Why does Trump want to abolish the Education Department? An anthropologist who studies MAGA explains 4 reasons

Why does Trump want to abolish the Education Department? An anthropologist who studies MAGA explains 4 reasons

Published: February 7, 2025 8:20am EST
Author Alex Hinton Distinguished Professor of Anthropology; Director, Center for the Study of Genocide and Human Rights, Rutgers University – Newark
Alex Hinton receives funding from the Rutgers-Newark Sheila Y. Oliver Center for Politics and Race in America, Rutgers Research Council, and Henry Frank Guggenheim Foundation. Partners
Rutgers University – Newark;Rutgers University – Newark provides funding as a founding partner of The Conversation US.

“And one other thing I’ll be doing very early in the administration is closing up the Department of Education.
”President Donald Trump made this promise in a Sept. 13, 2023, campaign statement. Since then, he has frequently repeated his pledge to close the U.S. Department of Education.
Project 2025, the conservative think tank Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for the Trump administration, also provides detailed recommendations for closing the Education Department, which was created by an act of Congress in 1979.
On Feb. 4, 2025, Trump described his plans for Linda McMahon, his nominee for education secretary. “I want Linda to put herself out of a job,” Trump said, according to The Associated Press.

I am an anthropologist and have been studying U.S. political culture for years. During Trump’s first presidency, I wrote a book about the extremist far-right called “It Can Happen Here”. Since then, I have continued to study the Make America Great Again, or MAGA, movement, seeking to understand it, as the anthropological expression goes, “from the native’s point of view.” Education policies in the U.S. are largely carried out at the state and local levels. The Education Department is a relatively small government agency, with just over 4,000 employees and a US$268 billion annual budget. A large part of its work is overseeing $1.6 trillion in federal student loans as well as grants for K-12 schools.

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