President Donald Trump has tasked Education Secretary Linda McMahon with dismantling the Department of Education. Following a cabinet meeting on Thursday, Scripps News spoke with McMahon and asked about what’s been done to achieve that goal so far.
McMahon reiterated that there is still no set timeline for the process, and noted as she has before that any such shutdown of the department will need buy-in from Congress.
McMahon said she has been “working with governors, across the country, working with superintendents of schools, to just talk about what’s best practices to help, help them with tools that they will need to do that. At the same time looking at where the actual work of the Department of Education will be best handled.”
“It’s all moving in a very good direction,” McMahon said of the process.
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The potential for changes at the Education Department have raised concerns that programs that provide for special needs education could lose their effectiveness. McMahon sought to allay those concerns.
“The president has said from day one that dismantling the Department of Education will not mean defunding those programs,” she said. “That money is appropriated by Congress. It will continue to be appropriated by Congress and the budget that we are looking at for both Title I IDEA funding is certainly not being decreased and so parents, teachers and kids should not be worried about that.”
Watch more of the interview with McMahon in the video above.