McMahon Meeting With Senate Committee Canceled

A roundtable discussion between Education Secretary Linda McMahon and the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions was canceled just hours before it was set to take place Wednesday afternoon. Expected topics of discussion included efforts to dismantle the Education Department and the interagency agreements being used to do so.   

The Education Department is required to meet with HELP biweekly to discuss the implementation of such interagency agreements, according to report language attached to the fiscal 2026 federal budget, which President Trump signed in February. This would have been the first such meeting.

It was supposed to be a closed-door event, but Sen. Tim Kaine, a Virginia Democrat, planned to live-stream the meeting via Zoom to news organizations, “because the public has a right to know about the many ways in which the Trump-Vance administration is hurting our nation’s schools and students by dismantling ED and pushing its critical programs—such as student loans and career and technical education—to other agencies,” he said. 

The final call to cancel the meeting came from the White House, Kaine said, and was an unjustified attempt to avoid transparency. But Republicans and McMahon said the parties had agreed that the meeting would be private and inviting the press to join was a violation of good faith. 

“Democrats will not dictate the terms of today’s meeting and have lost the chance to speak to the Secretary today,” Sen. Bill Cassidy, a Louisiana Republican and chair of the HELP committee, said in a statement.

McMahon added on social media that she’s “always open to transparency,” citing her testimony before a Senate appropriations subcommittee Tuesday as an example. 

“It’s disappointing that instead of a productive conversation about the state of our nation’s students and the steps we’re taking at the Department of Education to reverse this trend and break up the bureaucracy, this became about producing another media clip for MSNBC,” McMahon wrote.

Kaine said on a press call Wednesday afternoon that discussing McMahon’s efforts to dismantle her agency behind closed doors is “not sufficient for me.”

“We need to just keep pressing to actually get the administration to be willing to discuss this in public,” he said. “If they were proud of what they were doing, if they felt that what they were doing was in the interest of American students or American families or American teachers, they wouldn’t mind coming and sharing it.”