Trump Tells Musk He Plans to Close the Department of Education

Trump vowed to shut down the Department of Education Monday night, telling billionaire CEO Elon Musk during a livestream conversation on X that moving education back to the states will be one of his first acts as president.

The former president shared his plan after praising Argentine President Javier Milei, who has set his country back on a path to prosperity after slashing government spending.

“What I’m gonna do, one of the first acts, I want to close up the Department of Education and move education back to the states,” Trump said.

Trump acknowledged potential drawbacks to his plan, predicting that poorly run Democrat states like California would, at least initially, struggle.

“If you moved education back to the 50 [states], you’ll have some that won’t do well. But they’ll actually be forced to do better, because it’ll be a pretty bad situation,” he said.

“You look at Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, he’s terrible—he does a terrible job. So he’s not going to do great with education, Trump said.  “But out of the 50 states, I would bet that 35 would do great, and 20 of them would be as good as Norway.”

The Harris campaign seized on these comments, posting on X that Trump said “I want to close the Department of Education.”

In a subsequent post, Harris HQ inaccurately wrote: “This is a key goal of Trump’s Project 2025,” although Project 2025 is a Heritage Foundation plan that Trump has disavowed.

Eliminating the Department of Education is a long-held Republican goal, and one that was shared by several other 2024 GOP candidates during the primary.

In a campaign video promoting his Agenda 47 last September, Trump first announced that he would have state governments “run the education of our children.”

“We’re going to end education coming out of Washington, DC. We’re going to close it up – all those buildings all over the place and people that in many cases hate our children. We’re going to send it all back to the states,” Trump said.

Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) has repeatedly attempted to pass a bill to eliminate the Department of Education, but has struggled due to lack of support among too many Republican lawmakers.

“There is no Constitutional authority for this federal bureaucracy to exist,” Massie said in a statement last year.

Monday night on X, the congressman wrote “the creation of the US Department of Education was a failed re-election ploy of Jimmy Carter, but now we are stuck with what amounts to a national school board composed of 4,000 bureaucrats.”

During his conversation with Musk, which had to be slightly delayed due to a massive DDoS attack, Trump also opened up about assassination attempt he survived in Butler, Pennsylvania.

During a campaign rally on July 13, a bullet passed within millimeters of Trumps head, grazing his ear. Two rallygoers were hurt, and Corey Comperatore, a former fire chief, was tragically killed by stray bullets while shielding his wife and daughter.

“It was a hard hit. It was very, I guess you would say, surreal, but it wasn’t surreal. You know, I was telling somebody, you have instances like this … where you feel it’s a surreal situation. And I never felt that way. I knew immediately that it was a bullet,” Trump said.

The former president also told Musk that the incident has drawn him closer to God.

“That was a miracle. For those people that don’t believe in God, I think we all have to start thinking about that—I’m a believer. Now I’m more of a believer.”