Linda Mcmahon grilled over Trump efforts to shrink Education Dept.

WASHINGTON — Linda McMahon, the sports entertainment mogul whom President Donald Trump has nominated to run the Education Department, told lawmakers Thursday that she envisioned a vastly diminished role for the agency in the future, and would seek to realize that vision if confirmed.

A former executive of World Wrestling Entertainment, McMahon was tapped to run a department that is in the middle of intense upheaval and whose very reasons for being have been challenged by the president. Trump has repeatedly said he would like to shrink, if not fully eliminate, the department, setting up a Senate confirmation hearing Thursday with few parallels in American history.

McMahon stopped short of embracing calls to shutter the department, which would have amounted to calling for the elimination of the job she has been nominated to take. Instead, she laid out a more roundabout plan to return to the period before the department was established in 1979, during which she said state officials and other federal agencies handled the department’s current responsibilities more effectively.

“I’m really all for the president’s mission, which is to return education to the states,” she said. “I believe, as he does, that the best education is closest to the child.”

McMahon walked lawmakers through her qualifications to oversee the health of the country’s schools in the midst of open discussions in the White House about whether to close the department. On Wednesday, Trump said he wanted to see the department shuttered “immediately,” calling it “a big con job.”

She headed off some of the most pressing questions about that rhetoric at the outset by acknowledging that slashing federal funding for schools, which is allocated by Congress, was neither practical legally nor a goal she would pursue.

But she repeatedly suggested that many of the duties the department currently handles, including disbursing funds for special education or collecting data and research on students and teaching methods, could be better handled by other agencies.

“It is my goal, if I am confirmed, to get in and assess these kinds of programs, because I’m not sure yet what the impact of all of those programs are,” she said.

McMahon spoke about the dismal results documented last month on a national exam, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which showed pervasive learning loss across the country’s public schools since the COVID-19 pandemic. Conservative think tanks and lawmakers have pointed to the results as evidence that the nation’s education system requires deep changes, and as justification for policies aimed at expanding access to private and religious schools.

She was introduced at the hearing by Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina and Sen. Katie Britt of Alabama, Republicans who each lamented what they described as a long slide in educational standards. They called for a move away from public schools and traditional college programs.

In her opening statement, McMahon picked up that theme, promoting novel ways to train the country’s future workforce.

She also ticked through the priorities Trump has already set for the agency through executive orders in recent days. One of the orders focused on school choice, a topic she will most likely highlight. The administration’s other priorities revolve around cultural issues, such as gender, race and sexuality, and combating antisemitism.

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