Linda McMahon was nominated on Tuesday by President-elect Donald J. Trump as education secretary. The businesswoman is co-chair of Trump’s transition team and led the Small Business Administration under his first term as president.
Much of McMahon’s career has been spent at World Wrestling Entertainment, or WWE, the world’s largest professional-wrestling promotion. She co-founded the company with her husband, Vince McMahon, and served as its chief executive.
In a statement on Tuesday, Trump touted McMahon’s “decades of leadership experience” and “deep understanding of both education and business.”
Trump made a range of promises related to education policy during his campaign, some of which are conflicting. He has vowed to eliminate the Education Department entirely — which experts say is unlikely to happen, given the need for congressional approval — and return education to the states. But Trump has also discussed leveraging the power of federal agencies to target schools and colleges for violating antidiscrimination laws.
Trump and his allies have said that colleges are flouting such laws by, among other things, maintaining diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, protecting transgender students, collaborating with researchers in China and other non-U.S. allied countries, teaching certain race- and gender-related topics in classrooms, and tolerating pro-Palestinian protesters.
Decision 2024
Read more about President-elect Trump’s first term in office and what could be in store for colleges during the next administration.
McMahon was not among the possible candidates floated by education-policy watchers in recent days. Those included Ryan Walters, Oklahoma’s superintendent of public instruction who has railed against colleges’ DEI efforts; Christopher Rufo, the conservative activist who is helping to reshape public higher ed in Florida; and Tiffany Justice, co-founder of Moms for Liberty, a political group that advocates against teaching about sexual orientation and gender identity in elementary and secondary schools.
On Monday, Semafor reported that McMahon was frustrated over not being asked to lead the Commerce Department. The nomination instead went to Howard Lutnick, Trump’s longtime friend and the other co-chair of his transition team.
McMahon serves as treasurer of Sacred Heart University’s Board of Trustees. She previously served as vice chair during an earlier period on the board, from 2004 to 2017, at which point she resigned to lead the Small Business Administration.
McMahon was appointed to Connecticut’s State Board of Education in 2009, but only served for one year before resigning to run for a U.S. Senate seat. She ran unsuccessfully as a Republican candidate for Senate in 2010 and 2012. On her campaign website from 2010, McMahon said she supported school choice, a policy that allows public money to support alternatives to local public schools, such as charter schools.
McMahon hasn’t made many public statements about higher education. In September, she wrote an op-ed in The Hill arguing that Congress should make Pell Grants, the financial-aid awards for low-income students, available to people in workforce-training programs.
A Tuesday statement from higher ed’s top lobbyist didn’t have much to say about McMahon and her background. Ted Mitchell, who leads the American Council on Education, included general comments about “McMahon’s willingness to tackle the challenges facing our nation in the area of education.”
ACE sees “many opportunities to work with her to advance policies that will benefit all Americans and ensure that students from all walks of life are able to reach their fullest potential,” Mitchell said.
The president of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, said on X that he was pleased with the pick. The organization created Project 2025, a blueprint for a second Trump term that, among other things, calls for eliminating the Education Department.
Jason Altmire, president and chief executive of Career Education Colleges and Universities, also endorsed McMahon’s nomination. The group represents for-profit colleges, which have been targeted by a wave of regulations under the Biden administration that could limit their access to federal financial aid.
“Under her leadership, we are confident that the new Department of Education will take a more reasoned and thoughtful approach in addressing many of the overreaching and punitive regulations put forth by the Biden administration, especially those targeting private career schools,” Altmire said in a statement.
If McMahon is confirmed, one pressing item on her agenda would be Title IX policy. President Biden’s Education Department enacted civil-rights protections for transgender students under Title IX, which Republicans oppose. Those regulations have been partially held up in court.
Trump has said that he wants to undo those protections and ban transgender students from playing on sports teams that align with their gender identity. Biden’s department has proposed but not finalized regulations that cement rights for transgender athletes.
Title IX policy looked different under Betsy DeVos, who served as secretary of education during Trump’s first term. DeVos put in place regulations that increased due-process rights for students accused of sexual misconduct and narrowed the definition of sexual harassment under Title IX to “severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive.”
The Biden administration pared back many of those regulations, removing requirements for colleges to hold live hearings with cross examination when investigating sexual-misconduct complaints, and broadening the definition of sexual harassment to “unwelcome sex-based conduct.”
Kenneth L. Marcus, who served as the Education Department’s assistant secretary for civil rights under George W. Bush and Trump, told The Chronicle in an interview before McMahon was announced that he expected the eventual pick to follow Trump’s education priorities “scrupulously.”
“President Trump has actually been unusually vocal during this campaign about education issues, more so than many presidential campaigns,” said Marcus, the founder and chair of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law. “And that suggests a greater focus on this issue than we’ve seen in some other administrations.”
Asked whether he would be interested in serving in the department for a third time, Marcus said he would be “honored to support President Trump in any way that I can.”
Michael Itzkowitz, a former official in the Obama administration’s Education Department, said that McMahon’s “very limited experience” sets her up for an “uphill battle” in carrying out Trump’s vision.
“I don’t imagine that she’ll have much of an idea of how the Education Department works, its primary responsibilities, or much of an agenda,” Itzkowitz said. “It’s going to be a steep learning curve to say the least.”
