Trump was just talking about getting rid of the department of education entirely and now appoints Linda McMahon. Even for Trump this is strange
They can't outright "close" the Department of Education, but they can undermine it by slashing its funding, restructure it to create inefficiencies, rewrite rules to strip its authority, appoint leaders who oppose its core mission, and assign yes men to push their agenda. A president doesn't have the sole authority to abolish federal agencies, and the architects of Project 2025 know this, so they're opting for the next best thing: making them so dysfunctional that they become ineffective.