Linda McMahon
Announced as Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Education
Linda McMahon is Trump’s pick for Secretary of Education, and is co-head of the Trump 2025 Transition Team. McMahon served in Trump’s cabinet as the Administrator of the Small Business Association (SBA) from 2017 to 2019 and was seen as a “loyal foot soldier” inside the White House. A few days after she stepped down from the SBA, she was named Chair of America First Action, a pro-Trump super PAC. Trump noted she would be helping him get re-elected and called McMahon a “superstar.” The New York Times named McMahon “one of Mr. Trump’s most prolific donors during the 2016 presidential campaign.” She is listed as an independent director of Trump Media & Technology Group, which owns Truth Social.
The deadly January 6 insurrection does not appear to have dampened McMahon’s support for Trump. She was chair of a group that funded the “Women for America First” group that planned the rally that preceded the violent insurrection. She has continued to help fundraise on Trump’s behalf, and Forbes recently reported that she has donated more than $11 million to Trump groups.
McMahon, a billionaire who has known Trump for 32 years, is a former CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE), which she co-founded with her then-husband, Vince McMahon. He stepped down as chairman of WWE’s parent company earlier this year after a former employee filed a lawsuit accusing him of “serious sexual misconduct.” Two years prior, it was reported that Vince paid four potential victims of misconduct more than $12 million in hush money. The WWE board also found that year that Vince had secretly paid $5 million to the Trump Foundation in years that the future president appeared on WrestleMania.
Linda McMahon is the Chair of the Board and Chair of the Center for the American Worker for America First Policy Institute, a MAGA-aligned non-profit led by former Trump official Brooke Rollins that has been nicknamed Trump’s “administration in waiting.” Media Matters reported that in that role “she has written content attacking diversity, equity, and inclusion; minimum wage increases; and Biden’s record on labor policy.”
McMahon was also a Republican nominee for U.S. Senate for Connecticut in 2010 and 2012, but she lost. She reportedly spent $100 million of her own money on the campaigns.
WHAT PROJECT 2025 SAYS ABOUT THE DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION AND CHILD CARE
THE POLICIES
– Eliminate the Department of Education and limit “federal education policy.”
– Eliminate the Head Start Program to cut off access for quality early childhood education. Head Start is one of the longest-running efforts to address systemic poverty and has served over 22 million preschool children.
– Phase out Title I federal funding for public schools, abandoning America’s highest-need schools and their students.
– Cut off federal funding for schools, districts, school boards, counties, and states that resist Administration policies. Trump has even vowed to cut federal funding for schools that require vaccinations, a long-standing policy that has prevented the spread of polio and other serious diseases that can disable children for life.
– Prioritize funding for childcare by parents or family over communal or universal childcare, which would make care more expensive for two-working-parent households.
– Re-establish Trump’s religious exemption waivers for state and child social service agencies.
– Classify books and materials that the Administration deems to include “transgender ideology,” as “pornography,” and then class “[e]ducators and librarians who purvey it” as “sex offenders.”
PRECEDING CONTEXT FOR PROJECT 2025
– Florida Governor Ron Desantis signed the Stop Woke Act in 2022, banning schools’ ability to “promote, support, or maintain any programs or campus activities” that “espouse diversity, equity, and inclusion or critical race theory rhetoric.” Florida’s Department of Education also rejected an AP African American studies course, asserting it was “filled with” critical race theory.
– PEN America found that more than 4,300 books were removed from schools across 23 states, including books like Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson, The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, and Maus: A Survivor’s Tale by Art Spiegelman.
– Missouri legislators passed a law in 2022, which according to AP, subjects librarians to “fines and possible imprisonment for allowing sexually explicit materials on bookshelves.”
HOW ARE PROJECT 2025’S POLICIES POSSIBLE?
–Eliminating the Head Start Program will require congressional approval since it was authorized by Congress. Congress would also likely need to legislate phasing out funding for Title I schools.
– Other proposed Project 2025 education policy changes can either be rescinded or enacted through rulemaking.