Education Secretary Linda McMahon fields questions Thursday from members of Congress about the dismantling of her agency, student loans and other issues.
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Eric Lee/Bloomberg via Getty Images
U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon sparred with Democrats on the House education committee Thursday on a visit to Capitol Hill to defend the Trump administration’s new budget proposal.
The lawmakers and education secretary tussled over several key education issues that will affect the lives of millions of Americans, including whether new Republican caps on federal student loans will lower the cost of college, what role the government should play in trying to improve abysmal literacy rates among U.S. students — and whether the U.S. Department of Education should exist at all.
Here are some of the moments that stood out from the hearing.
The end of the Education Department?
Starting with their opening statements, McMahon and the committee’s top Democrat, Rep. Bobby Scott of Virginia, made clear the hearing wasn’t just about the U.S. Department of Education’s budget for the next fiscal year; it was an existential fight over the department itself.
McMahon’s first words to the committee, after the usual thank-you’s, were a flag-planting for the department’s forceful dissolution.
“The American people elected President Trump with a clear mandate: to sunset a 46-year-old, $3 trillion failed federal education bureaucracy in Washington, D.C., and return authority to where it belongs, to parents, teachers and local leaders,” McMahon told lawmakers.
This after Scott, in his opening remarks, told McMahon, “The Trump administration has not returned education to the states, rather it has empowered you to effectively dismantle one of the country’s strongest civil rights institutions.”
According to data from the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), the Department of Education has gone from roughly 4,200 employees in 2024 to 2,300 in 2026.
In addition to cutting staff by roughly 45%, the administration has offloaded more than 100 programs and department obligations onto other federal agencies, including many elementary and secondary education programs to the Department of Labor (DOL) and efforts at improving family engagement to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
In one of the latest big shifts, in March, the department announced a transition of the nation’s massive federal student loan portfolio to the U.S. Treasury Department. By August, remaining department employees will be physically moved from the department’s longtime, Washington, D.C., headquarters to a smaller office roughly a block away.
While the dismantling was roundly condemned by the committee’s Democrats, Republicans cheered McMahon’s efforts during the hearing. “I hope you’re the last secretary of education,” Republican Rep. Randy Fine of Florida told her, intending it as a compliment, not a critique.
But the dismantling has also gotten… weird. According to internal Education Department documents obtained by NPR, the department’s student loan office, which was cut in half by last year’s reduction-in-force, is now in the middle of a hiring spree.
The Office of Federal Student Aid (FSA) is trying to bring in 334 new staff – a tacit acknowledgement that the previous cuts did serious harm to the office’s ability to do its work.
The future of special education oversight
One of the department’s most significant responsibilities — overseeing programs and funding for students with disabilities — has not yet been offloaded to another federal agency, in part because of fierce pushback from disability-rights advocates. At one point in the hearing, McMahon said she had met with “twenty-something” disability groups to hear their concerns.
McMahon has explored moving the management of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), the country’s landmark special education law, to either DOL or HHS, and Rep. Suzanne Bonamici, an Oregon Democrat, used Thursday’s hearing to push for clarity on any potential move.
McMahon said, “We have not yet made a determination of where IDEA services would go.”
“Do you plan to transfer the services to another agency? Yes or no,” Bonamici shot back.
“Well, eventually, congresswoman, you do know that —”
“Just a yes or no,” Bonamici interjected.
But McMahon held firm: “It’s not a yes or no answer. I’m sorry. We will be looking to transfer and, first, co-administering these programs with other agencies.”
Of all the decisions McMahon has made thus far, moving special education oversight will be one of the most consequential — and controversial — which explains why it hasn’t happened yet.
Cutting, rehiring and possibly more cutting at the Office for Civil Rights
McMahon fielded tough questions from Rep. Mark Takano, a California Democrat, about cuts to the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR), which investigates complaints of discrimination in schools based on students’ sex, race, national origin, disability and more.
OCR was hit hard in last year’s layoffs and firings, with roughly half of the office’s staff, including civil rights lawyers, being removed. After the courts intervened, the department under McMahon chose to keep 247 OCR staff on paid administrative leave, rather than allow them to work — a decision a government watchdog says cost taxpayers between $28.5 million and $38 million.
Previous NPR reporting, using public data, captures the effect of the cuts:
- After Trump’s 2025 inauguration, OCR reached a resolution agreement in just two racial harassment cases the rest of the year. In 2017, the first year of the first Trump administration, it resolved more than 30.
- In 2017, the Trump-led OCR reached agreements in roughly 10 times as many disability discrimination cases as it did in 2025.
- And finally, OCR resolved nearly 60 sexual harassment cases and 15 sexual assault cases in 2017. After Trump’s second inauguration, the office did not reach a resolution agreement in a single case of school-based sexual harassment or sexual assault for the rest of the year.
In her House testimony, McMahon insisted that “OCR is important” and said she is actively “rehiring attorneys.” She has even intimated that she disagreed with the original staffing cuts, telling Takano that the administration “had started that process before I came onboard.”
Here Takano pushed back: “They were firing half the staff that you need at OCR, and it took you 10 months to figure out that was a mistake.”
Then Takano asked McMahon, if she is rehiring lawyers and fully supports the mission of OCR, why does the department’s own budget propose a new 35% cut in funding to the office?
McMahon answered that the budget document “is a floor for hiring. We want to increase those numbers.”
It’s not clear why the administration’s budget request to Congress recommends a cut in OCR funding that McMahon does not appear to support. The Education Department did not immediately respond to a request for clarification.
A moment later, in the hearing, McMahon said the funding proposal is “not where we want to be.”
Student loan changes
One subject brought up by Democrats and Republicans was the new limit on federal student loan borrowing that was passed as part of Republicans’ One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
The law does not change limits for undergraduate borrowers but dramatically scales back how much graduate students can borrow. They could previously borrow up to the cost of their program, but new limits cap annual borrowing for most grad students at $20,500 with a total limit of $100,000. Only a shortlist of what are labeled professional programs — including medicine, law and dentistry — will be allowed loans up to $50,000 a year and $200,000 overall.
Early in her testimony, McMahon complained that “college costs are just exorbitant. Students are burdened with debt. … We really have to do something to bring down the cost of college.”
Specifically, the cost of colleges’ graduate programs. Graduate loans make up nearly half of all new loans, even though graduate school students are a much smaller fraction of overall borrowers.
Later in the hearing, Democrats argued these new graduate loan limits would lead to shortages in teaching, social work and nursing.
Fine, the Florida Republican, echoed the concern over a potential shortage of skilled healthcare workers and asked McMahon, “Does it make sense for us to take a field where we have real shortages and create a situation where we may not be able to create the [healthcare workers] we need, where we already don’t have enough?”
McMahon offered two arguments in defense of these new loan limits. First, that the cost of most advanced nursing degrees, for example, would still fall within or near the new loan caps and that undergraduate nursing programs will not be affected. Second, she argued that these caps are intended to force colleges to lower their prices.
“It is our overall goal to bring down the cost of college and education,” McMahon told Fine. “And I do think that, relative to the shortages we’re having, if we can bring down the cost for nurses in schools, we can get more students to apply.”
McMahon mentioned that a few colleges have already lowered their prices in response to the caps. Among them is the University of California at Irvine’s Flex MBA program.
But the connection between accessibility of federal student loans and school price tags is incredibly complicated, and several economists have told NPR that capping graduate loans, while it may prevent some borrowers from taking on debts they cannot repay, isn’t likely to lead to widespread price cuts.
Student achievement
Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York invoked a “literacy and reading crisis in the country” and asked McMahon what she’s doing to combat this crisis.
Crisis indeed. A new report out Wednesday, called the Education Scorecard, says U.S. schools have been in a “learning recession” for more than a decade, tracing drops in reading and math scores not to the pandemic but years earlier, to around 2013.
“We have clearly failed our students,” McMahon said, noting that “the greatest improvement we have seen in literacy scores… were in those states like Mississippi and Louisiana and Florida who have adopted the science of reading. These are state initiatives, and they originated at the state level.”
McMahon was spot-on in celebrating Louisiana especially. According to that new review of student performance, Louisiana is the only state to return to 2019 student performance levels in reading and math both. Alabama also deserves credit for a remarkable turnaround in math.
The Scorecard does, however, suggest that, while Florida has embraced reforms around the science of reading, it is no success story. From 2022 to 2025, Florida ranked 35th out of 35 states in reading growth.
McMahon and several committee Republicans touted the administration’s proposed MEGA (Make Education Great Again) grants as a powerful new tool to help states improve literacy.
However, these proposed grants would actually be a funding cut to schools, by consolidating 17 current programs (including for English learners and rural schools) funded at roughly $6.5 billion into a block grant worth less than a third of that: $2 billion.
Edited by: Nirvi Shah
Visual design and development by: LA Johnson
Source: https://www.npr.org/2026/05/14/nx-s1-5815213/education-secretary-linda-mcmahon-house-hearing
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