By Kevin Liptak and Sunlen Serfaty

(CNN) — President Donald Trump on Thursday signed an executive order to begin dismantling the US Department of Education, seeking to fulfill decades of conservative ambition to get rid of the agency, but raising new questions for the country’s millions of public schools, student-loan holders and parents.

No president in modern history has tried to close down a Cabinet-level agency. Shutting down the department wholesale would require an act of Congress, which created the agency in 1979. Trump officials acknowledge they don’t have the necessary votes to dissolve the department that way; instead, the order Trump signed Thursday instructed Education Secretary Linda McMahon to take “all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education and return education authority to the states.”

Speaking in the East Room, surrounded by school children in uniforms sitting at classroom desks, Trump said, “We’re going to shut it down, and shut it down as quickly as possible.”

How precisely the components of the Education Department would be dismantled wasn’t precisely clear.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said ahead of Thursday’s signing that the order would move to “greatly minimize the agency,” but that certain “critical functions” like student loans and administering grants for at-risk students would remain under the agency’s umbrella.

Trump, in his remarks, said those functions would be preserved but “redistributed to various other agencies and departments that will take very good care of them.”

The discrepancy could foretell McMahon’s challenge as she works to carry out Trump’s order. While she has fully endorsed the mission of closing the department, she is also required by law to carry out some of its congressionally mandated functions, like administering loans and providing grants for schools in high-poverty areas.

In his remarks, Trump repeatedly cited the imperative of returning control of education to states as his rationale for shuttering the agency, along with what he said were poor test scores compared with high investment-per-student. He said under a new system – without the Education Department – schools could compete with countries in Europe and China, which he said were outcompeting the US.

“I really believe that they’ll be as good as any of them,” he said. “And then you’ll have some laggards and we’ll work with them. And we can all tell you who the laggards will be right now.”

Making what he called a “personal statement,” Trump praised teachers as “among the most important people in this country,” extending an olive branch even to those represented by labor unions who have decried Trump’s executive order.

“I don’t care if they’re in the union or not in the union. That doesn’t matter. But we’re going to take care of our teachers,” he said.

Since taking office, Trump typically signs his executive orders several-at-a-time from the Oval Office, with the actual documents often overshadowed by Trump’s remarks on other topics.

Thursday’s major event in the East Room for the education directive underscored its significance for Trump and fellow conservatives, who have long attempted to shutter the agency and move more control over public schools to individual states.

The initiative has gained momentum in recent years, driven by anger over certain policies and local schools’ curriculums combined with discontent over school closures during the coronavirus pandemic. A parents’ rights movement pushed back on measures in schools meant to address LGBT rights and promote diversity, equality and inclusion.

Almost all public school funding in the United States is provided by states and localities, with those governments exercising control over curriculums. The Education Department is responsible for administering federal funding for students with disabilities, who fall under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, along with Title I funding for low-income schools and federal student loan payments like Pell Grants.

“When it comes to student loans and Pell Grants, those will still be run out of the Department of Education, but we don’t need to be spending more than $3 trillion over the course of a few decades on a department that’s clearly failing in its initial intention to educate our students,” Leavitt told reporters earlier Thursday.

“Any critical functions of the department such as that will remain, but again, we’re greatly reducing the scale and the size of this department,” she added.

Trump has argued publicly for moving some of the agency’s responsibilities to other departments within the federal government. For example, he has previously said oversight of the student loan program could fall under the Small Business Administration, which oversees separate business loans.

But the Education Department has struggled to find a viable alternative agency to manage its massive student debt portfolio, according to two sources involved in the discussions. The loan portfolio totals a staggering $1.8 trillion in debt, with an estimated 40% of loans past due, the sources said, up from what CNN has previously reported based on publicly available information.

Already, nearly half of the Education Department’s employees have been put on notice they could be laid off. And a number of programs meant to promote diversity and put in place protections for transgender students have been rolled back.

As news of the president’s upcoming order was spreading on Wednesday evening, staff at the department who were among the 1,300 recently terminated received an email from the chief human capital officer instructing them to schedule a time to collect personal items from their office and to return government devices.

Each employee will be given 30 minutes to pack up their items, and they were instructed to provide their own boxes and tape to pack up their items.

Some long-time department employees were reeling from the long-anticipated order and still trying to figure out what it would portend for their work and their jobs.

A current department employee said that many within the agency feel that the order is a “slap in the face and kicking us while we’re down” after the massive layoffs.

“This EO underscores that Linda McMahon, Donald Trump, and the rest of this administration remain ignorant about what our agency actually does and how their efforts to dismantle it will negatively affect kids and families throughout the country,” the employee, who requested anonymity for fear of retribution, told CNN.

On the campaign trail, Trump promised that he would take steps to dismantle the agency once in office again, pointing to the department as a sign of federal overreach and tied it to culture war issues.

“I told Linda (McMahon), ‘Linda, I hope you do a great job in putting yourself out of a job.’ I want her to put herself out of a job – Education Department,” Trump said in February.

Like many of Trump’s executive actions, this one is likely to face legal challenges. Unions representing teachers decried the action ahead of Trump’s event.

“Donald Trump and Elon Musk have aimed their wrecking ball at public schools and the futures of the 50 million students in rural, suburban, and urban communities across America, by dismantling public education to pay for tax handouts for billionaires,” National Education Association President Becky Pringle said in a statement.

“If successful, Trump’s continued actions will hurt all students by sending class sizes soaring, cutting job training programs, making higher education more expensive and out of reach for middle class families, taking away special education services for students with disabilities, and gutting student civil rights protections,” she said.

This story has been updated with Trump signing the executive order.

CNN’s Kayla Tausche contributed to this report.

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