In a bit of a surprise to education watchers, former World Wrestling Entertainment CEO Linda McMahon has been nominated to be the new US Secretary of Education. It comes amidst a renewed push to eliminate the unconstitutional and ineffectual federal Department of Education.
Will McMahon tear the place down?
That’s the wrong question. The right one points to why it is not all that important who the education secretary is.
Neither the secretary, nor her boss the president, gets to unilaterally decide to raze the Department of Education. To end it, Congress must pass a law dissolving it, and then the secretary executes the law. Indeed, that is the job of the executive branch overall—to execute the law, not to make it, which administrations seem to forget all the time.
Hopefully, that is what the Trump administration will do: Work to persuade Congress to pass legislation dissolving the department, sure, but focus on executing the law as it is and not remaking it through executive action, as the Biden administration has tried to do egregiously with federal student loans and, perhaps more arguably, Title IX.
The main thing the secretary should be—until the job is ended—is a good administrator. Current Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona appears to have failed in this regard, most pointedly with the disastrous simplification of the Free Application for Federal Student Aid. Indeed, running federal student aid is the biggest Department of Education function, and it has long been decrepit, perhaps because secretaries have never come from financial backgrounds. A good sign for McMahon is that she has had a successful business career, albeit running steel cage matches and not red tape machines. But she probably knows something about efficiency and effectiveness.
So should we be thrilled or depressed by McMahon’s nomination?
Neither. It is not the job of the secretary to drive the reforms we want. That is Congress’s job. But if and when Congress does the right thing and eliminates the US Department of Education, I hope there is a secretary in place to faithfully and efficiently do as the law commands. As of yet, I have no reason to believe that Linda McMahon is not that person.