Amid the incoming Trump administration’s flurry of unqualified, corrupt, and/or vengeance-driven cabinet nominees, it’s been easy to overlook Linda McMahon, Trump’s pick to head the US Department of Education. McMahon is best known for her role in running World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) with her husband the longtime Trump crony Vince McMahon. Linda McMahon’s background in education is exceedingly thin; she served on the Connecticut Board of Education more than a decade ago, thanks to an appointment from another politically connected friend, then–Connecticut Governor Jodi Rell. McMahon has a teaching certificate but has never actually taught. Indeed, she was forced to resign her spot on the Connecticut board when the Hartford Courant reported that she’d lied on her résumé about having an education degree. Add in the alleged role of the WWE and its parent company in a sexual-abuse scandal involving “ring boys” for the wrestling league, and McMahon’s nomination, in any sanely administered political order, would be dead in the water. (McMahon and her husband both deny the abuse allegations in the pending WWE suit.)
Yet McMahon possesses one key credential for the next Trump administration—in addition, that is, to a proven track record to personal fealty to the president-elect, and a long string of Fox News appearances: She’s the former head of the America First Policy Institute (AFPI), the policy nerve center for MAGA governance. For all the attention focused on the Heritage Foundation and its Project 2025 policy agenda, AFPI has been Trumpworld’s principal policy network, serving as a haven for former Trump appointees during the Biden years. AFPI hands assembled a detailed blueprint for Trump’s return to power, including plans to make the Trump tax cuts permanent and purge the federal workforce of civil service workers deemed insufficiently MAGA. In addition to McMahon, Trump has tapped several senior AFPI figures for cabinet posts, including EPA nominee Lee Zeldin, Agriculture nominee Brooke Rollins (the think tank’s president and CEO), and its Georgia chapter chair, Doug Collins, Trump’s pick to head the Department of Veteran’s Affairs.
As education secretary, McMahon would be charged with administering a uniquely destructive suite of policies, even by the usual standards of Trump governance. That’s because the Department of Education has been a bête noire of the American right ever since Jimmy Carter founded the agency in 1979. By creating a layer of federal oversight over locally run schools, the DOE has, in the overheated imaginings of right-wing policy mavens, arrogated deep-state sovereignty over the rights of parents to preside over the best educational options and life chances for their children. And as the Education Department has sought to clarify and standardize anti-discrimination policy for LGBTQ+ students, it’s become a pet target for anti-trans culture warriors on the right.
McMahon probably won’t heed the growing chorus of conservative calls to abolish the DOE outright, but she can be counted on to aggressively pursue other key MAGA objectives in education policy. In line with her work at AFPI, McMahon will likely continue to promote the use of privately backed charter schools to defund public education—the most fundamental plank of right-wing education policy. In addition, she’ll probably resume her predecessor Betty DeVos’s campaign to deny basic Title IX protections to LGBTQ+ students. And it’s a safe bet that she’ll also re-up plans to promote Trump’s 1776 commission—MAGA’s agitprop answer to the 1619 Project, promoting a “patriotic” national curriculum to downplay and discourage honest discussion of America’s racial history in the schools.
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Following the lead of billionaire right-wing donors, AFPI enthusiastically champions the charter-schools movement, while seeking to undermine the government’s role in providing quality public education. McMahon’s think tank has erected a whole policy infrastructure to promote charter schools, including direct public subsidies to them, the creation of education saving accounts (ESAs) for parents to enroll kids in charters, and proposals to weaken teachers’ unions in conjunction with the rise of open-shop charters. This agenda does more than harness the long-standing animus to government-backed education on the right—it advances the creation of a parallel education system for right-wing partisans. In this regard, as well as in its aggressive model of privatized education funding, the AFPI plan recalls the original role that neoliberal economics played in supporting the new ad hoc network of “segregation academies” launched in the American South after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling to desegregate the nation’s schools. The same basic dictum holds for today’s American right as it did then: If you can’t segregate with law, segregate with economics.
AFPI claims that charter school students have higher scores on standardized tests. In reality, the findings here follow what holds for better-funded public schools: namely, that well-funded charter schools tend to produce better test scores, while less well-off charters fare a bit worse, with some regional variations. Students in the competitive DC charter school system’s Opportunity Scholarships program, often cited as the gold standard by charter school advocates, actually performed worse on reading tests than those who did not attend the program.
School choice and voucher programs are a drain on the public’s coffers. For hard-right ideologues like the advisers at AFPI, that’s the whole point. Privatized education is part of the broader right-wing campaign to block the public sector’s ability to finance anything, especially if it would further racial equality. The National Education Association notes that voucher programs redirect scarce public funds toward unaccountable private school programs, and found zero evidence that these programs—which increase school segregation—improve students’ performance. In some cases, there are negative impacts.
What’s more, private management naturally leads to a focus on profit, financial self-sustainability, and expansion—mandates that typically lead to steep budget cuts in the schools, even if students suffer. According to the Network for Public Education, for-profit management companies run nearly one in seven charter schools.
AFPI has also endorsed federal legislation to create national education savings accounts. Like charter schools, ESAs seek to redirect public resources to market-driven gimmicks under the broad rubric of consumer choice. When parents open an ESA, they withdraw their children from the school district and receive a deposit of public funds in a savings account authorized by the government. Parents are then allowed to spend from that account on a range of educational expenses, including tutoring, therapy, or school supplies.
ESA plans create an obvious bind by forcing parents to navigate the education industry all on their own. The ESA scheme affords no safeguards for students whose parents made poor spending choices with the funds in their account. A report in Forbes recounted the story of a family using up its entire account before paying for a single English or math class. And like the broader charter model it upholds, the savings-account system reinforces, rather than weakens, the core inequalities of the US education system; it ensures that wealthier parents will be able to afford to send their children to the best schools.
For a bracing illustration of how charter and for-profit education schemes pillage publicly funded schools, consider Chicago’s experience. In 2013, the city closed 48 public schools to cover widening budget shortfalls. And Chicago’s public schools were going broke in no small part due to the rapid expansion of a parallel charter system captained by ardent school privatizers. Since the insurgent charter schools operated outside traditional governance and accountability, they accumulated millions in debt while draining desperately needed funding away from public schools. Ultimately, 17,000 students were displaced, and Chicago was left with a more unequal and racially segmented school system than it had at the outset of the city’s charter-school fiasco.
Beyond the defunding agenda bound up with charter-school promotion, McMahon’s DOE will almost certainly resume prosecuting right-wing culture-war crusades against public education. With the outcry over critical race theory proving a political bust, it’s likely that McMahon will push to reverse the safeguards that the Biden administration granted to LGBTQ+ students and faculty when it changed its interpretation of Title IX, the law that prevents sex discrimination at schools that receive federal funding. With Trump and other GOP leaders continuing to foment bogus outrage over trans accommodations in schools, Title IX could once more furnish right-wing culture warriors the opportunity to transform threats into policy.
That’s what AFPI’s track record clearly indicates. When Biden’s education secretary, Miguel Cardona, announced the extension of Title IX protections to LGBTQ+ students, AFPI submitted public comments claiming that Cardona’s policies would “make schools unsafe for women by opening intimate facilities like bathrooms and locker rooms to students based on gender identity.” The think tank also came out against Title IX protections relating to the testimony of survivors of sexual assault, setting up the mind-bending scenario of impunity for sexual assault perpetrators alongside a ginned-up moral panic over the right of transgender people to use the right bathrooms, which has never been linked to any criminality whatsoever.
There’s also every reason to expect McMahon to mount a culture-war takeover of school curricula—despite the alarms raised by small-government conservatives about federal usurpations of local schools. The lead agenda item here would be a revival of Trump’s 1776 commission, the right’s rejoinder to the findings of the 1619 Project.
Jerry C. Davis is a senior adviser to AFPI’s Center for 1776, the think tank’s cheerleading section for Trump’s commission. Davis was the president of the College of the Ozarks, which is ranked among the most gay-unfriendly campuses in the country; the school’s student handbook explicitly bans the expression of any kind of LGBTQ+ identity. Former students recount being coerced into undergoing conversion therapy. A scathing 1994 report from John Hopper, then the executive secretary for the Missouri chapter of the American Association of University Professors, charged that “Davis’ administration has thrown out the faculty-approved handbook, ended faculty governance, ended tenure for those on tenure-track, ended free discussion of much of anything by a ‘gag rule’ in the administratively dictated handbook, and begun ‘reviews’ for those with tenure.”
Apart from McMahon’s advocacy in Washington, AFPI is already hard at work getting its agenda before state legislatures. The institute now has chapters in Pennsylvania, Florida, Georgia, and California. The Georgia chapter has focused on school choice by advocating for a school voucher bill that caters only to the wealthiest Georgians. The bill charts the same ruinous policy arc that unfolded in Chicago, permitting parents to use public funds for private-school enrollment, tutoring services, and other educational outlays, and leaving public schools begging for scraps.
In other states, AFPI has targeted diversity initiatives. The organization has lobbied in favor of Ohio’s bill to defund and delimit diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives on college campuses, HB 151, also known as the Ohio Education Enhancement Act; AFPI’s director of higher education reform, Johnathan Pidluzny, provided testimony on the bill’s behalf. The bill would institute a ban on DEI training programs, prohibit hiring in education on the vague and unenforceable mandate to shun “controversial beliefs and policies,” dismantle affirmative action programs and affinity groups on campuses, and gut collective bargaining protections for state educators. Critics argue that its passage would visit “extremist gag orders” on colleges and students, while enacting de facto bans on student organizations that advocate for marginalized groups.
This is clearly the comfort zone of AFPI and Linda McMahon alike. When the state of Connecticut briefly gave her authority as an arbiter of education policy, she was exposed as a liar and forced to step down. Alas, the Trump-throttled Republican Party is unlikely to heed that lesson as McMahon’s nomination comes up before the Senate, so be prepared for an education secretary to pursue a policy agenda designed to appeal in equal parts to billionaires and WWE-style culture warriors.
