Small Business Admin to control, distribute student loans as DOE dismantled

Trump made the comments as he was speaking to reporters in the Oval Office, where he said, “I’ve decided that the SBA, the Small Business Administration, headed by Kelly Loeffler, will handle will all of the student loan portfolio."

He then noted that the student loan program is a “pretty complicated deal, and that’s coming out of the Department of Education immediately.”

“And also, Bobby Kennedy, with the Health and Human Services Department, will be handling special needs and all the nutrition programs and everything else," Trump added in his comments. “I think that will work out very well. Those two elements will be taken out of the Department of Education."

The announcement from Trump comes one day after he signed an executive order to dismantle the Department of Education insofar as he is legally allowed to do, stripping it down to bare-bones functions. The department, although it can be shrunk by the president, has to be eliminated through an act of Congress.

Ahead of signing the executive order on Thursday, Trump said, "We're going to be returning education, very simply, back to the states where it belongs," adding, "Probably the cost will be half, and the education will be maybe many, many times better."

"But beyond these core necessities," Trump later said, "my administration will take lawful steps to shut down the department. We’re going to shut it down and shut it down as quickly as possible. It’s doing us no good. We want to return our students to the states where just some of the governors here are so happy about this, they want education to come back to them, to come back to the States, and they're going to do a phenomenal job."

During the press briefing where he signed the order, Trump said that he hopes that Linda McMahon will be the last Secretary of Education needed at the federal level. Although the order looks to cut from the bureaucracy in the department, it also calls for the "uninterrupted delivery of services, programs, and benefits on which Americans rely."