President Donald Trump signs an executive order in the East Room of the White House in Washington on Thursday. Ben Curtis/Associated Press

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump signed an executive order Thursday calling for the dismantling of the U.S. Education Department, advancing a campaign promise to take apart an agency that’s been a longtime target of conservatives.

Trump has derided the Education Department as wasteful and polluted by liberal ideology. However, completing its dismantling is most likely impossible without an act of Congress, which created the department in 1979. Republicans said they will introduce a bill to achieve that.

Trump’s order has generated an uproar in Maine and across the country. Local educators have decried the cuts for weeks, and on Wednesday, teachers and parents at three Portland schools “walked in” to protest workforce cuts. On Thursday, members of Maine’s congressional delegation said the move would have a devastating effect on students and schools.

The department, however, is not set to close completely. The White House said the department will retain certain critical functions.

Trump said his administration will close the department beyond its “core necessities,” preserving its responsibilities for Title I funding for low-income schools, Pell grants and money for children with disabilities. The White House said earlier it would also continue to manage federal student loans.

The president blamed the department for America’s lagging academic performance and said states will do a better job.

“It’s doing us no good,” he said at a White House ceremony.

Already, Trump’s Republican administration has been gutting the agency. Its workforce is being slashed in half, and there have been deep cuts to the Office for Civil Rights and the Institute of Education Sciences, which gathers data on the nation’s academic progress.

Advocates for public schools said eliminating the department would leave children behind in an American education system that is fundamentally unequal.

“This is a dark day for the millions of American children who depend on federal funding for a quality education, including those in poor and rural communities with parents who voted for Trump,” NAACP President Derrick Johnson said.

Democrats said the order will be fought in the courts and in Congress, and they urged Republicans to join them in opposition.

Trump’s order is “dangerous and illegal” and will disproportionately hurt low-income students, students of color and those with disabilities, said Rep. Bobby Scott of Virginia, the top Democrat on the House Committee on Education and the Workforce.

The department “was founded in part to guarantee the enforcement of students’ civil rights,” Scott said. “Champions of public school segregation objected, and campaigned for a return to ‘states’ rights.’”

Supporters of Trump’s vision for education welcomed the order.

“No more bloated bureaucracy dictating what kids learn or stifling innovation with red tape,” Tiffany Justice, co-founder of Moms for Liberty, said on social media. “States, communities, and parents can take the reins — tailoring education to what actually works for their kids.”

The White House has not spelled out formally which department functions could be handed off to other departments or eliminated altogether.

The department sends billions of dollars a year to schools and oversees $1.6 trillion in federal student loans.

Currently, much of the agency’s work revolves around managing money — both its extensive student loan portfolio and a range of aid programs for colleges and school districts, like school meals and support for homeless students. The agency also is key in overseeing civil rights enforcement.

States and districts already control local schools, including curriculum, but some conservatives have pushed to cut strings attached to federal money and provide it to states as “block grants” to be used at their discretion. Block granting has raised questions about vital funding sources including Title I, the largest source of federal money to America’s K-12 schools. Families of children with disabilities have despaired over what could come of the federal department’s work protecting their rights.

Federal funding makes up a relatively small portion of public school budgets — roughly 14%. The money often supports supplemental programs for vulnerable students, such as the McKinney-Vento program for homeless students or Title I for low-income schools.

Colleges and universities are more reliant on money from Washington, through research grants along with federal financial aid that helps students pay their tuition.

MAINE REACTS

Maine K-12 schools received $250 million this year from the federal government, which supports students with disabilities and low-income students. Chloe Teboe, a spokesperson for the Maine Department of Education, said Thursday afternoon before the order was signed that officials were keeping an eye on the situation.

“The Maine Department of Education is closely monitoring this development at the federal level for potential impacts and awaits any forthcoming guidance,” Teboe said.

Two members of Maine’s federal delegation, Rep. Chellie Pingree and Sen. Angus King, criticized Trump’s order Thursday evening.

“Eliminating the department would have devastating consequences for students, parents, and educators throughout the country — including here in Maine,” Pingree, a Democrat, said in an emailed statement. “Let’s call this what it is: an attack on our kids, on parents, on communities, and on the very idea of public education.”

“It will result in less support for education in Maine and very likely lead to higher local property taxes. All so that Republicans can give huge tax breaks to billionaires like Elon Musk,” she said.

King, an independent, said the decision would cause “untold damage” in the lives of children.

“Cutting the Department of Education could leave thousands of vulnerable children in the lurch by compromising federal support for our public schools,” he said. “Our educators, students and parents are still getting their bearings after the chaos of the pandemic; this is no time to backslide and destabilize public education.”

He also described Trump’s attack on a congressionally created department as “grossly unconstitutional” and said the order violated the checks and balances of American government.

The Maine School Management Association, a statewide education advocacy group, said school districts are concerned about how this order will impact them, although it remains unclear if dismantling the department will affect Maine’s federal funding.

“But some national experts have expressed concerns that those funds could be delayed, and there may be less technical assistance at the federal level to assist schools in ensuring funds are implemented in compliance with federal law,” said Robbie Feinberg, a spokesperson for the association, said before the order was signed. “This could put an additional administrative burden on local schools absent federal assistance.

Feinberg said an even greater concern for his group right now is education cuts proposed in the Congressional budget.

“These discussions could result in a reduction in formula funds, potentially leading to fewer resources for reading interventionists, math coaches, summer learning programs, and other important programming to help our most at-risk students,” he said. “This could exacerbate achievement gaps and lead to holes in local budgets, forcing schools to reduce programming or raise local property taxes to compensate.”

TAXPAYER MONEY

Republicans have talked about closing the Education Department for decades, saying it wastes taxpayer money and inserts the federal government into decisions that should fall to states and schools. The idea has gained popularity recently as conservative parents’ groups demand more authority over their children’s schooling.

In his platform, Trump promised to close the department “and send it back to the states, where it belongs.” Trump has cast the department as a hotbed of “radicals, zealots and Marxists” who overextend their reach through guidance and regulation.

Even as Trump moves to dismantle the department, he has leaned on it to promote elements of his agenda. He has used investigative powers of the Office for Civil Rights and the threat of withdrawing federal education money to target schools and colleges that run afoul of his orders on transgender athletes participating in women’s sports, pro-Palestinian activism and diversity programs.

Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, a Democrat on the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, dismissed Trump’s claim that he’s returning education to the states. She said he is actually “trying to exert ever more control over local schools and dictate what they can and cannot teach.”

Even some of Trump’s allies have questioned his power to close the agency without action from Congress, and there are doubts about its political popularity. The House considered an amendment to close the agency in 2023, but 60 Republicans joined Democrats in opposing it.

During Trump’s first term, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos sought to dramatically reduce the agency’s budget and asked Congress to bundle all K-12 funding into block grants that give states more flexibility in how they spend federal money. That move was rejected, with pushback from some Republicans.

Leavitt is one of three administration officials named in a lawsuit by The Associated Press on First and Fifth Amendment grounds. The AP says the three are punishing the news agency for editorial decisions they oppose. The White House says the AP is not following an executive order to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America.

Press Herald Staff Writer Riley Board contributed to this report.

The Associated Press’ education coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. The AP is solely responsible for all content. Find the AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.