McMahon Touts First Year in Office; Dems, Students Push Back

A year after Education Secretary Linda McMahon took office, two Democratic lawmakers, a handful of students and several laid-off staff members took to the steps of the Education Department to decry her track record of cuts and crackdowns. Their message was clear—McMahon must go.

“Trump put someone in this position that has absolutely no experience and is completely unqualified to run the Department of Education,” said Arizona representative Adelita Grijalva.

The only way the secretary can make up for her wrongs, Grijalva and her fellow speaker, California representative Mark Takano, added, is by stepping down.

“I’d like her to quit. Resign. Put someone in there that actually knows the job and understands education,” Grijalva said. “There is nothing that she can do other than walk away.”

But the Trump administration and Republicans on the Hill have shown no sign of backing down. In fact, they say things are just getting started.

Jessica Blake/Inside Higher Ed

Over the past year, McMahon has wasted no time in carrying out what she called her “final mission”—ending decades of so-called bureaucratic bloat at the Education Department and ultimately putting herself out of a job.

Within the first 10 days, she fired nearly half of the agency’s employees, setting up a lengthy legal battle that ultimately ended when the Supreme Court gave the green light for the reduction in force. Then she outsourced dozens of programs and relocated many of the staff members that remained, signing nine interagency agreements that parceled operations out to the Departments of Labor, State, Interior and Health and Human Services. She also defunded grant programs that support minority-serving institutions and redirected millions to support the administration’s priorities.

Additionally, McMahon launched a series of high-stakes battles with some of the nation’s wealthiest universities, bringing institutions like Columbia University to heel, vowing to cut off all grant funding for Harvard University and targeting dozens of others through civil rights investigations. More broadly, she also had tough words for higher ed, denouncing the sector as “broken” in a September speech that outlined her vision to improve colleges and universities.

Now, she and her chief higher ed official, Under Secretary Nicholas Kent, are working to carry out a number of monumental policy shifts, including loan caps, expansion of the Pell Grant program and a new earnings test to hold colleges accountable.

The department touted its own accomplishments as McMahon marked her one-year anniversary in the job. Among the highlights included in a fact sheet distributed at the beginning of the Democrats’ news conference were “restoring civil rights, merit and accountability to universities”; “realigning civil rights enforcement with the letter of the law”; and “halting Biden’s attempt to pass debt to every taxpayer and rooting out waste, fraud, and abuse.”

“In the first year of the Trump administration, U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon took significant steps to make college more affordable, increased transparency for students on the value of their education, and restored merit in higher education,” the fact sheet states. “These are reforms that conservatives have championed for decades—and in just one year, we’ve made them a reality.”

‘Year One Was the Tester’

Daniel Collier, an assistant professor of higher education at the University of Memphis, is a longtime fan of the WWE, which McMahon helped to turn into a global enterprise, and has followed her since she served in the first Trump administration. He said her background in wrestling and business was clearly reflected during her first year in office.

“She was a very ruthless executive in WWE with her husband … and they basically ruled the wrestling world with an iron fist for a long time,” he said. “She is applying those lessons there in, saying that ‘I’m going to do what I’m going to do and you can all deal with it.’”

He expects plans to break up ED as well as work on other key priorities across the federal government will further accelerate as the administration prepares for the midterm elections, when Republicans could lose control of Congress.

“Year one was the tester in seeing what they could get away with and how long they could get away with it and who cares about what issues,” he said. “Whatever you saw in year one will be limited in comparison to what we see in year two, because they need to get it done before the House flips. And I have no idea what that looks like.”

Republicans, including Rep. Tim Walberg of Michigan, who chairs the House education committee, praised McMahon for her work, saying she’s delivered real results.

“She’s helping rightsize the Department of Education, give parents a stronger voice, and hold colleges accountable,” he said in a statement to Inside Higher Ed. “I’m proud to work alongside her to cut red tape in Washington and make sure our education system works for students, parents, and teachers—not the bureaucracy.”

Neal McCluskey, director of the Center for Educational Freedom at the libertarian Cato Institute, said when it comes to dismantling ED and working to transform colleges, McMahon “is doing what her boss wants her to do.”

“Secretary McMahon has done about as good a job as I could hope in the things that I would like her to do,” he said. “I think she’s worked hard to try and get them done to the maximum extent allowed by law.”

McCluskey supports her efforts to shrink the federal role in education, though the use of interagency agreements to outsource various programs and responsibilities isn’t moving as quickly as he thought. He expects to see more in the coming year. (He’s less supportive of the administration’s efforts to change what colleges can teach and whom they can hire.)

He attributes the pace to McMahon’s business background, “where you can’t just snap your fingers and everything falls into place. You have to have plans and processes and thoughtfulness, and so to the extent that things are moving in a more deliberative manner, I think that might reflect her management.”

He added that McMahon also avoided any major controversies or gaffes—other than when she referred to artificial intelligence as “A1,” like the sauce.

“Whenever I’ve seen her, she gives the impression that this is somebody who is calm, in charge of her operation and not trying to draw a whole lot of attention to herself,” he said.

Jessica Blake/Inside Higher Ed

But students in attendance at Wednesday’s news conference were not so supportive. To them, McMahon represents a threat to their academic aspirations.

Markie Mathis, a sociology major and member of the John Fylpaa Leadership Institute at Long Beach City College, said it’s “crazy” to even think about dismantling the department—let alone actually doing so. And as long as support and funding for higher ed is on the line, many students’ ability to complete a degree will hang in the balance, she added.

“It’s scary,” Mathis said. “If funding gets cut, I probably won’t be able to continue.”

Olivia McCary, a political science major at the same college, said McMahon’s characterization of higher education as nothing more than a career pipeline and the department as unnecessary are disconnected from the needs of students on the ground. To McCary, college is a chance to engage as a citizen and the department is a critical means of civil rights enforcement.

“I’m an African American who is trying to work in legislation one day,” she said. “But a lot of states don’t support people of color or DEI programs. People at the department were the people who backed us up. Now they’re going away.”