The Department of Education exists because Congress created it in 1979. Only Congress can close it. Yet Education Secretary Linda McMahon has spent the past year taking it apart, and she does not have the authority to do that.
On June 25, 2026, Rep. Suzanne Bonamici and sixteen colleagues introduced three articles of impeachment against Secretary McMahon. The charges are specific. That she illegally dismantled the department. That she illegally transferred its duties to other agencies without congressional approval. And that she made false and misleading statements to Congress.
The record behind those charges is not in dispute. The department lost about half its staff to mass layoffs. $900 million in research contracts were cancelled. The operations of multiple offices and more than 100 programs were moved to other federal agencies, again with no vote in Congress. The Office for Civil Rights was cut so deeply that a court ordered some of its staff restored. Mental health grants and TRIO college-access awards, which help low-income and first-generation students, were withheld.
The people calling in distress are parents of students with disabilities, because the offices that enforce their children's rights are the ones being hollowed out.
I am asking you to do three specific things.
First, co-sponsor and vote for the articles of impeachment against Secretary McMahon. A cabinet officer who dismantles an agency Congress built, against the law, should answer for it.
Second, use your committee's oversight and spending power to halt and reverse the transfer of programs out of the department until Congress votes on them.
Third, demand the immediate release of the withheld TRIO and mental health grants that students are losing right now.
If a secretary can erase an agency that Congress created, the power to make law and the power of the purse mean nothing. Please defend them, and the students who depend on this department.
