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Who: Linda McMahon
Nominated for: secretary of education
You might know her from: Linda McMahon is most well-known for leading World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) and helping to build it into a multibillion-dollar business. She also led the U.S. Small Business Administration for about two years under President Trump's first term.
More about McMahon:
- McMahon's background in education is limited. She served for about one year on Connecticut's State Board of Education.
- Up until recently, not much was known about McMahon's policy positions on education. In January, she shared more about where she stands, including that she supports expanding school choice and career and technical education opportunities for students.
- She held leadership positions at WWE for nearly three decades, including CEO.
- If confirmed, McMahon would oversee an agency the president has already moved to diminish.
What the education secretary does: The education secretary leads one of the smallest federal agencies, the Department of Education. The agency safeguards the civil rights of students with disabilities, manages the federal student loan portfolio and sends billions of dollars to schools that serve low-income students, among its many responsibilities. Read more on what the department does here.
What happened at the hearing:
Secretary of Education nominee Linda McMahon decried a public education "system in decline" as she appeared Thursday before the Senate education committee, and she vowed to "reorient" the U.S. Department of Education and "invest in teachers not Washington bureaucrats."
In a confirmation hearing that was heated at times, and interrupted repeatedly by the shouts of protesters, McMahon was grilled by committee Democrats about the White House's plans to dismantle the department.
The fact that the administration has already begun cutting department staff and programs made today's hearing less a referendum on McMahon's views or her qualifications – she is arguably one of President Trump's least controversial Cabinet nominees – and more a referendum on her boss' stated plans.
Here's what we heard:
Executive actions
Nearly two weeks before McMahon appeared to lay out her vision for the Education Department, the White House made clear: Her vision will be to unwind the department.
The White House confirmed that it is preparing to take executive action to shutter department programs that are not protected by law, and will call on McMahon, once confirmed, to draw up a blueprint for Congress to close the department entirely.
During Thursday's hearing, the committee's Republican chairman, Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, asked McMahon to elaborate on these plans.
"We'd like to do this right," McMahon said, saying she would present Congress with a plan to dismantle the department "that I think our senators could get on board with."
The department cannot be officially closed through executive action alone. It was created by an act of Congress in 1979 and can only be closed by an act of Congress.
Multiple senators asked whether the department's dismantling would include cuts not just to the department but to the federal funding for K-12 schools it administers, including Title I (for students in lower-income communities) and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA, for students with disabilities).
McMahon said repeatedly that she considers the department separate from the funding. The former, she said, can be dismantled without affecting the latter. "It is not the president's goal to defund the programs. It was only to have it operate more efficiently."
Later, McMahon elaborated that IDEA funding, for example, is protected by statute and would not be targeted for cuts. But, she offered, it might be more effectively administered by a different agency, perhaps the Department of Health and Human Services.
To that, New Hampshire Democrat Maggie Hassan scoffed: "I just want to be clear, you're going to put special education into the hands of Robert F. Kennedy Jr."
Whether there are enough votes in Congress for that kind of shift is unclear. House Republicans have tried before to close the Department and failed, and Republicans enjoy only narrow majorities in the House and Senate.
Cuts are already underway at the department. Wednesday evening, roughly 60 newer workers received termination notices. These more recent federal hires were still in their probationary period, making them easier to fire without cause.
Last week, the Trump administration placed dozens of department staff members on paid administrative leave with little explanation, saying only that the moves were the result of President Trump's executive action targeting federal diversity programs.
The Education Department is among the smallest of all federal agencies with roughly 4,200 employees.
School choice
Several senators asked McMahon about her position on whether families should be allowed to use public dollars to send their children to any school they choose, including private and religious schools. Currently, the federal government can do very little to encourage this kind of private school choice, but Trump wants to change that.
During the hearing, McMahon favored an expansive view of school choice.
"Parents look at their children and say, 'I want that for my child. My school is failing my child.' " In that situation, McMahon said, parents deserve a multitude of options, from education savings accounts to vouchers, charter schools and even access to multiple public schools. "I know that if I could get my child to that next school, they would be better off. Every parent wants that opportunity for their child."
School choice was often cited by Republicans as an antidote to the abysmal state of student learning five years after the first wave of pandemic-driven school closures.
The evidence on school choice is decidedly mixed, though all can agree, many students are struggling right now.
A pair of important, recent research efforts, The Nation's Report Card and The Education Recovery Scorecard, found that student achievement in math and reading still lags pre-pandemic learning levels. What's more, reading scores not only fell during the pandemic but continued to fall from 2022 to 2024.
Only one state, Alabama, raised its 4th graders' math scores above 2019 levels. Similarly, only Louisiana did the same in 4th grade reading.
During his first term, Trump championed a plan to create a $5 billion federal tax credit to help parents pay for private school. Republicans are renewing a push for a credit in 2025.
During the hearing, though, Republican Lisa Murkowski of Alaska pointed out that many rural Republicans oppose school choice because, "it works if you're in a city," But in many remote Alaska districts, "there is no choice."
And so she asked McMahon if she believes, as Education Secretary, that her primary role would be "to support and strengthen our public schools"?
McMahon's answer: "I absolutely do believe that our public schools are the bedrock of our education. You know, they go back to the very founding of our country."
According to the most recent federal data, 4.7 million children attend private schools. Nearly 50 million children attend the nation's public schools.
Research cuts
On Monday, NPR reported that Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), after recently embedding at the Education Department, announced sweeping cuts to programs at the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), an independent office within the department that oversees education research.
Republican Susan Collins of Maine referenced the cuts in Thursday's hearing, saying her office had heard from a former Maine teacher who had been using one of these grants to develop a high-impact tutoring model.
"Considering the poor reading and math scores … shouldn't the Department of Education continue to collect data and evaluate outcomes rather than to halt these activities so that you can help states know what works well?"
"I want to study [these programs]," McMahon said, sidestepping Collins' question. "I'd like to get back and talk to you more and to work with you."
While DOGE, in a post on X, implied the cuts were about ending government waste, sources with knowledge of some of the dozens of research programs that were scuttled decried the cuts as "the destruction of knowing what works for kids."
DEI and antidiscrimination
The Trump administration has made no secret of its contempt for diversity, equity and inclusion programs across the federal government. That manifested recently in an executive action that has led to dozens of employees at the Education Department being placed on paid leave.
"[DEI] is a program that's tough," McMahon said. "It was put in place ostensibly for more diversity, for equity and inclusion. And I think what we're seeing is, it is having an opposite effect. We are getting back to more segregating of our schools instead of having more inclusion in our schools."
Democrat Chris Murphy, who represents McMahon's home state of Connecticut, pointed out that, in response to those anti-DEI actions, schools managed by the Department of Defense have already canceled programming around Black History Month. He asked McMahon whether a public school could lose its federal funding if, for example, it continues to allow students to form extracurricular clubs based on race or ethnicity.
"I certainly today don't want to address, you know, hypothetical situations," McMahon answered, committing to assess the question further if she is confirmed.
"That's pretty chilling," Murphy responded. "My son is in a public school. He takes a class called African American History. If you're running an African American history class, could you perhaps be in violation of this executive order?"
"I'm not quite certain," McMahon responded. "And I'd like to look into it further and get back to you on that."
Several Republican senators raised concerns about gender issues involving school sports. Trump has issued an executive order banning transgender men and boys from competing in women's sports.
Republican Josh Hawley of Missouri said he was "delighted" that a federal court recently struck down the Biden-era expansion of legal protections for transgender students. "This is a huge victory for common sense and the rule of law," Hawley said.
McMahon agreed. "I was very happy to see those [rules] vacated," she said, returning Title IX to its original purpose "to protect [students from] sexual discrimination." And she vowed to investigate any school that receives federal funding and refuses to comply with the Trump's administration's executive order.
Multiple senators, on both sides, asked McMahon about the rise of antisemitism on college campuses, and what the department could do to better protect Jewish students from harassment and, in some cases, violence.
McMahon committed to using the education department's authority to push back against campus antisemitism and agreed to an idea, suggested by Republican Sen. Roger Marshall of Kansas, to create an antisemitism committee.
Hassan, the New Hampshire Democrat, expressed exasperation at McMahon and Republicans who say they want the department to use its enforcement authority to push back on schools that flout the new administration's demands, while they also say they want to strip the department of this very enforcement authority.
She called this "elegant gaslighting."
"People need to understand, people like my son," Hassan told McMahon, "before IDEA, before the Department of Education existed, state and local schools did not educate [kids with disabilities]. They barred them from the classrooms."
Hassan added, the Department of Education exists "because educating kids with disabilities can be really hard and it takes the national commitment to get it done."
It's this idea, of a national commitment to education, and what it should look like moving forward, that's now in question.
For more coverage of the new administration follow NPR's Trump's Terms podcast
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