When Linda McMahon was sworn in as U.S. Secretary of Education, it wasn’t with the quiet resolve of a public servant—it was with the swagger of a political appointee armed for demolition. Her background was not in teaching, school administration, or public education policy, but in running a scripted entertainment empire. Yet that lack of experience was never a liability to those who appointed her. It was the point.
Her role was never about improving the Department of Education. It was about ending it.
From day one, McMahon’s actions revealed a strategic campaign of erosion. More than 1,900 federal education staff have been laid off. DEI initiatives have been systematically purged. Programs have been stripped, grants slashed, and federal oversight intentionally blunted. Executive orders have been signed directing her to prepare the department for closure. McMahon calls it efficiency. Her critics call it sabotage.
What’s happening is not negligence—it’s intent.
Public education, at its best, has served as a national compact: a promise that zip code, income, race, or disability would not determine a child’s access to opportunity. That fragile promise has always been uneven, always contested—but it remained a shared goal. McMahon’s tenure has weaponized that unevenness. Her rhetoric of “school choice” and “parental rights” serves a narrower function: to privatize, to decentralize, and to abandon responsibility.
Voucher programs, long favored by conservative policy groups, are being aggressively expanded. But data shows they disproportionately benefit higher-income families and often worsen academic outcomes for students most in need. In McMahon’s framework, parents who lack access to private schools or live in underfunded districts are simply collateral damage.
The elimination of DEI initiatives is more than symbolic. It’s ideological. It is a coordinated erasure of tools once aimed at addressing systemic inequality. Civil rights protections for marginalized students—already inconsistently enforced—are being hollowed out in the name of political purity.
There’s a cruelty in the silence that follows these cuts. Unanswered emails from families seeking accommodations. Unreviewed complaints from students of color. Unfunded literacy programs in rural counties. The ghost of a functioning department still lingers, but the muscle has been severed.
What’s left is a shell.
And behind that shell stands someone who once sold conflict as entertainment—now selling austerity as reform. Her longtime loyalty to Donald Trump has never been subtle. Her appointments, both at the SBA and now in education, were rewards not for expertise but for obedience. In this administration, governing isn’t about public service. It’s about executing the ideological will of a shrinking base.
Linda McMahon is not an educational leader. She’s a liquidation agent.
The consequences will outlast her term. When the federal government steps back, it doesn’t create freedom—it creates gaps. And those gaps are filled not by innovation, but by inequality. The states most eager to dismantle protections will move the fastest. The students who depended on those protections will fall the furthest.
And the rest of us will watch the lights go out in slow motion.
