‘We’re going to find something else for you, Linda’: Trump’s education secretary is tasked with putting herself out of a job

Good morning! Accenture gets hit by DOGE, AI regulation should factor in risks we don't know yet, and Trump's education secretary is tasked with making herself obsolete.

- On the job market. When President Donald Trump sat down yesterday to sign an executive order calling for the dismantling of the Department of Education, he acknowledged the member of his cabinet who will be tasked with putting herself out of a job.

"Hopefully you won’t be there too long,” he said to his new Secretary of Education Linda McMahon, the New York Times reports. "We’re going to find something else for you, Linda.”

McMahon knew what she was getting into when she took the job. (The same can't be said for the 2,000 federal workers who have already lost their jobs at the agency.) During her confirmation hearing last month, she told senators that the Department of Education's "mission and authority were a special focus on [Trump's] campaign." "He pledged to make American education the best in the world, return education to the states where it belongs, and free American students from the education bureaucracy through school choice," she said. McMahon, the former WWE CEO, has been a steadfast Trump supporter and donor.

Republicans' opposition to the education department predates Trump. It was authorized under President Jimmy Carter in 1979, and Republicans opposed it from the start, the NYT reports. President Ronald Reagan called the education department a form of "nonessential government spending." Now issues ranging from book bans to trans children participating in girls' sports to COVID-era school policies to anti-Israel protests on college campuses have culminated in bringing that goal back to the mainstream of the Republican Party.

Trump says the federal government will still provide funding for special education, Pell grants for low-income students, and high-poverty schools. And yet McMahon is still directed to work to eliminate the agency—and to still comply with federal law. Specifically, the order reads: "The Secretary of Education shall, to the maximum extent appropriate and permitted by law, take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education and return authority over education to the States and local communities while ensuring the effective and uninterrupted delivery of services, programs, and benefits on which Americans rely."

It's certainly a higher-profile job than the one McMahon held in the first Trump administration as head of the Small Business Administration. And it may be an impossible one.

Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com

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