Linda McMahon

Political Ideology

Free Market Fundamentalist

• Chaired the MAGA think tank America First Policy Institute (AFPI) from 2021 till her time at the Department of Education
• In her official capacity as the Small Business Administrator, and as head of AFPI, she supported Trump’s massive tax cuts to billionaires
• Pushes to privatize the public school system through a host of policies advocated by AFPI, including “Education Savings Accounts” that encourage families to “shop” for schools and diverting of federal funds to private charter schools

Controversies

• Linda McMahon and her husband classified WWE wrestlers as independent contractors and, in the process, didn’t pay for health insurance, social security, Medicare, or unemployment insurance.
  • In some cases, McMahon paid beloved fighters as little as $35,000 per year.
• In the 1980’s the wrestler (and future Governor of Minnesota) Jesse Ventura attempted to form a union but was unsuccessful – unfortunately, WWE wrestlers still do not have a union today.
• In 2019, the Small Business Administration’s Inspector General found that when McMahon led the Small Business Administration, a program within the SBA mishandled funds in the SCORE Program, a mentoring program designed to help entrepreneurs start up small businesses.
• As head of the SBA, McMahon hired former NRA lobbyist Mary Ann Bradfield to be her chief of staff.

Obscene spending

• The McMahon's owned a primary residence once valued at $40 million, called Conyer’s Farm in Greenwich, Connecticut.
• At one time, owned a 47-foot yacht, inappropriately named “sexy bitch.”
• The McMahons World Wrestling Entertainment owned a corporate jet that cost around $27 million.
• Spent almost $100 million to lose two Senate races in succession.
• Shelled out $7 million to Trump and became his Small Business Administrator during his first term, and donated $10 million to pro-Trump super-PAC, MAGA and became his Education Secretary during his second term.

Enabling:

Destroying Public Schools

Since McMahon took the reins as the Secretary of Education, she has helped Trump in his illegal takedown of the Department. She said President Trump’s mandate was clear: to close the Department of Education, even going on record that Trump eventually “wants me to fire myself” after her mission of dismantling the DOE was complete. In November, she announced one of the biggest shifts in the Department’s history: sending specific major offices that do the critical work of protecting our nation’s students to other agencies.

Advocates point out that this move is going to make allocating federal dollars more confusing which will ultimately take critical resources away from our kids.

Take, for example, the Office of Civil Rights, the department’s antidiscrimination watchdog. The office has been in the crosshairs of Republicans since the Reagan administration, but McMahon has taken it further by attempting to fire staff, a move that may have cost the taxpayers almost $30 million dollars in salaries and benefits for staff that wasn’t working and outright dismissing thousands of cases across public schools and college campuses.

McMahon and the administration’s attempts to ruin public education extend to screwing over student loan recipients. Specifically, DOGE and McMahon’s attempts to downsize Federal Student Aid (FSA) has removed the guardrails protecting borrowers. While McMahon was in charge of the Department of Education, DOGE depleted Federal Student Aid’s enforcement unit that specifically ensures that students do not get scammed.

McMahon also allowed DOGE to deplete the resources of the Institute for Education Sciences (IES), which is the research and data collection arm of the Department of Education. IES data helps both researchers, and legislators, around the country solve complex issues around various populations in schools. For example, because of IES data, the California legislature passed a law that specifically was aimed at remediating some of the struggles faced by working parents.

McMahon has long held public schools as a target to destroy in favor of for-profit charters. While serving on the Connecticut State Board of Education in 2009, McMahon voted to expand the number of spots for charter school enrollment.

This attack on the right to education goes beyond funding and into the rights of students themselves. AFPI stoked a moral panic about Biden era protections for LGBTQIA+ college students, falsely claiming that it would require a “pronoun police.”

Tax Cuts For Billionaires

As a major proponent of the law that slashed public spending to give billionaires tax cuts, McMahon didn’t just support Trump’s 2017 “Tax Cuts,” but used her position as head of the federal Small Business Administration to push for even more of them. This includes publishing an op-ed claiming business owners were investing their no-longer-taxed wealth into business (the tax cuts led to stock buybacks that enrich shareholders at everyone else’s expense). During her leadership tenure, AFPII also released a report calling to make the Tax Cuts and Jobs act permanent. McMahon also gave a speech at the 2024 Republican National Convention promising that Donald Trump would “make those [2018] tax cuts permanent.” For Linda McMahon, the less billionaires pay in taxes, the more of the school system they can buy.