Improving Education Outcomes by Empowering Parents, States, and Communities
March 20, 2025
By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, and to enable parents, teachers, and communities to best ensure student success, it is hereby ordered:
Section 1. Purpose and Policy. Our Nation’s bright future relies on empowered families, engaged communities, and excellent educational opportunities for every child. Unfortunately, the experiment of controlling American education through Federal programs and dollars — and the unaccountable bureaucracy those programs and dollars support — has plainly failed our children, our teachers, and our families.
Taxpayers spent around $200 billion at the Federal level on schools during the COVID-19 pandemic, on top of the more than $60 billion they spend annually on Federal school funding. This money is largely distributed by one of the newest Cabinet agencies, the Department of Education, which has existed for less than one fifth of our Nation’s history. The Congress created the Department of Education in 1979 at the urging of President Jimmy Carter, who received a first-ever Presidential endorsement from the country’s largest teachers’ union shortly after pledging to the union his support for a separate Department of Education. Since then, the Department of Education has entrenched the education bureaucracy and sought to convince America that Federal control over education is beneficial. While the Department of Education does not educate anyone, it maintains a public relations office that includes over 80 staffers at a cost of more than $10 million per year.
