United States Department of Education

The United States Department of Education is a cabinet-level department of the United States government, originating in 1980. The department began operating on May 4, 1980, having been created after the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare was split into the Department of Education and the Department of Health and Human Services by the Department of Education Organization Act, which President Jimmy Carter signed into law on October 17, 1979. An earlier iteration was formed in 1867 but was quickly demoted to the Office of Education a year later. Since its official renaming, the department's official abbreviation is ED ("DOE" refers to the United States Department of Energy) but its name is also abbreviated informally as "DoEd". The Department of Education is administered by the United States secretary of education. In 2021 it had more than 4,000 employees – the smallest staff of the Cabinet agencies – and a 2024 budget of $268 billion, up from $14 billion when it was established in 1979. In 2025, the department's budget was about four percent of the total US federal spending. During Donald Trump's second term, the Department of Government Efficiency announced it would shrink the Department of Education's workforce by half, and Trump signed an executive order on March 20, 2025 aimed at closing the department to the maximum extent allowed by law. There are limits to how much can be done by executive action as significant parts of it are statutorily defined by Congress and signed into law by previous presidents. The presidential action was held off by a US district court in Boston on May 22, 2025, which the Trump administration appealed, and a federal appeals court declined to lift the injunction in early June. On July 14, 2025, the Supreme Court overturned the lower courts, allowing the layoffs to proceed.