U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon told reporters President Donald Trump wants to empower states to decide what’s best for their schools after he signed an executive order calling for the dismantling of the Education Department. Trump wants to get "even more dollars back to the states without the bureaucracy of Washington," McMahon told reporters Thursday evening. "The president would clearly like to see that money being used to educate our students, and that's the goal." Trump on Thursday signed an executive order calling for the dismantling of the Education Department. Trump has derided the Education Department as wasteful and polluted by liberal ideology. However, completing its dismantling is most likely impossible without an act of Congress, which created the department in 1979. And the White House says the department would not close completely right now. It is to retain certain critical functions, like managing federal student loans and Pell grants. Already, Trump's Republican administration has been gutting the agency. Its workforce is being slashed in half, and there have been deep cuts to the Office for Civil Rights and the Institute of Education Sciences, which gathers data on the nation’s academic progress. The Trump administration’s effort to abolish the Education Department through an executive order was quickly met by promises of legal challenges. Skye Perryman, president of the advocacy group Democracy Forward, promised to sue. Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, made a similar pledge even before the order was signed. “See you in court,” Weingarten said in a statement Wednesday evening.