President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration next week will mean sweeping changes in the way the federal government handles issues from foreign policy to education — and Education Secretary Miguel Cardona is already rebutting what he’s expecting to see from his successor.
In an interview with NBC News this week, Cardona, who served in President Joe Biden’s Cabinet for four years, said he is both proud of his efforts to protect the changes implemented under his watch and concerned about how the second Trump administration will handle education issues, including Trump’s stated goal of eliminating the Department of Education altogether.
Cardona said eliminating the department would widen disparities between students and disproportionately hurt the most vulnerable populations.
“The federal Department of Education at its core is a civil rights agency that ensures that students in protected classes, in particular, get their rights, and that students are getting the support that a public education should provide,” Cardona said. “It would create a wider gap between the haves and have nots.”
Trump has repeatedly accused Democrats of politicizing schools and has promised to cut funding to some schools. He has said, “On day one, I will sign a new executive order to cut federal funding for any school pushing critical race theory, transgender insanity and other inappropriate racial, sexual or political content on our children.”
Cardona said Trump’s plans would “deteriorate the fabric of our country.”
Brian Hughes, a spokesman for the Trump transition team, pushed back on Cardona’s assertion and said the “best movements” that have made the “most positive impact” on the nation’s education systems are happening at the local and state levels.
“Only a liberal bureaucratic mindset would imagine that government would be the solution for our education system,” Hughes said. “So I think with the president and with Linda McMahon, when she’s confirmed, what you’ll see is a department that recognizes the need to put more power and economic freedom into the core mission of educating our kids at the local and state level. And if you do that, if you really bring a reform mind and choice back to local communities, it will have the exact opposite of disparity. It will actually bring more equity and equal opportunity of education to communities, particularly underserved communities.”
The matter of the department’s existence is not the only looming education fight. When asked how he has sought to protect some of the Biden administration’s work at the department beyond his impending departure, Cardona said he was proud of streamlining the public service loan forgiveness program.
“We went from 7,000 people in the first Trump administration that got debt relief — these are teachers and nurses and firefighters, police officers — now we have over a million,” Cardona said. “So the way we changed that should continue to grow — unless, you know, the next administration seeks to destroy that relief that was passed in bipartisan fashion.”
But some critics of Cardona are eyeing the separate student loans deferment programs passed under Biden as places ripe for immediate change under Trump.
Frederick Hess, director of education policy at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, said he welcomes the change in administration and wants to see “student loans back to the deal it’s supposed to be between borrowers and taxpayers.”
He also said he wanted to see changes to Free Application for Federal Student Aid, the form known as FAFSA, after the department endured a botched redesign of the process, disrupting decision timelines for current and prospective college students and schools across the country.
Hess also criticized Cardona’s leadership and said he “politicized the department in small and unnecessary ways.” It’s a charge Cardona denies but one that Republicans have effectively made against Democrats at the ballot box.
“It’s like a corporate turnaround. You got to, like, fix all the bad stuff before you get to do what you want to do,” Hess said, adding that while he doesn’t think there will be the support to eliminate the Department of Education, he would be fine with it going away.
“The federal government can do education, higher ed, K-12, whether or not there’s a department,” Hess said. “Whether or not there’s a website that says you’re now visiting the U.S. Department of Education is not what really matters when it comes to what Washington is doing, as far as schools or colleges. What really matters is what kinds of rules we’re writing, what kinds of programs exist, how much money is being spent. The ‘abolish the department’ debate is less helpful when people kind of focus on it, rather than those more specific, more important pieces.”
Trump has nominated Linda McMahon, a former World Wrestling Entertainment executive who served in the first Trump administration as head of the Small Business Administration, as his pick to lead the Education Department.
“I don’t know that McMahon is well equipped to do it. I don’t know her. We’ll see, in part, through her confirmation process,” Hess said. “But her background in business and the small business administration certainly suggests to me that she might have the right skills.”
Hess added that he hopes to see legislative changes by Congress that will do things like bolster school choice initiatives, as well as executive orders by Trump on issues like combating antisemitism and discrimination on college campuses. Still, he acknowledged that some of Cardona’s biggest actions can’t be undone, including the funding he has given out for state initiatives as well as millions of dollars in student loan forgiveness.
Meanwhile, Derrell Bradford, president of 50CAN, a nonprofit that supports school choice policies like charter schools and vouchers, said he hopes to see the Department of Education under Trump do things like making it easier for people to access federal funds to start charter schools and supporting career and technical education programs along with college and career apprenticeships initiatives. He added that he hopes the country can come together despite the partisanship that has been infused in education debates.
“Education is political and so at some level is partisan. But a family’s love for their kids, and their desire to have them be the best version of themselves is apolitical,” Bradford said. “I would also like to see the department spend more time highlighting the things that states are doing together, regardless of who’s in charge of them, as a way to show that that kind of collaboration is still possible.”
