you moved our schools into some of these states that are really well-run states, they would be as good as Denmark and Norway and Sweden,” he said. “But you’d have the laggards, the same laggards that are laggards with everything else, including crime.”

Trump, along with his biggest supporter billionaire Elon Musk, who is leading the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), have started working on dismantling several government agencies like the US Agency for International Development (USAID) to narrow down the federal department and its spending.

(With inputs from agencies)