President Trump’s interest in closing down the Education Department was never front and center to any of his three White House campaigns, but his explanation for shuttering the agency has always remained consistent.

“Move it back to the states,” Mr. Trump said in his third month as a candidate in 2015. In the final days of the 2024 race, he told supporters, “Your state is going to control your children’s education.”

Very little control over education has ever resided with the federal government, which is mainly in charge of administering college loans and enforcing civil rights in schools. Even so, Mr. Trump deployed the back-to-the-states mantra again when signing an executive order on March 20 to close the department. The title of the order was: “Improving Education Outcomes by Empowering Parents, States, and Communities.”

The maneuver has long been a calling card of politicians from the conservative establishment advocating a smaller federal government and more local control, and is now a central tenet of the second Trump administration when it comes to a host of issues, from abortion and cutting regulations to hiking tariffs. But states are not necessarily positioned to replicate the oversight functions that the federal government has played, particularly on education matters.

Mr. Trump used the tactic during the 2024 presidential race to sidestep questions about abortion rights by saying that states should decide the issue — a particularly brazen move after he stacked the Supreme Court with conservative judges to overturn Roe v. Wade.

More recently, Mr. Trump and others in his administration have pushed to eliminate the Federal Emergency Management Agency, saying states would do a better job. The move appears to ignore the agency’s core principle that the best practice for disaster relief is “locally executed, state managed, and federally supported.”

The push rings familiar for conservatives who have worked to trim the federal government since the 1970s under the umbrella of “New Federalism” promoted by the Nixon administration. That initiative, which the Reagan administration expanded on, transferred many social and civic programs to the states, a move that scholars have said was often rooted in an attempt to disrupt a Civil Rights-era alliance between the federal government and Black communities that threatened conservative power.

But Mr. Trump’s boldest attempt to use states as a political heat shield is his bid to close down the Education Department, potentially the most significant shift in the federal government’s role in the nation’s schools since the Civil Rights era.

The federal department’s predominant role, since it was established in 1979, has been to administer college financial aid, oversee education research, enforce civil rights in schools and help support low-income students and students with disabilities. The Trump administration has proposed shifting some of these functions to other federal agencies — for instance, moving student loans to the Small Business Administration, and support for students with disabilities to the Department of Health and Human Services.

Other functions, like research, have been basically disbanded as the government lays off workers. A right-wing blueprint for the Trump administration, known as Project 2025, has called for allowing some federal funding for low-income students to be spent on private schools, although it is unclear if Mr. Trump will follow that playbook.

As Mr. Trump looks to shed responsibility for some of the nation’s most pressing and challenging issues, state officials are deeply divided over the changes.

“This is a total shell game,” Gov. Maura Healey of Massachusetts, a Democrat, said. “It’s all about shifting responsibility and costs from the federal government onto states that are not in any way positioned to bear those costs.”

Republican governors, on the other hand, have generally aligned themselves behind the president in support of the move, including Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, Gov. Kim Reynolds of Iowa and Gov. Mike DeWine of Ohio. All three traveled to Washington to watch Mr. Trump sign an executive order on March 20 to begin dismantling the department.

“Every student, family, and community is different,” Mr. DeWine said in a statement. “By giving states more authority over education, we will have the flexibility to focus our efforts on tailoring an educational experience that is best for our children.”

In Virginia, Gov. Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, has also remained supportive of Mr. Trump. But he asked lawmakers to double the size of the state’s contingency fund to nearly $600 million to brace for a potential economic downturn after the Trump administration moved to slash tens of thousands of jobs from the federal work force.

The justification appeals to some of the Republicans’ key voters. During Mr. Trump’s last campaign, he turned the department into a political punching bag to appease the growing “parents’ rights” movement in his conservative base.

Mr. Trump’s ambition to abolish the department has also become intricately linked with his broader political agenda to dismantle diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives within the federal government.

How much power and decision making he will be able to deliver to communities remain unclear.

Control over public education already rests predominately with states and local districts, which generate roughly 90 percent of all school funding. State and local officials set teacher salaries and pick out which textbooks to use. State​s also administer standardized tests, set academic standards and determine ​what can and cannot be taught. In Florida, for example, the state’s “Stop W.O.K.E. Act” prohibited teaching certain aspects of history.

Decisions on how much money to spend on education, what those funds can be spent on and whether families can use those dollars for private school or home-schooling are all determined by states.

Federal law also expressly prohibits Washington from prescribing curriculum standards, library resources, textbooks and other measures of influence. That law existed before Mr. Trump first assumed control of the White House in 2017.

Even Mr. Trump’s description of the Education Department as a “massive behemoth” is misleading.

The department’s work force of 4,133 men and women at the start of the year ranked last among 15 cabinet-level executive agencies. Some public high schools have more enrolled students than the Education Department had employees.

Mr. Trump has denounced it as a failed experiment by pointing to declining math and reading scores that even the previous Democratic administration bemoaned as “appalling and unacceptable.” He has not explained how ending the federal government’s role in public education would increase student proficiency.

Instead, even as he moves to close the department, new Trump administration policies appear to have eclipsed the importance of the president’s mantra of returning power to the states.

The Trump administration this week opened investigations into entire state school systems in California and Maine, both states that are run by Democratic governors who have been openly critical of Mr. Trump’s policies. The investigations take aim at policies aimed at protecting the safety of transgender students over requirements from unwanted disclosures to their parents.

The probes were launched just days after Mr. Trump signed an executive order during a made-for-TV event in the White House, where he repeated five times his abiding interest in empowering states to make the best decisions for their students.

“We’re going to be returning education, very simply, back to the states where it belongs,” he said.

Sarah Mervosh contributed reporting.