President Donald Trump has signed a much-anticipated executive order laying out his goal to eliminate the U.S. Department of Education — while also pledging to deliver “uninterrupted” services to schools.
Those seemingly contradictory messages aren’t likely to help providers of K-12 products and services trying to make sense of the funding and regulatory implications.
The impact of the order is in many respects tangential to the more direct actions taken by the administration over the past few weeks affecting the agency.
Trump’s team recently announced that it was cutting the agency’s total staff from more than 4,000 to 2,183 employees. His administration’s cuts have already impacted a number of programs that directly intersect with the work of education providers, including through the cancellation of millions of dollars of grants at the Institute of Education Sciences, the department’s research arm.
Closing the federal agency would require an act of Congress, and it remains unclear whether lawmakers are willing to take that step. At least one Republican U.S. senator has said he will introduce a bill to eliminate the agency, but many observers believe that step faces long odds. At least one bill filed in the U.S. House of Representatives would terminate the agency.
Here’s are a few of the most salient points about what the order says — and does not say — for education companies.
1. There’s Little Clarity Offered on Federal Funding Streams
One of the biggest questions for school districts, and education companies, is how changes at the Education Department could affect major federal programs that collectively provide billions of dollars of targeted aid to schools.
Those programs include Title I, II, and III, which support students in poverty, teacher professional development, and English learners, respectively; and IDEA, which supports students with special needs.
The president’s order calls on the secretary of education to “take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education,” within what is permitted in the law, and return authority over education to the states and local communities.
But it also says the government needs to ensure “the effective and uninterrupted delivery of services, programs, and benefits on which Americans rely.”
Separately from the order, Trump said that the department’s “useful functions” would be “preserved in full and redistributed to various other agencies and departments that will take very good care of them.”
At the White House on Friday, Trump said he will seek to have another agency, the Small Business Administration — which McMahon previously led during Trump’s first term — administer student loans. And he said the Department of Health and Human Services, directed by Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., administer special needs programs, as well as child nutrition.
Those moves would appear to run afoul of the law. As Education Week has noted, only Congress has the power to move the administration of IDEA out of the Education Department, and the Higher Education Act specifies that the department manages student loans.
2. Even Without the Order, Many Business-Friendly Functions at the Agency Have Been Throttled or Ended
The administration in recent weeks has eliminated the Office of Educational Technology, which has offered resources not only to school districts but also to emerging and established K-12 companies.
Joseph South, the former director of the ed-tech office, said it sought to influence the development of more useful products in schools through outreach to vendors — and funders.
Join Us for EdWeek Market Brief’s Virtual Forum
Join our virtual forum June 10 & 11, 2025, to hear directly from school district leaders and industry peers about important trends playing out in the sector—and the support school systems need from education companies.
“We would periodically meet with venture capitalists and would talk to them about the need for evidence-based solutions and brainstorm with them,” South said in an interview with EdWeek Market Brief.
“VCs are not opposed to evidence-based solutions,” he added. “They like the idea of it. They just don’t feel like they can spend that money first [to establish the product’s evidence base] if the buyer isn’t demanding it.”
The Trump administration has also imposed layoffs at the Small Business Innovation Research program, which offers funding to emerging education companies and encourages them to integrate research into their products.
(See my colleague Michelle Caffrey’s recent story about the uncertain future of the SBIR.)
3. Legal Challenges Cloud the Picture
The legality of a number of Trump’s moves are already being challenged in court.
A federal judge this week ordered a temporary restoration of teacher-prep programs cut by the administration, as our EdWeek colleagues reported.
U.S. District Court Judge Julie Rubin warned of a “grave effect on the public,” from the cuts and said the administration’s actions were “unreasonable, not reasonably explained, based on factors Congress had not intended the Department to consider (i.e., not agency priorities), and otherwise not in accordance with law.”
The executive order could also invite legal scrutiny, if Trump attempts to make its ambitions a reality. The president of the AFT, a nationwide teachers’ union, initially offered a one-line comment in response to the order.
“See you in court.”