Linda McMahon.  Courtesy of Education Week.

Dear Commons Community,

As expected, Linda McMahon yesterday secured the votes in the U.S. Senate needed to serve as secretary of education, allowing her to take the helm of an agency President Donald Trump is already trying to significantly downsize and hopes to abolish.

The Senate approved McMahon to lead the U.S. Department of Education in a 51-45 party-line vote.

Though the Trump administration’s early moves to shrink the department and force schools to drop diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts have sparked strident objections from Democrats, McMahon passed with relative ease compared to her predecessor in Trump’s first term, Betsy DeVos, who made history by needing a tie-breaking vote from then-Vice President Mike Pence.

The vote was a far cry from McMahon’s 81-19 confirmation vote in 2017 to serve as head of the Small Business Administration in Trump’s first administration, when most Democrats backed her.

Republicans have championed McMahon as the person needed to fundamentally change a department they feel is bloated with bureaucracy and imposes conditions on schools they find unfavorable. Though the federal government has no say over what schools do and don’t teach, the Trump administration has skirted around the edges of that limitation early into his second term, threatening to pull federal dollars from schools that disobey executive orders seeking to eliminate DEI programming and roll back rights for transgender students.

GOP lawmakers said McMahon’s background in business as the co-founder of World Wrestling Entertainment and her time in Trump’s first administration as head of the U.S. Small Business Association will help her overhaul the department—despite her lack of a lengthy education background.

“Ms. McMahon demonstrated a strong vision for the Department of Education,” Sen. Bill Cassidy, a Republican from Louisiana who chairs the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committee, said during a Feb. 20 committee meeting. “She committed to empowering parents and returning powers to states and local communities, which, by the way, are best equipped to address students’ needs.”

Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, said the role of education secretary is not that of a superintendent.

“The job description of a secretary of education is to manage a bureaucracy that runs a number of funding programs,” he said. “By all accounts, Linda McMahon did a great job running the Small Business Administration in the last Trump administration. I have no reason to believe that she cannot run the Department of Education.”

Democrats, meanwhile, have raised concerns that abolishing the department would hurt the most vulnerable students, as the agency annually funnels billions of dollars earmarked for low-income students and students with disabilities to the schools that serve them. The nation’s largest teachers’ union pressed the Senate to reject McMahon.

We will see how McMahon does!  Abolishing the DOE will be difficult.  Dismantling and defunding programs is another issue!

Tony

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