President Trump’s interest in closing down the Education Department was never front and center to any of his three White House campaigns, but his explanation for shuttering the agency has always remained consistent.

“Move it back to the states,” Mr. Trump said in his third month as a candidate in 2015. In the final days of the 2024 race, he told supporters, “Your state is going to control your children’s education.”

Very little control over education has ever resided with the federal government, which is mainly in charge of administering college loans and enforcing civil rights in schools. Even so, Mr. Trump deployed the back-to-the-states mantra again when signing an executive order on March 20 to close the department. The title of the order was: “Improving Education Outcomes by Empowering Parents, States, and Communities.”

The maneuver has long been a calling card of politicians from the conservative establishment advocating a smaller federal government and more local control, and is now a central tenet of the second Trump administration when it comes to a host of issues, from abortion and cutting regulations to hiking tariffs. But states are not necessarily positioned to replicate the oversight functions that the federal government has played, particularly on education matters.

Mr. Trump used the tactic during the 2024 presidential race to sidestep questions about abortion rights by saying that states should decide the issue — a particularly brazen move after he stacked the Supreme Court with conservative judges to overturn Roe v. Wade.

More recently, Mr. Trump and others in his administration have pushed to eliminate the Federal Emergency Management Agency, saying states would do a better job. The move appears to ignore the agency’s core principle that the best practice for disaster relief is “locally executed, state managed, and federally supported.”