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Edited by Amelia Cantwell and Madelyn Bello

Long before Linda McMahon became the most powerful figure in American education, she was creating another empire where destruction was at the center of the show. McMahon made a name for herself in professional wrestling—an industry built on spectacle and the illusion of pure chaos, where the boundaries of the scripted show appear to collapse. Inside the Cabinet, the former WWE CEO is presiding over something much more consequential and momentous: the systematic weakening of the federal agency she was appointed to aid and lead. Rather than abolishing the department outright, McMahon's approach erodes its core capabilities from within—hollowing out its resources and leaving a fragile shell of an institution that is functionally paralyzed despite technically still standing. McMahon’s destruction is not artificial nor scripted, but perilous. 

Following McMahon’s tenure over the Education Department, the administration has slashed its workforce, terminated contracts and grants, and begun shifting responsibilities to other federal agencies—namely, the Department of Justice and Health and Human Services. In an astounding June 2026 Investigation by the department’s own inspector general, it was found that the workforce had been reduced by at least 40 percent in the first months of the administration, with cuts affecting 16 of the department’s 17 offices. 129 contracts worth $1.3 billion had been terminated, along with 90 grants totalling $504 million. 

These numbers are staggering yet remain at the tip of the iceberg in terms of what’s actually at stake. Real consequences include severe backlogs in investigating school discrimination complaints and tracking national student achievement data. Without these essential staff and resources, the agency can no longer properly monitor special education compliance or manage hundreds of millions in school safety and teacher training grants. 

A federal department is a massive apparatus. At best, the department is a purveyor of systemic standards, but at its worst, a glaring example of bureaucratic red tape. But it is not a name that functions as decoration on the secretary’s door. Strip away enough people, and eventually the institution itself begins to disappear. This strategy of administrative attrition is a well-established Republican blueprint, as past administrations dating back to Reagan and Bush routinely appointed leaders to agencies like the EPA or Department of Labor to weaken them from within when they could not be legally dissolved. That very thought, at its core, is what makes the tenure of McMahon so epoch-making; while her predecessors targeted specific rules behind closed doors, the Trump administration has escalated the strategy to its logical extreme by openly pursuing the absolute elimination of a Cabinet-level department. President Trump ordered McMahon in 2025 to take steps toward closing the Department to the extent permitted by law and, consequently, McMahon has described reducing the federal education bureaucracy as her central mandate.

The administration maintains that the power to create education policy should be delegated to states, communities, and parents, and that a smaller federal footprint will make the government more efficient, which is a legitimate political position for an administration to pursue. Many people agree that a rural school district in Southwest Virginia has considerably different needs, resources, and perhaps even cultural priorities than one in urban New York City. While both environments contend with high poverty rates, localized control allows curriculum and funding to match community realities, shifting the focus from the broadband and transportation deficits of the rural mountains to the overcrowded classrooms and high costs of the inner city. Moreover, when states secure additional autonomy, they can experiment with various modes of educational models that  may extend from career-technical initiatives to teacher compensation models, allowing for successful policies to be emulated by other states while failures stay localized. Despite this, there is a crucial distinction between deciding that an institution should be abolished and making the institution incapable of doing its job. The former requires Congress, while the latter can happen one budget line, one vacant position, and one eliminated office at a time. 

With this, there is an uncomfortable lesson emerging from McMahon’s tenure—the idea that bureaucratic erosion is much easier than working towards explicit department abolition. In September 2026, a federal judge struck down an Education Department policy that resulted in roughly $600 million in teacher-training grants being cancelled, finding that the administration’s directive violated federal law and was arbitrary and capricious. This is significant because dismantling a government institution cannot be the same as closing a business—you cannot just fire the staff, scatter responsibilities, and assume the knowledge goes with them. Government expertise is collective. It is formed through career employees, institutional memory, relationships, databases, and procedures that take decades to develop. When those systems are disrupted, the consequences can show up in surprisingly ordinary places: a school that was counting on a federally funded teacher-training program may have to cancel that training, leaving new teachers without the support they need as they enter the classroom (such as those in Tennessee that recently faced sudden federal pausing). This gap hits students the hardest, stalling their academic progress and learning outcomes just when they need steady, high-quality education. Thus, once you smash these systems, reassembling the pieces is an extreme, almost-impossible undertaking, even if a future administration decides it wants to. 

A reality like this may just be Linda McMahon’s legacy: to be remembered as the secretary who demonstrated how much of a federal institution can be dismantled without formally abolishing it. This backdoor sabotage highlights a broader, deeper cynicism–it is vastly easier for Republican administrations to paralyze an agency from within than to face the public backlash of trying to kill it legally. By bypassing Congress, Republican administrations evade democratic accountability and avoid a transparent floor debate they know they would likely lose. A formal legislative process remains vital because it forces these types of administrations to publicly defend their extreme agenda to the families and communities who rely on these education programs to thrive and succeed. When Congress elevated the Department of Education to a Cabinet-Level agency in 1979, it recognized a need for a federal institution capable of coordinating the nation’s educational responsibilities. Rebuilding it now would require restoring the expertise and resources needed to fulfill those responsibilities by restoring funding, rebuilding staffing, protecting programs serving students with disabilities, and clarifying the department’s long-term role. 

The people who come after McMahon will be tasked with that reconstruction. They will have to rebuild expertise that took decades to accumulate, restore relationships that simply cannot be recreated, and recover institutional knowledge that cannot be salvaged from a statute. Edmund Burke, an 18th-century Anglo-Irish writer and former member of Parliament of the United Kingdom, once described society as a partnership between “those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.” Government institutions work much the same way. What one generation dismantles, another is left to rebuild.