Her job is to end her job.
President Trump reiterated that his top objective for Department of Education secretary nominee Linda McMahon is for her to bring about the elimination of the position altogether.
“I told Linda — ‘Linda, I hope you do a great job and put yourself out of a job,’” Trump, 78, recounted to reporters Tuesday. “I want her to put herself out of a job [in the] Education Department.”
The president was asked about how he squares picking McMahon, 76, to helm the Education Department with his push to eliminate the department outright.
McMahon, who served as the administrator of the Small Business Administration during Trump’s first term, has publicly echoed his goal of abolishing the department.
Trump is rumored to be contemplating executive action to that end, but critics in the legal realm argue he would need to go through Congress in order to achieve that.
“I think I’d work with Congress,” Trump said about ending the Department of Education. “We’d have to work with the teachers union because the teachers union is the only one that’s opposed to it.”
“We have to tell the teachers union we’re rated last in the world in education of the top 40.”
It is not immediately clear which rating system Trump was referencing.
Conservatives have long sought to get rid of the Education Department, which was created in 1979 under late former President Jimmy Carter. Former President Ronald Reagan had also backed eliminating the department.
The Department of Education had $241.66 billion in budgetary resources last fiscal year, according to data from USASpending.gov.
The bulk of those budgetary resources — about $180 billion — went to the Office of Federal Student Aid, which deals with student loans.
Trump said he would prefer to return power from the department back to the states, which he argued are better suited to manage their own education systems.
“I think that if you moved our schools into some of these states that are really well-run states, they would be as good as Denmark and Norway and Sweden,” Trump said. “But you’d have the laggards, the same laggards that are laggards with everything else, including crime.”
Thus far into his second administration, Trump has championed efforts to slim down the federal government and reduce its footprint.
He has tapped tech guru Elon Musk to lead the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which despite its name is not actually a government department but rather a temporary government organization.
Via DOGE, Musk has begun taking aim at various government agencies such as the US Agency for International Development (USAID) as part of his efforts to root out bloat.
