Secretary Of Education: 13th Pick Trump Wants Gone

The Department of Education has the smallest staff of any cabinet agency. Smallest. And yet it still controls the third-largest discretionary budget in the entire federal government. I read that stat twice before it registered — a tiny office, an enormous checkbook. Once it clicked, a lot of the fighting over this job made more sense to me.

I write about education policy for work, and even I had gaps here. Most news coverage of the secretary of education just assumes you already know what the job does. You probably don’t, not fully — I didn’t either until I actually traced through who’s held it, what it legally controls, and what’s being done to it right now. So that’s what this is.

Who’s Actually In The Job

Linda McMahon. She’s the current secretary of education, the 13th person to hold it, sworn in March 3, 2025, after a Senate vote that landed 51–45. Not exactly a landslide.

Her background is not what you’d guess for this role — former WWE executive, ran the Small Business Administration under Trump’s first term. When her nomination came out, a lot of people (myself briefly included) assumed it was a strange fit. Turns out that’s kind of the point.

Trump nominated her with a mandate that sounds like a contradiction if you say it out loud: run the department while dismantling it. Not subtle about that either. He’d campaigned on closing the whole agency, and McMahon isn’t pretending otherwise once she got the job.

Quick gap in the timeline worth mentioning — between Biden’s team leaving and McMahon getting confirmed, Denise Carter held the acting secretary of education title for about six weeks. Normal transition stuff. The chair doesn’t sit empty.

What The Job Actually Controls

People get this wrong constantly, and honestly I used to get it wrong too. The secretary of education does not run American schools. No national curriculum comes out of that office. No hiring authority over teachers in Ohio or wherever. None of that.

What the job actually touches: federal education funding, civil rights enforcement inside schools, student loans and financial aid, and a huge amount of national education data collection. It’s also supposed to function as the president’s top adviser on education, which is a softer job than the title implies.

Student aid is probably the biggest lever this office has. Pell Grants. Federal loans. FAFSA. If you’ve ever filled out that form, you touched a system this office runs — even though you never once thought about who was signing off on it.

Civil rights enforcement matters more than people give it credit for. The department’s Office for Civil Rights investigates discrimination complaints — disability access, sex discrimination, race discrimination — in any school taking federal money. And that enforcement posture shifts hard depending on who’s sitting in the secretary of education chair and what they’ve decided to prioritize.

How You Even Get This Job

Standard cabinet path, nothing exotic. President nominates someone. The Senate’s HELP committee — Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions — holds hearings, votes on whether to move it forward. Clears committee, goes to the full Senate. Simple majority confirms.

McMahon went through exactly that. Cleared committee, then the floor vote came in at 51–45, tighter than a lot of cabinet confirmations get. Tells you something about how politically loaded this particular seat has become, separate from anything specific to her.

One thing worth knowing: like every cabinet secretary, this person serves at the pleasure of the president. The president can fire them whenever, no Senate involved. Getting in requires Senate consent. Getting out doesn’t.

A Short History, Fast

The department itself is younger than people assume — created in 1980, carved out of what used to be Health, Education, and Welfare. Before that there wasn’t a standalone secretary of education at all. Education sat under one giant umbrella with health and welfare policy.

Duncan’s run is one of the longest on record. DeVos’s ended abruptly — she resigned right after the January 6, 2021 Capitol riot, which briefly pushed Deputy Secretary Mick Zais into the acting secretary of education role for the last stretch of Trump’s first term. For the full list going back to 1980, with vote counts and dates, Ballotpedia keeps a running page on the department that’s worth bookmarking.

Why This One’s Different

Most people treat McMahon’s tenure like any other leadership change. It’s not that. The goal here isn’t new priorities inside the same department. It’s taking the department apart.

Since she took office, there’s been a steady stream of interagency agreements moving administration of K-12 and higher-ed programs to other agencies entirely. Late 2025: six agreements shifted programs to the State Department. By February 2026: more agreements pushed additional pieces to Health and Human Services, plus even more to State.

Let me be precise here because it’s easy to overstate. Fully closing the department needs an act of Congress. A secretary of education can’t just wave a hand and dissolve a cabinet agency. What’s actually happening is slower — programs getting reassigned piece by piece to other departments — which gets you close to the same end result without needing the full congressional vote to kill the agency outright.

McMahon frames all this as progress, not retreat. In a statement after the February 2026 State of the Union, she talked about “restoring accountability in education” and “empowering parents” — reform language, basically, even though what it looks like from inside the department is closer to being slowly dismantled. Her full statement is up on ed.gov if you want it unfiltered.

What The Job Pays

Executive Schedule Level I — same pay tier as every other cabinet secretary, Defense, State, all of them. Roughly $250,000 a year as of recent years, though that number drifts slightly with federal pay adjustments, so take it as accurate at time of writing rather than fixed.

In the formal cabinet order of precedence, the secretary of education sits pretty far down — 16th in line, wedged between Energy ahead of it and Veterans Affairs behind. That ranking is mostly about when the department was created, not really a reflection of how big the portfolio is.

Who Actually Controls Your Schools

This is the misconception I run into more than any other, so it gets its own section. Public education in this country is a state and local function, full stop. States set standards. Local boards hire teachers, set the school calendar, run the buildings. None of that flows through DC.

So what’s left for the secretary of education to actually control? Money, mostly. And the conditions attached to that money. Federal funding comes with strings — take certain federal dollars, comply with certain federal rules, whether that’s civil rights protections or reporting requirements. The office has power because it controls access to a funding pipeline, not because it can issue direct orders to a school.

Which is exactly why the current shuffling of programs to other agencies is such a big deal structurally, even if it sounds boring on paper. Move federal education funding through Health and Human Services or the State Department instead of Education, and the actual leverage tied to the secretary of education title shrinks, even while the dollar totals stay basically the same. Money doesn’t vanish. Who’s stamping it does.

Things People Get Wrong About This Role

A few assumptions come up over and over, so let’s knock them out.

People think the secretary sets national curriculum. Nope — that’s state and local, and federal law actually restricts the department from dictating curriculum in most cases anyway.

People think this office controls teacher pay or hiring. It doesn’t. That’s local school districts and state agencies, funded mostly by state and local tax dollars.

People assume killing the department would instantly end Pell Grants or federal loans. It wouldn’t — not automatically. Those programs exist under separate federal statutes and would just get reassigned to whoever administers them next, which, again, is basically what’s already underway.

And some people write the job off as purely ceremonial, no real power. That’s underselling it. Billions in discretionary funding, civil rights enforcement, financial aid administration — that’s real leverage, classroom authority or not.

FAQs

Who is the current secretary of education?
Linda McMahon, confirmed by the Senate on March 3, 2025, the 13th person to hold the role under Trump’s second term.

Does the secretary of education decide what schools teach?
No. Curriculum is a state and local decision. The office’s real authority is over funding, civil rights enforcement, and student aid, not classroom content.

How does someone become secretary of education?
Presidential nomination, then Senate HELP committee hearings, then a full Senate vote requiring a simple majority.

Can the president shut down the Department of Education alone?
Not entirely — full closure needs Congress. But a secretary of education can shift most of the department’s actual functions to other agencies through interagency agreements, which is what’s happening now.

What does the secretary of education get paid?
Executive Schedule Level I, the same as other cabinet secretaries — around $250,000 a year at time of writing, subject to periodic adjustment.

Final Thoughts

What stuck with me, writing all this out, is the gap between what people think this job is and what it’s actually built to do. It’s not a national school principal. It’s closer to a gatekeeper for federal money with civil rights enforcement bolted onto the side, ranked pretty low in the formal cabinet pecking order despite the size of the budget running through it.

That gap matters more right now than it has in a long time, because the current secretary of education isn’t just running the place day to day — she’s actively taking it apart, agency by agency, agreement by agreement, rather than shutting it down in one move. Whether that reads as states finally getting their power back or as federal oversight quietly disappearing probably comes down to your politics more than anything I can settle here, and I’m not going to pretend there’s some neutral middle ground everyone should land on. Both sides are looking at the exact same interagency agreements and walking away with opposite conclusions.

Here’s what I’d actually say, plainly: this office is worth understanding on its own terms, not through whatever headline scrolled past you last week. The secretary of education isn’t running your kid’s school. But the office shapes financial aid, civil rights protection, and — increasingly — which federal agency even administers those programs going forward. That’s not nothing, however it gets dressed up in a press release.

If you want to actually track where this goes, watch the interagency agreements, not the speeches. That’s where the real structural change is happening, quietly, one agency at a time, while the public fight over the department plays out somewhere else entirely.