By ANNIE MA and COLLIN BINKLEY

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump has said he wants his new education chief, Linda McMahon, to “put herself out of a job” and close the Education Department.

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McMahon was confirmed by the Senate on Monday, and an executive order to shutter the department could come as soon as this week. McMahon told employees it was the department’s “final mission” to eliminate bureaucratic bloat and turn over the agency’s authority to states.

Eliminating the department altogether would be a cumbersome task, which likely would require an act of Congress.

Already, the Trump administration has started overhauling much of the department’s work.

Trump adviser Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has cut dozens of contracts it dismissed as “woke” and wasteful. It gutted the Institute of Education Sciences, which gathers data on the nation’s academic progress, and the administration has fired or suspended scores of employees.

The agency’s main role is financial. Annually, it distributes billions in federal money to colleges and schools and manages the federal student loan portfolio. Closing the department would mean redistributing each of those duties to another agency. The Education Department also plays an important regulatory role in services for students, ranging from those with disabilities to low-income and homeless kids.

Indeed, federal education money is central to Trump’s plans for colleges and schools. Trump has vowed to cut off federal money for schools and colleges that push “critical race theory, transgender insanity, and other inappropriate racial, sexual or political content” and to reward states and schools that end teacher tenure and support universal school choice programs.

Federal funding makes up a relatively small portion of public school budgets — roughly 14%. Colleges and universities are more reliant on it, through research grants along with federal financial aid that helps students pay their tuition.

Here is a look at some of the department’s key functions, and how Trump has said he might approach them.

Student loans and financial aid

The Education Department manages approximately $1.5 trillion in student loan debt for over 40 million borrowers. It also oversees the Pell Grant, which provides aid to students below a certain income threshold, and administers the Free Application for Federal Student Aid ( FAFSA ), which universities use to allocate financial aid.

President Joe Biden’s administration made cancellation of student loans a signature effort of the department’s work. Even though Biden’s initial attempt to cancel student loans was overturned by the Supreme Court, the administration forgave over $175 billion for more than 4.8 million borrowers through a range of changes to programs it administers, such as Public Service Loan Forgiveness.

The loan forgiveness efforts have faced Republican pushback, including litigation from several GOP-led states.

Trump has criticized Biden’s efforts to cancel debt as illegal and unfair, calling it a “total catastrophe” that “taunted young people.” Trump’s plan for student debt is uncertain: He has not put out detailed plans.

Civil rights enforcement

Through its Office for Civil Rights, the Education Department conducts investigations and issues guidance on how civil rights laws should be applied, such as for LGBTQ+ students and students of color. The office also oversees a large data collection project that tracks disparities in resources, course access and discipline for students of different racial and socioeconomic groups.

Trump has suggested a different interpretation of the office’s civil rights role. Under his administration, the department has instructed the office to prioritize complaints of antisemitism above all else and has opened investigations into colleges and school sports leagues for allowing transgender athletes to compete on women’s teams.

In his campaign platform, Trump said he would pursue civil rights cases to “stop schools from discriminating on the basis of race.” He has described diversity and equity policies in education as “explicit unlawful discrimination” and said colleges that use them will pay fines and have their endowments taxed.

Trump also has pledged to exclude transgender students from Title IX protections, which affect school policies on students’ use of pronouns, bathrooms and locker rooms. Originally passed in 1972, Title IX was first used as a women’s rights law. Last year, Biden’s administration said the law forbids discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation, but a federal judge undid those protections.

College accreditation

While the Education Department does not directly accredit colleges and universities, it oversees the system by reviewing all federally recognized accrediting agencies. Institutions of higher education must be accredited to gain access to federal money for student financial aid.

Accreditation came under scrutiny from conservatives in 2022, when the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools questioned political interference at Florida public colleges and universities. Trump has said he would fire “radical left accreditors” and take applications for new accreditors that would uphold standards including “defending the American tradition” and removing “Marxist” diversity administrators.

Although the education secretary has the authority to terminate its relationship with individual accrediting agencies, it is an arduous process that has rarely been pursued. Under President Barack Obama, the department took steps to cancel accreditors for a now-defunct for-profit college chain, but the Trump administration blocked the move. The group, the Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges and Schools, was terminated by the Biden administration in 2022.

Money for schools

Much of the Education Department’s money for K-12 schools goes through large federal programs, such as Title I for low-income schools and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. Those programs support services for students with disabilities, lower class sizes with additional teaching positions, and pay for social workers and other non-teaching roles in schools.

During his campaign, Trump called for shifting those functions to the states. He has not offered details on how the agency’s core functions of sending federal money to local districts and schools would be handled.

The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, a sweeping proposal outlining a far-right vision for the country, offered a blueprint. It suggested sending oversight of programs for kids with disabilities and low-income children first to the Department of Health and Human Services, before eventually phasing out the funding and converting it to no-strings-attached grants to states.

Associated Press education writer Collin Binkley contributed to this report.

The Associated Press’ education coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

By JOHN HANNA

For more than a century, Fort Benning’s name honored a Confederate general who supported slavery. The military changed the name of the Army base in Georgia two years ago, but now the Trump administration is set on restoring the familiar one — this time for a different Benning.

The new namesake is Fred Benning, a Nebraska native awarded the military’s second-highest honor for his battlefield courage as an 18-year-old corporal in 1918, near the end of World War I. The military noted that he later served as mayor of the small Nebraska town of Neligh, but it did not mention that he ran a bakery, opted to have his Distinguished Service Cross mailed to him rather than presented at a military ceremony and didn’t discuss his wartime experiences once home. He died in 1974.

Federal law now bars the military from returning to honoring Confederates, but the move restores a name known by generations of soldiers.

Honoring a soldier from the Army’s lower ranks echoes President Donald Trump’s anti-elite appeals to working-class voters. Still, the circumstances of the change — and a similar one for North Carolina’s once-and-future Fort Bragg — have skeptics wondering whether their new namesakes are receiving much of an honor.

But Fred Benning deserves recognition, said Andrew Orr, a professor and director of the Institute for Military History at Kansas State University. Benning was part of American assaults on the toughest German defenses by soldiers who fought to take trenches and to hold them, often hand-to-hand and under clouds of poison gas, he said.

“If you’re the town that Benning was the mayor of, claim it,” Orr said in an interview Thursday. “What you can do is try and fight back against the stealing of his name by emphasizing this guy earned it.”

Renaming bases, again

The military renamed Forts Benning and Bragg, both established in 1918, as part of a broader effort by Congress to strip the names of Civil War rebels from military posts, roads, buildings and landmarks following protests over the May 2020 police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Trump, then nearing the end of his first term, opposed renaming the military bases.

In 2023, the base named for Brig. Gen. Henry L. Benning became Fort Moore to honor the late Lt. Gen. Hal Moore and his wife, Julia, for his storied military service and her advocacy for notifying families of war casualties in person rather than by telegram. The base named for Confederate Gen. Braxton Bragg became Fort Liberty and is now renamed for Army Pfc. Roland L. Bragg, a World War II paratrooper from Maine.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said last month that reverting to the previous names was about “connection to the community,” and that 2023 changes eroded the bases’ legacies.

Honoring one soldier in a highly decorated regiment

Benning was among more than 150 fellow soldiers who received the Distinguished Service Cross for their service in the 16th Infantry Regiment during World War I.

Steven Clay, an Army veteran in Leavenworth, Kansas, and historian of the association dedicated to preserving the 16th Infantry’s legacy, disagreed with removing Confederate generals’ names from bases, and he questioned why Fred Benning should receive such a high honor.

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“Clearly the motivation is the name,” Clay said. “It’s not to denigrate what he accomplished. But I think the intent is that a lot of old soldiers like me like the name Benning.”

Fred Benning settled in Neligh, Nebraska, and married in 1926, records and newspaper stories showed. Neligh is about 150 miles (241 kilometers northwest) of Omaha and now has about 1,500 residents.

Benning and his wife had two children, one of whom died in infancy. Their second child, a daughter, died in California in 2013. Phone messages left for people who appeared to be surviving relatives in Colorado and Nebraska were not returned.

Until this week’s announcement, even some longtime Neligh residents didn’t know much of Benning’s story. His portrait in a City Hall display for Neligh’s mayors shows a clean-shaven, middle-aged man wearing a business suit.

“I think it’s great,” Mayor Joe Hartz, a 45-year resident, said of the honor. “There are a lot of people who come and go in our community, and sometimes you don’t know what their history is.”

A small-town Nebraska boy enlists at 17

Benning was just 17 when he enlisted in the Army in April 1917, joining a machine gun company, according to reports at the time in The Daily News in nearby Norfolk, where he grew up.

At age 18, he had been “over the top many times,” into the deadly space between opposing trenches, according to the Daily News.

Orr said American troops were advancing “over a sea of their own dead.”

The announcement of Benning’s honor said he took command of his platoon in October 1918 after its commander was killed and led its 20 survivors through heavy fire.

Later, he didn’t talk about his experiences. In 1928, The Norfolk Press caught up with him in Neligh and reported he was “so busy making good in his bakery” that he wouldn’t discuss his wartime service, adding, “Most of the fellows who did the real fighting don’t talk about it.”

Building up a bakery and serving as mayor

Benning and his bakery popped up in small news items over the years. He led the local American Legion Post and Chamber of Commerce and helped plan for a new hospital.

In 1948, Benning ran for mayor, won easily and was reelected without opposition two years later. Before he decided not to run again in 1952, the city started trash collection for $1 a month and improved its sewers, streets and water system.

At one memorable City Council meeting, the Neligh News reported Benning was examining the city night watchman’s defective .38-caliber revolver. Unaware that it was loaded, he pulled the trigger. A bullet clipped another council member’s finger and lodged in a wall.

Benning sold his bakery and retired in 1965.

While Orr believes the Trump administration is appropriating Benning’s service to score a political point, he said Neligh should respond with pride and say, “We remember him, and we’re going to make it all about him regardless of why other people have done it.”

Associated Press Writers Russ Bynum in Savannah, Georgia, and Lolita Baldor, in Washington, D.C., contributed reporting.

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CASCADE LOCKS, Ore. (AP) — Authorities said Thursday that they planned to pull a station wagon from an Oregon river believed to have belonged to a family of five that disappeared nearly 70 years ago while out searching for Christmas greenery.

The station wagon thought to belong to Ken and Barbara Martin was found last fall by Archer Mayo, a diver who had been looking for it for seven years, said Mayo’s representative, Ian Costello. Mayo pinpointed the likely location and dove several times before finding the car upside-down about 50 feet deep, covered in mud, salmon guts, silt and mussel shells, he said.

“This is a very big development in a case that’s been on the back of Portland’s mind for 66 years,” Costello told The Associated Press.

FILE – The Columbia River is seen near Cascade Locks, Ore., on Tuesday, June 21, 2022, near where a diver discovered a car that is believed to belong to a family that’s been missing since 1958.”(AP Photo/Jessie Wardarski, File)

Mayo found other cars nearby, which will need to come out before the station wagon can be pulled from the river, Costello said.

The Martins took their three daughters on a car ride to the mountains in December 1958 to collect Christmas greenery, the Oregonian/OregonLive reported. They never returned. The bodies of two daughters were found the following year near the Bonneville Dam, but the rest of the family was never located.

“It’s been a high public interest case,” Pete Hughes, a Hood River County sheriff’s deputy, told the AP. After Mayo provided part of the license plate number and other vehicle identifiers, the sheriff’s office and the Columbia Gorge major crimes team, along with the Oregon State Crime Lab, arranged to have the car pulled out, he said.

“We’re not 100% sure it’s the car,” Hughes said. “It’s mostly encased in mud and debris, so we don’t know what to expect when we pull it out of the water today.”

Mayo runs a business that finds things that were lost in the river, like watches and rings, but also helps with the recovery of drowning victims, Costello said. He had been looking for a research vessel that sank in 2017 when he learned about the Martin family, Costello said.

Mayo began digging up material on the family and used modeling to pinpoint the possible location, he said.

There is a road near where the cars were found underwater. Authorities haven’t said whether they think they might find the remains of other missing people in any of the other vehicles being pulled from the river.