When Donald Trump announced his choice of former World Wrestling Entertainment executive Linda McMahon to lead the Department of Education, his statement shouted that with her at the helm, “We will send Education BACK TO THE STATES.” The sentence was a reference to Trump’s previous pledge to shut down the department entirely — a promise Republicans have been making since it was created in 1979.
But axing the entire department was always unlikely — not just because it would require congressional action, but because what Trump actually wants is more federal control over education, not less.
The real focus in the new Trump administration will be higher education.
Like everything else in Trump’s vision for government, he wants the department McMahon would lead to be more corrupt, more ideologically right wing and less capable of doing the job it is supposed to do. In the past, McMahon has promoted private school vouchers that drain money from public schools, and she will surely do so again. But the real focus in the new Trump administration will be higher education. The war on universities is about to begin.
This war has both practical and political purposes for the GOP. For decades, demonizing higher education has been a favorite tactic for Republicans. They believe universities stand in fundamental opposition to the right’s project, and in many ways they’re correct: Most professors are liberal, and critical inquiry often undermines conservative ideas and values.
During the campaign, Trump released a video laying out his plan to “reclaim our once-great educational institutions from the radical left.” He promised to use the “secret weapon” of accreditation, punishing schools that don’t follow his instructions by stripping them of the certification without which they might not survive. “I will fire the radical left accreditors that have allowed our colleges to become dominated by Marxist maniacs and lunatics,” he said, and replace them with Trump-approved accreditors who will bring a more MAGA-friendly approach to higher education.
Trump also said he would have the Justice Department target “schools that continue to engage in racial discrimination,” by which he clearly meant efforts to promote diversity; his allies are planning to invert the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division so it focuses on alleged anti-white racism. If universities do not meet Trump’s standard, they “will not only have their endowment taxed, but through budget reconciliation, I will advance a measure to have them fined up to the entire amount of their endowment.”
Seizing the endowments of universities would almost certainly be illegal, but Trump is spoiling for a fight, and his “secret weapon” is a powerful threat. Accreditation is vital to every university; without it, their students can’t get federal loans and they can’t receive federal research funding (more than half of university research funds come from the federal government).
This assault is already going on at the state level, where Republicans have passed laws outlawing diversity programs, weakening tenure protections and gagging professors from discussing certain ideas. No politician has waged war on his state’s higher education system with more venom than Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. A 2023 report from the American Association of University Professors called DeSantis’ efforts “a politically and ideologically driven assault unparalleled in US history, which, if sustained, threatens the very survival of meaningful higher education in the state.”
In Vice President-elect JD Vance, Trump has an enthusiastic partner for this fight.
Trump is essentially promising to mount the same kind of attack from Washington. And there’s more. Project 2025 proposed to “deny loan access to students at schools that provide in-state tuition to illegal aliens.” (Trump, of course, disavowed Project 2025, but since the election, those around him have embraced it.) That would mean any student attending a state school in one of the 25 states (plus Washington, D.C.) that allow undocumented students to pay in-state tuition would have their loans cut off.








