Donald Trump smiled in March 2025 as he declared victory over the Department of Education in the East Room of the White House. Flanked by about a dozen students sitting in classroom desks, the president signed an executive order directing the agency to shut itself down and put education solely in the hands of state and local officials. The students signed their own copies of the order—and held them up for the cameras when Trump did.
Almost a year later, the Department of Education is still open—and is getting even bigger. The new federal funding package Trump signed into law on Tuesday funds the agency at $79 billion for the current fiscal year, which ends September 30. That is an increase of $217 million from fiscal 2025, $12 billion more than the White House requested in May, and a win for Democrats in Congress who helped negotiate the deal.
“Congress will not abolish the Department of Education,” Senator Patty Murray of Washington, a retired preschool teacher who is the second-highest-ranking member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, said last week after the Senate passed a spending package that included the agency’s funding. The House approved the measure by a vote of 217–214 on Tuesday after a brief round of negotiations with Republican holdouts.
Trump signed 225 executive orders in 2025 and another 10 so far this year, compared with 220 during his entire first term. Getting rid of the Department of Education “would provide children and their families the opportunity to escape a system that is failing them,” the president wrote in the order last March.
