Inside Linda McMahon’s effort to dismantle the Department of Education : NPR

DAVE DAVIES, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. I’m Dave Davies. In filling out his Cabinet, President Trump has tapped some colorful characters, sometimes TV hosts and talking heads whose views appeal to him. His pick for secretary of education, Linda McMahon, has television experience of a different kind, talking smack in pro wrestling rings, often with her husband, wrestling mogul Vince McMahon, known for his showmanship and allegations of sexual abuse.

Our guest, writer Zach Helfand, has written a profile of Linda McMahon in The New Yorker. She is no clown, he finds. She proved to be a savvy businesswoman as CEO of the family wrestling empire. And when Trump tapped her to head the Small Business Administration in his first term, Helfand writes she was a steady and effective leader. Many describe her as capable, kind and empathetic. She came to her new role with little experience in education policy but an unwavering commitment to Trump’s goal of eliminating the department altogether.

While only Congress can formally abolish the Cabinet-level agency, Helfand writes that McMahon is systematically dismantling the department, cutting some 50% of its employees and transferring its functions elsewhere, with dramatic impacts on education research, student loan management and programs for students with disabilities. He also finds that her experience with professional wrestling and her volatile husband was good preparation for her turn to MAGA politics.

Zach Helfand became a staff writer at The New Yorker in 2025. Previously, he was an editor of the magazine’s Talk of the Town feature, a member of its fact-checking department and a reporter for the Los Angeles Times. His new story is “The Executor (ph): How Professional Wrestling Prepared Linda McMahon For Trump’s Cabinet.”

Zach Helfand, welcome to FRESH AIR.

ZACH HELFAND: Thanks for having me.

DAVIES: Professional wrestling is more than just battles in the ring, you know, with pile driving and swinging chairs. And this is something that you describe well. I mean, it’s also stories – right? – with characters and a plot with dialogue in the ring and videos that are shown on the big screens in the arenas of live or recorded confrontations involving the characters. And you write that Vince McMahon – you know, Linda’s husband – played a character in these conflicts that were played out in these arenas. You want to describe his character?

HELFAND: Linda McMahon described wrestling as like a soap opera. Basically, everyone in the family played a version of themselves, a fictionalized, ostensibly, version of themselves. So Mr. McMahon was this evil billionaire character. He played the evil owner of wrestling who was always trying to seduce the female wrestlers. He disdained the fans. And this was supposed to be fiction, and in many ways, it was. But even Vince has acknowledged that he really enjoyed playing this character because in many ways, this character was true to real life. In real life, he was philandering. He had many affairs. He was ruthless, sometimes contractually, with his wrestlers. A lot of the things that he was kind of having fun with in the ring ended up being true to reality. And a lot of that was his relationship with his wife, Linda McMahon.

Linda was kind of a reluctant participant in the family drama. The two adult kids, Shane and Stephanie, played a part in the ring before she did, and they were pretty enthusiastic about it. She didn’t really want to get into the ring. She was never interested in that. She wasn’t a natural performer. But eventually, it became apparent that the wife, the mother figure, was missing. So it really called for her to play a role in the ring. And a lot of what went on between Vince and Linda was Vince would mistreat Linda in a lot of ways. He would cheat on her with other wrestlers in the ring.

The most famous story line came when Vince asked Linda for a divorce in the ring, and Linda suffers a nervous breakdown and goes into this kind of catatonic state. And for weeks, Vince would wheel her out into the ring and inflict these humiliations upon her, where he would make out or grope another female wrestler. And the denouement of all this was that at Wrestlemania, the big pay-per-view event, Vince was fighting his son Shane and was about to smash a trash can over his head when Linda, who he had kind of wheeled out into the ring, she wakes up and kicks him in the groin.

DAVIES: Oh, boy, that’s getting a crowd into it, I’m sure. Well, you know, I have a little clip of one of these performances, not the one you described, but it gives us a little bit of a sense. This is – I think it’s the year 2000, and Linda is – she’s not in a coma there. She’s standing up. She’s in the ring with three big wrestlers. One of them is The Rock, I believe. And her husband, Vince, is a few feet away with the two adult children, Stephanie and Shane. Both have microphones so the crowd can hear them, and they’re in the middle of the some ongoing feud. And we hear their exchange. We’ll also hear a little bit of the broadcast announcers professing shock and surprise at what they’re seeing. So let’s just get a sense of this. Vince McMahon speaks first.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

VINCE MCMAHON: (As character) But let me tell you exactly, Linda McMahon, who you truly are. And all you truly are is a meddlesome…

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: (As character) Uh-oh.

V MCMAHON: (As character) …Goody Two-shoes…

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: (As character) Whoa.

V MCMAHON: (As character) …Castrating…

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: (As character) Castrating? What?

(CHEERING)

V MCMAHON: (As character) A shrew of a wife.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: (As character) Shrew?

V MCMAHON: (As character) That’s really who you really are, OK? So just get the record straight.

LINDA MCMAHON: (As character) Well, Vince, before I was so rudely interrupted when you came out, I was about to say that these three men, these fine competitors, are going to join forces as one half of a six-men tag team at King of the Ring.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: (As character) What?

DAVIES: And there it is. Vince McMahon and Linda McMahon in the ring. I don’t know what the King of the Ring is, but the crowd obviously did. Boy, they really get into this. They hate Vince. They love her, right?

HELFAND: That’s the setup, is Vince plays the heel, the evil character. And eventually, almost always, the heel gets his comeuppance. And what’s really interesting about this psychodrama in the ring was wrestling is supposed to be real in a way. Like, this is the WWE. This is professional wrestling. This is not UFC, where they’re actually fighting and it’s a real competition. This is all scripted. But for a long time, wrestling – and they still do, in many ways, plays with what’s real and what’s fake. And I think what you can sense from the crowd is that they hit on something that was really, really pure entertainment.

DAVIES: Let’s talk about kind of how this all got going. Tell us a little bit about how Vince and Linda met and how they got together, what their early lives were like.

HELFAND: Vince and Linda both grew up in New Bern, North Carolina. Vince, as Linda describes him, was kind of the bad boy. He would get into fights and would be a little bit dangerous, and that appealed to her. Linda was the church-going, kind of civic-minded good student in town. Vince first saw her, kind of improbably, in church. Vince didn’t go to church very often. Linda sang in the choir. Vince was a few years older. Linda was 13 at the time. And they got together and got married at 17. Actually, she bought her prom dress and her wedding dress on the same day.

They eventually went to college together, and after college, Linda became a paralegal, and Vince went into the promotion business. So he was promoting things like Evel Knievel jumps and Muhammad Ali kind of exhibition wrestling-boxing crossover matches. And he had these big, bold ideas and wasn’t able to corral them into something that’s profitable. They were really creative and, as promotions, interesting, but on the business side, he couldn’t figure out a way to consistently make that work. And Linda, it turned out, had the mind for that.

DAVIES: Right. They went bankrupt at one point – had really nothing. And then she got into the business and turned out to be good at it. You write that Linda actually caused the transformation of wrestling by changing the way it is regarded under the law from a sport to entertainment. Why was that significant?

HELFAND: For the longest time, wrestling would not acknowledge that it was fake. And what that meant from a business standpoint was if this is a real sport and competition, you have regulation, you have safety laws, you have taxes, you have fees that you wouldn’t pay if this were just theater. And so just from a business standpoint, Linda McMahon began lobbying state legislatures that this is theater. This is not sport. You don’t have to regulate us like sport. And that would save them some money. What happened from that is this really strange and compelling artistic flourishing. It turned into a new kind of art form where you are playing with what’s real and what’s not.

DAVIES: The other thing that was significant here was that the company that Linda and Vince own – World Wrestling Entertainment – could capture the identities of their performers, and their contracts gave the company the intellectual property rights to them, which allowed them to benefit from merchandising and other spinoffs, right?

HELFAND: That was Linda’s big moneymaking idea for the company. This is one of the most important ideas she had for the company. She – in college, she studied French and wanted to be a teacher, but she got pregnant right before they both graduated and needed to get a job quickly and so went to this law firm. And she was a paralegal working on IP cases in a lot of cases, and she learned through that how important IP can be.

DAVIES: Intellectual property, right?

HELFAND: Intellectual property – IP. And so what she did with the WWE was write into the contracts of the wrestlers that, you know, we’re creating this character together. You know, the wrestler and the company are creating this character, and the company has the rights to the character’s name, image, likeness – all those things that you would sell as merchandising or marketing materials or whatever it might be. And that ended up being one of the core parts of the business. And when this business grew into a billion-dollar business, that is a large reason why. An executive who ran a rival wrestling company said, it’s an IP company just like Disney, and credited Linda McMahon for turning it into that.

DAVIES: There were an effective team in business. What was the marriage like?

HELFAND: One of the big pastimes of WWE employees of, you know, several years ago, was to speculate on what kept them together. Vince, as he has acknowledged, would have many affairs. He had affairs with secretaries. He had affairs with almost anyone he could. And Linda, at one point, found out about an affair during a trial. Vince was on trial for steroid use in the WWE, and through that trial, it emerged kind of tangentially that Vince was having another affair with another secretary. And Linda was at the trial and could be seen crying when she found that out. I think this took a toll on her, but they stayed together, and the employees would speculate, why is that?

A lot of people thought that there was a lot of love there – that there was this long history that they had. And Vince was this huge, dynamic figure, and that’s exciting to be around. But I think also, it can’t be discounted that they were running this multibillion-dollar business together, and staying together, they knew, was best for the business. So there came a point when they stopped living together. They were not divorced. They’re still not divorced, although they say they’re separated now. But for years, they were running the business together, but they weren’t living together.

DAVIES: Right. We should also note that some women accused Vince later on of sexual abuse – and rape in one case. And he made payments in the millions of dollars, which became an issue, right?

HELFAND: Vince, as early as, I believe, the early ’90s, was accused by a female referee of rape and more recently was accused by a woman that he hired for the WWE of just horrible, horrible sexual abuses over months. And there were payments that the company made to these women that essentially was hush money – that they were paying them to not talk about these allegations, which, I should mention – Vince has denied all of these allegations. And a lot of these payments came when Linda McMahon was the CEO of the company.

DAVIES: We need to take a break here. Let me reintroduce you. We are speaking with Zach Helfand. He is a staff writer for The New Yorker. His new article is “The Executor: How Professional Wrestling Prepared Linda McMahon For Trump’s Cabinet.” We’ll talk more after this break. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF DAN AUERBACH SONG, “HEARTBROKEN, IN DISREPAIR”)

DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR, and we’re speaking with Zach Helfand. He is a staff writer for The New Yorker. His new article is about President Trump’s secretary of education, Linda McMahon. Its title is “The Executor: How Professional Wrestling Prepared Linda McMahon For Trump’s Cabinet.”

Donald Trump had a long relationship with Vince and Linda McMahon. He liked wrestling. They eventually made him a character in the World Wrestling Entertainment shows, right?

HELFAND: He played, as they did, a version of himself. He played Donald Trump. He played the nice billionaire to Vince McMahon’s evil billionaire, and they called their battle the Battle of the Billionaires, although it was unclear at the time if either one of them were billionaires. This is around the time when Trump, who had long claimed he was a billionaire, was actually becoming a billionaire through “The Apprentice” and other ventures. They played up the fact that they’re both really rich, and they made a wager in the ring where each staked a wrestler and the winner would shave the head of the loser. So Trump appeared at WrestleMania and his wrestler won. He actually got in on the action. He punched – or, you know, pretended to punch, in the WWE – Vince McMahon a bit outside the ring. And his wrestler won, and he shaved Vince’s head in the middle of the ring.

He was a wrestling fan for a long time. Growing up, he was a wrestling fan. He liked a wrestler named Antonino Roca, although he called him Rocky Antonino. And when his friends, you know, in school would tell him he was wrong, he would insist that, no, that’s his name.

DAVIES: (Laughter).

HELFAND: He followed wrestling for years. He hosted WrestleMania in the very early years – some of the earliest WrestleManias. And he had this (laughter) very funny stance to wrestling where he really understood it. I think they share – wrestling and Trump share a sensibility on a really primal level, and the appeal to the crowd and the theater and the fictionalized version of yourself. But he also seemed to not totally understand what was real and fake himself.

There was the storyline in which Vince, on air, gets into a limo, which drives off and explodes. And it’s very clearly fake. This is staged. This is kind of part of the wrestling storyline falseness. But Trump called into the WWE offices after that just to make sure that Vince was OK, just to make sure that, hey, that was fake, right? So he has this, I think, really interesting relationship with the WWE where he’s both, like, a fan, where he’s imbibing it like a fan would and thinking – is this real? Is this fake? – and then he also is a character, and he knows what to play up and how to play to the crowd.

DAVIES: Well, Linda McMahon – you know, she said at one point, you note, one thing she would never do is get into politics. And then she did in 2010 and again in 2012, ran for the United States Senate as a Republican. What’s your sense of why she decided to do that?

HELFAND: She also said she would never get into the ring. The two things she said she would never do would be get into the ring and get into politics. And she got into the ring first, and then after that, she got into politics. And the way she describes it is that she saw problems in the country and in the state, and she could address them. But I think a lot of it had to do with the fact that she had gained more and more power and authority within the WWE, and she saw that she was good at running the organization. And I think she also saw that she enjoyed running a big organization. And the next step for someone like that, when you’re one of the more powerful people in the state with this huge corporation, is to get into politics.

She ran as a Republican but not as a far-right Republican in any sense. She was a moderate blue-state Republican. And she was actually asked in – during one of the runs whether she would support the elimination of departments such as the Education Department, and she said she wouldn’t. She called the idea radical. She was a moderate Republican.

DAVIES: She did spend nearly $50 million of her own money, or her – yeah, I guess her family money on the races, even though she lost. And that got her the attention of, you know, Republican leaders across the country. And then when Trump ran for president, she was on board with him, right?

HELFAND: Linda McMahon was spending money, and to such scale, on a Senate race at a time when that was not at all the norm. She set records for the amount that she spent on Senate races. She spent $50 million of her own money on each race, and that’s normal now, but 15 years ago, that was very much an aberration. And it was such a part of the campaign and such a large amount of money that Vince McMahon actually, in the WWE, had a skit before her first election night. And he appears in the skit in a coma, and one of the doctors mentions that his wife has spent $50 million on the campaign. And Vince, in the skit, suddenly wakes up when he hears that. And he says, $50 million on what?

But what that did for her – she lost by 12 points in both elections. They were identical losses, and they were not particularly close. But she spent all of this money on these two losses. And what that signaled to the Republican establishment was that this is a person who has a lot of money and who is willing to spend it for the Republican cause. And so that turned her into a sought-after donor. And so in 2016, when Trump came around, she initially didn’t support him explicitly. She was a Christie supporter. She wanted Chris Christie to win the nomination.

And when Trump was making a lot of his comments about women that were – people viewed as very offensive, Linda McMahon came out and criticized those comments. But pretty quickly after he won the nomination, she recognized that this is a person that you could attach yourself to. This is much like Vince. This is someone who’s volatile, who has a genius for inflaming the crowds in many ways. And this is someone who, I think, she knew how to handle. And so she basically, from that point onward, was a staunch supporter of his and one of his biggest donors.

DAVIES: When Trump won in 2016, he appointed Linda McMahon head of the Small Business Administration. You say that she was a steady and effective leader.

HELFAND: Linda McMahon was a very good administrator, and she knew how to run an organization. And so when there was a lot of circus kind of atmosphere within the administration, within that first administration, she was someone who was competent, who had no scandals and who people genuinely liked as the leader of the administration. She would give people room to operate. She didn’t micromanage. She trusted people. And she kind of set clear expectations and trusted people to get them done, and she did. And she got high marks from employees. The job satisfaction among Small Business Administration employees actually went up significantly during her tenure there. Some of the outcomes with getting loans out the door and the comments you would hear from small business owners who would deal with her were pretty positive across the board.

DAVIES: We need to take another break here. Let me reintroduce you. We are speaking with Zach Helfand. He’s a staff writer at The New Yorker. His new article is titled “The Executor: How Professional Wrestling Prepared Linda McMahon For Trump’s Cabinet.” He’ll be back to talk more after this short break. I’m Dave Davies, and this is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF ANTHONY BRAXTON’S “22-M (OPUS 58)”)

DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR. I’m Dave Davies. We’re speaking with New Yorker staff writer Zach Helfand about his new profile of Linda McMahon, President Trump’s Secretary of Education. McMahon had a long career as an executive in professional wrestling, at times engaging in theatrics in the ring with her husband, wrestling promoter Vince McMahon. Linda McMahon was a well-regarded head of the Small Business Administration in Trump’s first term. As Secretary of Education, Helfand says McMahon has energetically embraced Trump’s charge to dismantle the department in preparation for its ultimate elimination. Helfand’s new article is “The Executor: How Professional Wrestling Prepared Linda McMahon For Trump’s Cabinet.”

When Trump lost the election in 2020, do you know if she joined in his claims that the election was stolen? Did she embrace that?

HELFAND: She didn’t talk about it at all. This is, I think, one of her skills, is she surrounds herself by often very bombastic people and knows, you know, when called upon how to be bombastic herself in the ring or if she’s negotiating with universities. But she also knows when to keep quiet. And so when all this was going on, she was mum. She didn’t talk about the election.

DAVIES: But it’s interesting. You write that after the election, she had an Oval Office meeting – this is in 2020 – with a couple of other high-ranking White House staffers and talked about forming a think tank to continue Donald Trump’s policy agenda. They formed the America First Policy Institute, which was kind of less well known than Project 2025, which was run by the Heritage Foundation, which was actually, in some ways, more influential, wasn’t it?

HELFAND: It was, or it turned out to be. When Trump lost the election and when it was clear that he had lost, he was politically toxic at that point, and she made a bet that he either would make a return or his politics would make a return. So she and Brooke Rollins, who’s now the agricultural secretary, and Larry Kudlow, who’s now a Fox News host, they created the America First Policy Institute, this think tank. And a lot of attention during the campaign was paid to Heritage, the Heritage Foundation, and to Project 2025, which was their blueprint for how to staff and how to run and what policies should be implemented in a second Trump administration. And that also became this toxic political force in the campaign to such a point where Trump had to distance himself from Project 2025 during the campaign because it was hurting him at the polls.

And what AFPI did, instead of being very vocal about their project, like Project 2025 was, AFPI was very quiet about it. And so policy-wise, there was not a lot of daylight between Project 2025 and Heritage and AFPI. But what they were competing over was who were going to get these very limited number of very powerful jobs in the administration, who was going to staff the administration. And AFPI positioned himself very, I think, smartly and savvily by being the quiet ones. And so when it became time to staff the administration, sure, there were a lot of people from Heritage that went into the administration, and a lot of the policies got enacted because they shared a lot of the policies. But the people implementing the policies more often were those from AFPI. AFPI sent about half of its staff into the administration. It staffed, I think, seven of the original Cabinet secretaries, including Linda McMahon, and were the ones that ultimately grabbed more power.

DAVIES: So the second term starts when Trump wins reelection in 2024. What do you know about Trump’s conversations with Linda McMahon about what role she would have?

HELFAND: So Linda McMahon was one of his biggest donors. She ran his transition with Howard Lutnik. They co-chaired the transition together, and Trump talked to her, and he said, what position would you want? And she said, Mr. President, I would love to be the commerce secretary. That’s what she had her eye on for years. And what she says that Trump told her was, great, thank you for that. I’m actually going to make you the secretary of education. And she described to me that she tells the president that, Mr. President, I don’t have much of a background in education. And he said, that’s OK. What I want you to do is kill the department. He said that you will be successful as the secretary of education when you put yourself out of a job.

DAVIES: Wow. Not many Cabinet appointments go that way, but she took it on. Let’s talk a little about the Department of Education. You know, since the 1980s, conservatives have talked about eliminating it. Ronald Reagan did. Of course, that didn’t happen. And I think the image among conservatives is that the Department of Education is this liberal elitist bunch of bureaucrats issuing politically correct edicts about what kids should learn. What does the Department of Education actually do?

HELFAND: Most of what the Department of Education does is distribute funding that’s been appropriated by Congress. So Congress says, we’re spending, you know, X billion dollars on these educational programs. And it’s up to the Department of Education to distribute that to states and to make sure that those are being implemented in line with the law. And on top of that, there are other programs that they run and other functions that they have that have really become the target of conservative ire. And I think the biggest example of that is the Office of Civil Rights. Anytime there’s a civil rights complaint, the Office of Civil Rights is in charge of investigating that and reaching a settlement with the school district or the university or the college to make sure that this infraction stops and doesn’t happen again.

DAVIES: So that would be a complaint of someone who says, you haven’t provided proper educational instruction for my child with disabilities, or there’s an example of prejudice, antisemitism or racism, that kind of thing.

HELFAND: Exactly. A lot of these have to do with disability access, but there are sexual harassment. There’s racial discrimination, things like that. And this for a long time was not very controversial. Clarence Thomas once led the Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights. But recently, there were a couple of policies that OCR was in charge of – the Office of Civil Rights was in charge of – that conservatives really hated. And the first was under Obama, there was guidance issued to universities and schools about how to adjudicate sexual harassment claims. And they said that the standard of proof in those claims needs to be what’s called the preponderance of evidence standard, which means if someone is accused of sexual harassment, they are held liable or responsible for that if it’s found that it’s more likely than not that they committed that infraction or they committed harassment or assault or whatever it might be. Instead of using a standard, like in the criminal justice system, like beyond a reasonable doubt. So conservatives viewed that as unfair and as an overreach.

And then also there was this push during the Biden administration more fervently to protect transgender rights, which conservatives viewed as an overstep. They viewed this as a bureaucracy that’s unelected, that is kind of grabbing power and pushing social changes that conservatives disagree with. And this, and then also, the second thing that really inflamed conservatives was the attempt to cancel student debt, which they viewed as basically a giveaway to young, mostly liberal voters. And those two things combined took this movement to dismantle the department from kind of something that was just rhetorical and talked about to something that they wanted to actually implement.

DAVIES: We need to take another break here. Let me reintroduce you.

We are speaking with Zach Helfand. He is a staff writer at The New Yorker. His new article is “The Executor: How Professional Wrestling Prepared Linda McMahon For Trump’s Cabinet.” We’ll continue our conversation in just a moment. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR, and we’re speaking with Zach Helfand. He’s a staff writer at The New Yorker. He has a new article about President Trump’s secretary of education, Linda McMahon. Its title is “The Executor: How Professional Wrestling Prepared Linda McMahon For Trump’s Cabinet.”

So Linda McMahon becomes head of the Department of Education, and she has 4,000 employees and all of these different programs. Does she take some time to tour it, learn about what it does?

HELFAND: She took about three hours before talking about how she wanted to make this the final mission of the department. Of course, she had the transition process to think about how she might want to implement the dismantling of the department. And then, within the week of her confirmation, she issued these sweeping layoffs that hit the department.

DAVIES: DOGE – you know, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency – had already taken a big swing with the axe at Department of Education. Between those two efforts, what kind of difference did it make to the department and just in terms of employment?

HELFAND: It made a huge difference. Giving an actual figure has been difficult because it’s fluctuated, because a lot of this was – it – courts have said that this was not carried out legally, some of these layoffs, and so people have kind of been in limbo. They’re on administrative leave. Sometimes they’re brought back by courts. Sometimes they’re brought back by the department because they’ve found that they are having trouble meeting these crucial functions. They just don’t have the manpower. But they laid off about – you know, if you want to give a ballpark, about half of the staff has been out of work. And some of the staff are being paid not to work because they haven’t been able to fire them. So over the first year, they spent about $30 million or so paying some of the employees just not to come to work.

DAVIES: And that’s because they have civil service protection, and there needs to be a cause to fire them. And that’s in dispute, so they’re not working, but they’re being paid.

HELFAND: Exactly. Courts have said that you’re not allowed to fire them. Either you’re not allowed to fire them in the way that you did, or we’re going to issue a – kind of an injunction. You have to leave them employed while we adjudicate this.

DAVIES: You know, one of the things that the Department of Education does is a lot of research on educational outcomes and achievement. You know, they track things by state, do a lot of regular reports on it. There’s a national report card, I think, they do, and this is through the Institute of Educational Sciences. What was the impact of the cuts on those efforts?

HELFAND: This was a DOGE cut, so this happened before Linda McMahon took over. And DOGE came in and cut about – I think it was 90% of the Institute of Education Sciences staff. The Institute of Education Sciences has what’s called the Nation’s Report Card. So when you hear about falling grades in math or reading among fourth-graders or eighth-graders or whatever it might be, that comes from the Nation’s Report Card. They’re assessing how well we’re doing at teaching kids.

And this was actually kind of the – a stated reason why Trump and Linda McMahon want to gut the Education Department. They cite these falling test scores. Test scores have fallen basically since the pandemic, and they have said that this is the fault of the Education Department – that we’re spending all this money and they’re not properly educating the nation’s kids. And this has been falling since the pandemic, and it probably has a lot to do with the pandemic itself. Could have to do with cell phones. I think you’d probably want to dig in more to the causes. But they have cited the falling test scores as the reason they want to get rid of the department. And then DOGE comes along and guts 90% of the institute that’s responsible for the Nation’s Report Card and makes it a lot more difficult for them to continue doing these assessments.

DAVIES: Another function of the department is managing federal student aid. I don’t know exactly what it does, but that’s been transferred to the Treasury Department.

HELFAND: Yes. So the Federal Student Aid office is in charge of administering student loans. They have a portfolio at this point of $1.7 trillion of outstanding loans that they administer, so this is a huge part of the economy. And I think this illustrates how difficult the process of moving one office from one department to another Cabinet department are. It’s not as easy as just kind of moving personnel. It’s systems. It’s processes. It’s legal privileges that also have to be ironed out.

So the Federal Student Aid office, for example, has been working with these really antiquated systems for a long time. And people who have worked in the office argue that this is one of the reasons why, you know, people think that this department is inefficient in some ways. They argue with – in a lot of cases, this is because they’re working just on really old platforms. So, for example, the Federal Student Aid office – they have a lot of their records, millions and millions of records of these loans, that are kept on microfiche in Nebraska in a bunker. And so the people who have worked in the office told me that moving it from Education to Treasury is not so simple as just kind of clicking a button. It’s – you have to figure out how to work with these old antiquated records. There are a lot of these very granular, very technical difficulties that come from moving offices.

DAVIES: You know, I covered government for a lot of years at the local level, and I always found that whenever I would look into an agency that is the subject of a lot of criticism, you’d often find, yeah, there’s valid criticisms. But there’s also a legitimate function, you know, a need that it meets for some people, and some dedicated people, you know, working to try and help the mission. Did you get any sense that Linda McMahon ever came to see the value of what the Department of Education staff does?

HELFAND: I have talked to a lot of people who’ve worked in the Education Department, or are still working in the Education Department, and have said that their level of contact with the secretary under McMahon’s leadership is as low as it’s ever been. Even under Betsy DeVos, they would hear from her. She would interact with them. And Linda McMahon hasn’t had the same level of communication with everyone. This was very different from how she ran the Small Business Administration. But it seemed like, to people who worked there, that she came in with this goal of dismantling the department. And so there – the coming in and acclimating herself, there was not really a period of that before she started making these big, wholesale cuts.

DAVIES: And you’re right that maybe because she really hasn’t learned so much about it, she, at times, sounds less than coherent in discussing it. You want to give us an example or two of that?

HELFAND: So she’s an intelligent person, and she’s an eager student, and she, I think, has tried to ramp herself up as quick as possible, but this is a big, complicated department with lots and lots of different offices that do lots of different things, and there’s just not enough time to fully get up to speed. So she’s had flubs where she’s forgotten the name of the law that protects students with disabilities. That’s the IDEA Act. She forgot what it stood for in an interview. And the most famous flub that she had was at a conference, she was talking about how she wanted students to have A1 education. She thought A1 education was really important. And people didn’t know what she was saying at first. She was talking about AI. She talked about how important AI education is, but she was calling it A1 education, like the steak sauce (laughter).

DAVIES: She misread (laughter) – she simply misread the term.

HELFAND: Right.

DAVIES: We need to take another break here. Let me reintroduce you. We are speaking with Zach Helfand. He is a staff writer at The New Yorker. His new article is “The Executor: How Professional Wrestling Prepared Linda McMahon For Trump’s Cabinet.” We’ll continue our conversation in just a moment. This is FRESH AIR.

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DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR, and we’re speaking with Zach Helfand. He’s a staff writer at The New Yorker. He has a new article about President Trump’s secretary of education, Linda McMahon. Its title is “The Executor: How Professional Wrestling Prepared Linda McMahon For Trump’s Cabinet.”

One of the things you write about is the department’s assault on elite universities. This was an interesting episode. There was a Joint Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism. That was not part of the Education Department, but it was sort of a vehicle for this. Tell us about how that worked and how Linda McMahon was involved.

HELFAND: Linda McMahon is on the Joint Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism. Usually, the way the government deals with antisemitism at schools is through the Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights. The Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights was one of these offices that received pretty devastating staff cuts. Offices that dealt most often and had the most expertise at dealing with antisemitism investigations were among the offices that were just gutted by the layoffs. And so what you would normally see – the pace of these investigations and settlements that you would see under past administrations, like the Biden administration, just fell off. And one of the things that filled that void was this Joint Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism.

The task force was where a lot of these investigations that you would see in the news originated from. So that’s, like, the Columbia investigation and settlement, Brown. Those universities.

DAVIES: So a lot of this came out of the campus protests after the October 7 attack and the Israeli initiative in Gaza, right?

HELFAND: That’s right. And this was one of the things that really inflamed the right, was they viewed universities as this hotbed for what they view as radical liberal activism that is hostile to conservatives and was also fomenting this environment of antisemitism on campuses. And so that’s where this task force sprung out of, ostensibly, was to try to combat that.

DAVIES: Right. You write that Linda McMahon, in pursuing this, had an ability to bluster transparently while keeping a straight face – kind of something that she learned in the World Wrestling Entertainment – and that this was useful in negotiations.

HELFAND: So I talked to May Mailman, who was a deputy under Stephen Miller and oversaw the White House’s negotiations with universities. And what she told me, very transparently, was that there’s a lot of people in the administration who will just say, we want to destroy these universities. We want to get rid of them if possible. And what she said is Linda McMahon doesn’t necessarily believe that – that she values higher education, but she is willing to hold this line with places like Columbia that if you don’t fall in line, if you don’t do what we say, then I’m willing to destroy your university if that’s what it takes to get reforms through.

And so I think what she learned from wrestling is to kind of say all this with a straight face. I think it would be very damaging if you just kind of ended a number of the country’s most prestigious Ivy League universities. But she was able to kind of say this and then also use her interpersonal skills and warmth to deal more directly with university presidents and actually have, like, real, substantive conversations.

One of her strengths, May Mailman told me, was that she’s just a normal person. I think there’s a lot of people in the White House who are hard-liners, who are very fervent, and Linda McMahon is more normal. So she – even though she can stake out this pretty hard-line negotiating stance, she’s able to play something like a good cop within this atmosphere.

DAVIES: Do you have a sense of how her staff feel about this commitment to abolishing the department? It would be demoralizing for a lot of people, I think, to think, your goal is to shut me down.

HELFAND: It depends on which part of the staff you’re talking about. The political appointees are thrilled. One of her deputy chief of staffs is Lindsey Burke, who was the author of the education chapter of Project 2025, which outlined a lot of these steps that you can take to dismantle the department. Staff members like that are thrilled. I think the rank-and-file staff feel insulted. There’s been a lot of rhetoric about how they’re lazy or they are somehow gaming the system. And I think a lot of them feel like they’ve devoted a large chunk of their life to serving students and they feel like they are being disrespected. They are being laid off in large numbers. They’ve had their lives uprooted in some cases. And so, yeah, there – there’s a lot of fear and there’s a lot of anger there.

DAVIES: What’s your sense of how comfortable she is being the hatchet woman here? Is she a happy warrior?

HELFAND: I think she is. I think she believes in the mission, and I believe she is OK with being ruthless when necessary. I think she likes being this warm, friendly person, but when necessary, she’s fine kind of wielding a hatchet. And she has tumblers in her office that are inscribed with – I believe it says shut it down or something along those lines. She truly believes in this mission, or at least is projecting the image of such.

DAVIES: Donald Trump and Linda McMahon cannot eliminate the Department of Education. Only Congress can do that. They know that. It – they don’t have the votes to do it now. I would require 60 votes in Congress. What’s your sense of the relationship between these steps to, you know, reduce the department, to strip it down, and its ultimate goal?

HELFAND: So what Linda McMahon says, this is kind of a proof of concept that if they can move all of these offices to different department agencies and show that it works, then they can convince Congress to shut down the department. I don’t think they’re ever going to convince enough Democrats to shut down the department, at least in the way that the Senate is currently constructed.

So I talked to people about what this project actually is, and I think part of it is – one hypothesis is that if you can hamper the functioning of enough offices within the department, then you can point at the Federal Student Aid office, for example, and say that this isn’t working. And I talked with some staffers in Congress who say, you know, offices like that were working, and, you know, you’re expecting to point at that and say, now it’s not working because we – all these staff cuts, and expect Congress to say, OK, we’re going to shut it down. But that’s one hypothesis.

Another is that this really is about power, and they view the Education Department as having accumulated too much power and doing things that conservatives hate. So if you can just hamstring the department enough you can make it really difficult for a future Democratic administration to enact these sorts of policies that Republicans have hated. And then also, I think she’s in favor of school privatization. One person she invited to sit right behind her at the confirmation has said that she doesn’t want any students in public school. I think hampering the department opens more doors. This is what Miguel Cardona, who was Biden’s education secretary, told me – that hampering the department opens the door toward more privatization as well.

DAVIES: She and Vince have two adult children – Stephanie and Shane. Does she have any relationship – she or her children – with World Wrestling Entertainment, which I guess is what the company was?

HELFAND: They still have a stake in the company, which has gone through sales since Linda and Vince were running it. Shane was kind of held up as – by Vince at times, or hinted at as his successor, as his heir to running the company. Ultimately, Stephanie, the daughter, was the one who took over running, you know, the functioning of the company. She and her husband – he was a wrestler. He went by Triple H – they ran the company together. So it remained for a long time a family affair.

DAVIES: Well, Zach Helfand, thank you so much for speaking with us.

HELFAND: Thanks for having me on.

DAVIES: Zach Helfand is a staff writer at The New Yorker. His new article is titled “The Executor: How Professional Wrestling Prepared Linda McMahon For Trump’s Cabinet.”

On tomorrow’s show, historian Steven J. Ross describes the racist and antisemitic groups that formed in the U.S. after World War II to carry on Hitler’s work American style. He also writes about groups that sent people undercover to infiltrate and expose the hatemongers. His book is “The Secret War Against Hate.” I hope you can join us.

To keep up with what’s on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram – @nprfreshair.

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DAVIES: FRESH AIR’s executive producer is Sam Briger. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Meyers, Roberta Shorrock, Ann Marie Baldonado, Lauren Krenzel, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaloner, Susan Nyakundi, Anna Bauman and Nico Gonzalez-Wisler. Our digital media producer is Molly Seavy-Nesper. Therese Madden directed today’s show. For Terry Gross and Tonya Mosley, I’m Dave Davies.

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