Education Secretary Linda McMahon told a conservative news outlet she wants to focus less on higher ed this year. The comment comes after the Trump administration’s yearlong use of multiple federal departments to pressure universities and their employees and students to conform to the White House’s desires.
McMahon discussed her 2026 priorities in an interview with Breitbart before Christmas. As the outlet put it, “McMahon said the new year is a chance to shift a little bit away from higher education and focus on elementary and secondary.” (Education Department spokespeople didn’t respond Monday to Inside Higher Ed’s requests for further information on what she meant.)
On social media, McMahon posted, “In 2026 we will empower parents, strengthen families, and end Washington’s grip on education by returning it to the states.” She also shared a video touting what she sees as the administration’s many wins. Those included cutting deals with several universities to restore funding the administration froze, changes to the federal student aid application and steps toward dismantling the Education Department.
She told Breitbart her top three priorities will be literacy, noting poor scores on a national K–12 test; school choice, which usually refers to providing public money for parents to send their children to K–12 charter or private schools or to homeschool them; and “returning education to the states.”
Regarding that last priority, McMahon told the outlet, “That’s what we’re really going to be working on, and that falls in line with the president’s directive to eventually totally move education to the states and to make sure that the bureaucracy of the Department of Education doesn’t exist in Washington anymore.”
It remains unclear what “returning education to the states” would look like, even if Congress agrees to sign off on the Trump administration’s push to close the Education Department. Other laws Congress has passed over the decades would still continue to require a significant federal role in education.
McMahon also touted what Breitbart called her “victories,” with the outlet writing that “one of her favorite accomplishments is the department’s Title IX work protecting women’s sports.” It wrote that McMahon “specifically pointed to an agreement reached with the University of Pennsylvania ordering awards to be taken” from transgender former swimmer Lia Thomas “and given to the [cisgender] female athletes who really deserved them.”
In April, the department’s Office for Civil Rights found that Penn violated Title IX by allowing a trans woman to compete on a women’s sports team—presumably referring to Thomas, who last competed on the swim team in 2022, in accord with NCAA policies at that time.
