Protestors gather during a demonstration at the headquarters of the Department of Education on March 14, in Washington. Mark Schiefelbein/Associated Press

Since his 2024 presidential campaign, President Donald Trump has been promising to abolish the Education Department, and on Thursday he is set to sign an executive order that will shrink, but not close the agency.

Closing the department — an off-and-on Republican goal since it was created in 1979 — would require congressional approval, and it’s highly unlikely Trump would have sufficient support. Nonetheless, Trump’s order will direct Education Secretary Linda McMahon to “take all necessary steps” to facilitate the dismantling of the department, according to the White House.

Trump and other Republicans argue the department has failed in its mission to improve student performance and is a tool of a “woke” culture war.

The order also will direct McMahon to “return education authority” to the states, a White House fact sheet said, though education has long been the responsibility of state and local governments, which provide about 90 percent of the funding and set most of the rules.

Here’s what to know.

What does the department do?

While states and local school boards set curriculum, and graduation requirements and pay the lion’s share of K-12 education, the federal agency plays an important role in higher education finance and in supplementing funding for many school districts.

For K-12 education, the agency administers federal grant programs, including the $18.4 billion Title I program that provides supplemental funding to high-poverty K-12 schools, as well as the $15.2 billion program that helps cover the cost of education for students with disabilities. Those programs come with rules, and conservatives have talked about alternatives that would give states more freedom to spend it as they choose.

The department also oversees the $1.6 trillion federal student loan program and sets rules for what colleges must do to participate, and it runs the Pell Grant program.

It also runs achievement tests dubbed the Nation’s Report Card and collects statistics on enrollment, crime in school, staffing and other topics.

The agency is charged with enforcing civil rights laws that bar discrimination in federally funded schools on the basis of race, sex and other factors. The Biden administration used that power, for instance, to prohibit schools from discriminating against students on the basis of gender identity. Trump is now using it in the opposite direction, threatening to cut federal funding from schools that allow trans girls and women to compete on women’s sports teams.

During the Bush and Obama administrations, the agency had a stronger role in K-12 schools, administering the No Child Left Behind statute, which required annual tests and various interventions for schools that failed to reach certain benchmarks. Schools that didn’t comply with the system risked losing federal funding. But most of those rules were rolled back at the end of the Obama administration.

The Education Department has the smallest staff of any federal department. At the start of the administration, there were just over 4,100 people, but layoffs and other efforts have cut the numbers nearly in half. Its discretionary annual budget is about $79 billion.

Why has Trump advocated for closing the department?

Trump and other Republicans argue that over its 45-year history, the agency has spent trillions of dollars over decades but failed to increase student test scores, which have largely stagnated. The White House fact sheet is replete with examples of substandard academic performance.

They also argue that eliminating the department would help reduce the size and cost of the federal government. They say that the agency burdens state and local schools with unnecessary paperwork and that Democrats have used the department to impose a liberal agenda on schools.

Can Trump eliminate the agency?

Trump cannot eliminate the agency on his own. Doing so would require congressional approval, including a supermajority of 60 votes in the Senate, where Republicans have only 53 seats. Education Secretary Linda McMahon acknowledged during her Senate confirmation hearing that the administration cannot eliminate the agency on its own.

But McMahon suggested she might try to dismantle the department by moving some functions to other federal agencies, an idea other Republicans have floated as well. McMahon suggested that oversight of the programs for students with disabilities could be moved to the Department of Health and Human Services and that civil rights enforcement could move to the Justice Department. Others have said that the Treasury Department could run the student loan program.

But even those moves would require congressional action, experts said. The 1979 law that established the department specifies that the agency “shall” include many of its major responsibilities, including an Office for Civil Rights and an Office of Elementary and Secondary Education. A separate statute, the Higher Education Act, specifies that the federal student aid office be housed in the Education Department.

What’s unclear is whether the Trump administration will ignore those statutes and try to move offices anyway. Such moves would almost certainly be met with lawsuits.

Can Trump shrink the department?

Since the opening weeks of the Trump administration, the Education Department has worked to shrink itself. It has eliminated nearly half its workforce, mostly through layoffs, and canceled contracts and grants.

Some grants were canceled, officials say, because they supported diversity, equity and inclusion. But others, they said, are not statutorily mandated and are therefore expendable.

Some of the biggest cuts happened at the Institute for Education Sciences, which conducts education research and administers federal student tests. The vast majority of its workers have been laid off, and many question how the office will carry out its core functions, including the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP tests, known as the Nation’s Report Card, which for decades has measured math and reading achievement.

There were also steep cuts to the staff in the Office for Civil Rights, the Office of the General Counsel and the Federal Student Aid program.

If the department closes, would its programs disappear?

Many Americans fear that closing the department would mean federal money and programs that support schools would disappear. The administration has already cut some contracts for programs supported by discretionary funding. The department could remain open and still see more cuts.

McMahon has said the major programs that support K-12 districts — Title I (for high-poverty schools) and IDEA (for students with disabilities) — would not be cut. On Wednesday, a senior administration official said Title I, IDEA and the student loan program “will NOT be touched.”

Still, closing the Education Department would surely have a symbolic impact. There would no longer be a member of the Cabinet focused solely on education issues and empowered to speak to Americans about the challenges schools face. It would be harder for the federal government to elevate education issues or press for change in schools.

What is the agency’s history?

The Education Department was created by an act of Congress in 1979, under President Jimmy Carter.

A much smaller Education Department briefly existed more than 100 years earlier. In 1867, President Andrew Johnson signed legislation creating the first such department — but it was soon downgraded to an office of education because of backlash from lawmakers who feared it would lead to federal overreach.

The federal government’s role in education grew after World War II when it increased spending, including through the GI Bill, which provided millions of military veterans with educational benefits such as free college tuition. Passage of civil rights legislation gave the federal government new powers to ensure that schools did not discriminate against students on the basis of race or sex.

Education was part of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare until 1980 when that agency was divided into two: the Education Department and the Department of Health and Human Services. The new education agency began operations in May 1980 and was tasked by Congress with “ensuring access to equal educational opportunity for every individual,” supporting states’ education efforts and funding education research.

Annabelle Timsit contributed to this report.