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Education Secretary Linda McMahon testified before multiple congressional committees last week.
Celal Gunes/Anadolu via Getty Images
Linda McMahon, secretary of the U.S. Department of Education, testified to a Senate subcommittee last week. She was unprepared. When asked specific questions about the number and status of civil rights investigations, research grants, services for low-income Americans and other important topics, she repeatedly responded with, “I’ll get back to you on that.” In one exchange, Senator Jack Reed, a Democrat from Rhode Island, corrected the secretary on a huge mathematical miscalculation.
McMahon’s congressional hearing performance confirms what many educators anticipated when Trump announced her as his pick last November: The 76-year-old wrestling entertainment mogul who has never been an educator knows too little about the department that she has been chosen to lead and eventually shut down.
“I’ll get back to you” is a response that many cabinet members commonly offer in congressional hearings, especially in their first year. It seemed more excessive, though, as McMahon fielded substantive questions from friendly GOP senators and tougher inquiries from Democrats. At moments, she reminded the subcommittee that she brings executive-level business experience to her education leadership role. Members of most corporate boards of directors surely would be frustrated by a CEO who shows up to a quarterly meeting with too few answers, too little data and a repeated promise to subsequently get back to them. Most CEOs are expected to be much more knowledgeable and prepared than was our nation’s chief education officer.
It did not appear that McMahon was skillfully or defensively avoiding questions that she had no interest in answering. Instead, it was apparent that she did not know, which is understandable given her lack of education industry experience. And to be fair, she has only been on the job since February—it is a large, complex entity. But there are perhaps three more plausible explanations.
First, hardworking staffers prepare White House and federal government leaders for high-stakes congressional hearings. They equip them with trustworthy data, compelling examples and expertly crafted predictions. McMahon likely has too few staffers. Those who had the deepest historical memory and knowledge of what decades of rigorous education research shows most likely have been fired.
The federal Education Department announced in March a reduction in its workforce from 4,133 to 2,183 employees. Before Trump’s return to the White House, the national education statistics center had approximately 100 staff—reportedly, there are now only three. A federal judge since deemed terminations across the department unlawful and directed the Trump administration to rehire those professionals. Even if some of them have since returned, it did not appear as if their expertise was leveraged to help the secretary prepare for her Senate hearing.
An underappreciation for research offers a second potential explanation for McMahon’s inability to respond to many queries. Senators asked questions for which data does indeed exist. For example, Jeff Merkley, a Democrat from Oregon, asked if she had read the annual performance reports on TRIO, a set of federally funded programs that provide services to more than 930,000 low-income students, Americans in rural communities, veterans and students with disabilities. McMahon confessed she had not, yet the Ed Department’s proposed budget includes massive cuts to TRIO, as well as significant reductions to Pell Grants and the Federal Work-Study program.
As part of its cuts all across the Ed Department, the Trump administration slashed more than $900 million in contracts and fired more than 80 percent of staff from the Institute of Education Sciences, the federal Education Department’s research arm. Also, across academic fields and disciplines, grants to our nation’s most trusted and treasured research universities have been paused and canceled.
Additionally, 13 education experts, including me, received two-sentence emails last month notifying us that we had been terminated from the White House education research board to which President Joe Biden appointed us, effective immediately. These and other actions signify an underappreciation for the producers of evidence and for evidence itself.
U.S. Health and Human Services secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his agency took most of the heat for the inclusion of citations to nonexistent studies, possible reliance on AI and numerous misinterpretations of research findings in the “Make America Healthy Again” report released last month. Noteworthy is that McMahon was on the commission and is therefore one of the report’s authors. Everyone involved, including her, is responsible for the careless disregard of what actual studies show. Maybe McMahon could not say in the Senate hearing what research, including the Education Department’s own data, shows because she has not taken time to read enough of it since Trump nominated her for the role nearly eight months ago.
Finally, McMahon’s obvious lack of preparation could be attributable to the mandate that Trump has given her to eliminate the nation’s education department. There is just one problem with that: Congress would have to approve the closure. Given this, its current secretary will definitely be required to appear before House and Senate committees again in the future. Next time, she should be better prepared with verifiable data. In the meantime, Congress should be sure to follow up and get what McMahon promised in last week’s hearing. “I’ll get back to you on that” ought not be deemed an acceptable response as Congress makes policy decisions that will affect the lives of students, educators and families across the nation.
