Cnn
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President Donald Trump signed a decree on Thursday Start dismantling the United States Ministry of EducationSeeking to achieve decades of conservative ambition to get rid of the agency, but Put up new questions For millions of public schools in the country, speakers holders and parents.
No president of modern history has tried to close an agency at the office level. The closure of the wholesale department would require a congress act, which created the agency in 1979. Trump officials recognize that they do not have the necessary votes to dissolve the department in this way; Instead, the order that Trump signed on Thursday asked the Secretary of Education Linda McMahon to take “all the measures necessary to facilitate the closure of the Ministry of Education and the return of the States Education Authority”.
Speaking in the eastern room, surrounded by uniform schoolchildren seated in the class offices, Trump said: “We will stop and close it as quickly as possible.”
The precision of the components of the education department would be dismantled was not precisely clear.
The press secretary of the White House, Karoline Leavitt, said before the signing of Thursday that the order was going to evolve to “considerably minimize the agency”, but that certain “critical functions” such as student loans and the administration of grants for risky students would remain under the umbrella of the agency.
Trump, in his remarks, said that these functions would be preserved but “redistributed to various other agencies and departments that will take great care of them”.
The gap could predict McMahon’s challenge as it strives to realize Trump’s order. Although it has fully approved the mission of closing the department, it is also required by law to fulfill some of its functions mandated by the congress, such as the loan administration and the granting of school grants in areas on high pause.
In his remarks, Trump has repeatedly quoted the imperative to return the control of education in states as justification to close the agency, as well as what he said is bad results in tests compared to high investment per student. He said that in a new system – without the Department of Education – schools could compete with the countries of Europe and China, which, according to him, exceeded the United States.
“I really think they will be as good as any of them,” he said. “And then you will have Laggards and we will work with them. And we can tell you who will be the Laggards right now.”
Doing what he called a “personal declaration”, Trump congratulated teachers as “among the most important people in this country”, extending a branch of olive tree even to those represented by the unions who decried the executive order of Trump.
“I don’t care if they are in the union or not in the union. It doesn’t matter. But we are going to take care of our teachers,” he said.
Since taking office, Trump generally signs his executive orders several times from the Oval Office, real documents often overshadowed by Trump’s remarks on other subjects.
Thursday’s major event in the Room East Room for the Education Directive stressed its importance for Trump and its conservative colleagues, who have long tried to close the agency and further change public schools to individual states.
The initiative has grown in recent years, motivated by the anger of certain local study policies and programs combined with the dissatisfaction of school closings during the coronavirus pandemic. A movement of parents’ rights has rejected measures in schools intended to approach the rights of LGBTs and to promote diversity, equality and inclusion.
Almost all of public school funding in the United States are provided by states and localities, governments showing the study programs. The Department of Education is responsible for the administration of federal financing for disabled students, who fall under the law on the education of people with disabilities, as well as the financing of title I for low -income schools and federal payments of student loans like Pell.
“Regarding student loans and Pell subsidies, they will still be short from the Ministry of Education, but we do not need to spend more than 3 dollars of dollars in a few decades in a department that clearly failed in its initial intention to educate our students,” Leavitt told journalists earlier on Thursday.
“All the critical functions of the department as this will remain, but again, we considerably reduce the scale and the size of this department,” she added.
Trump publicly pleaded for having moved some of the agency’s responsibilities to other departments in the federal government. For example, he previously declared that monitoring the student loan program may be from Small Business Administration, which oversees separate commercial loans.
But the Department of Education had trouble finding a viable alternative agency to manage its portfolio of massive student debts, according to two sources involved in the discussions. The loan portfolio totals a party CNN previously reported based on information accessible to the public.
Already, almost half of the employees of the education department have been notified that they could be dismissed. And a number of programs intended to promote diversity and to set up protections for transgender students have been canceled.
While the news of the president’s future order spread on Wednesday evening, the staff of the department who was one of the 1,300 recently dismissed received an email from the Director of Human capital asking them to plan a time to collect personal articles from their office and return government devices.
Each employee will have 30 minutes to pack their items, and they were invited to provide their own boxes and bands to pack their items.
Some long -standing employees of the department were in shock from the order expected for a long time and were still trying to understand what he would presume for their work and their employment.
A current employee of the department said that many within the agency believe that the order is a “slap in the face and kicking us while we have broken down” after massive layoffs.
“This EO stresses that Linda McMahon, Donald Trump and the rest of this administration remain ignorant of what our agency really does and how their efforts to dismantle it will negatively affect children and families across the country,” the employee told CNN, who asked for anonymity for fear of reprisals.
On the campaign track, Trump promised that he would take measures to dismantle the agency once in power, highlighting the department as a sign of federal surpassing and linked it to the problems of cultural war.
“I said to Linda (McMahon),” Linda, I hope you are doing a great job to put you out of a job. I want her to get away from a job – the education department, “Trump said in February.
Like many executive actions of Trump, it is likely to deal with legal challenges. The unions representing teachers decried the action before Trump’s event.
“Donald Trump and Elon Musk targeted their demolition ball in public schools and the future of 50 million students in rural, suburban and urban communities through America, by dismantling public education to pay tax documents for billionaires,” said the president of the National Education Association, Becky Pringle, in a press release.
“In the event of success, Trump’s continuous actions will harm all students by sending a fleeing class sizes, reducing vocational training programs, making higher education more expensive and out of reach for families in the middle class, taking special education services for disabled students and exhausting civil rights protections,” she said.
This story has been updated with Trump signing the decree.
Kayla Tausche of CNN contributed to this report.