Erika Donalds, congressman’s wife and DOE foe, floated as possible Trump cabinet pick

If appointed by Donald Trump to be America’s next education secretary, Erika Donalds has made it clear that one of her top priorities would be to effectively eliminate her job by backing one of the president-elect’s more controversial plans: abolishing the U.S. Department of Education. 

Donalds, an education entrepreneur who’s been named in published reports as a possible Trump cabinet pick, hit the interview circuit after the election to push for killing the DOE, a move that would halt Pell Grants and end funding for the popular Head Start program, among other very real-world consequences.

“[The Department of Education] has completely failed and therefore it should be eliminated,” Donalds said on Fox News Radio last week. “And I think it should be [the newly formed Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency’s] first order of business, if you ask me.”

It’s an unsurprising stance for Donalds, who is best known as the wife of Congressman Byron Donalds (R-Naples), himself a close Trump ally widely considered the frontrunner to be Florida’s next governor. As an advisory board member for the right-wing group Moms for Liberty and Heritage Foundation fellow, she hasn’t been shy about her mission to upend public education in favor of charter schools, which are taxpayer-funded but privately owned.

That pursuit has been a family affair for Donalds and her husband – a profitable one. While serving as a state representative in 2017, Byron Donalds co-sponsored legislation that fueled the expansion of charter schools across the state and allowed management companies to collect fees for services provided to charter schools.

That same year, Erika Donalds, while finishing out a single term on the Collier County School Board, opened the Optima Foundation, a non-profit charter school management company that listed nearly $4.2 million in revenues last year. She followed that in 2020 by founding a for-profit charter school management company called OptimaEd LLC. Donalds now provides management services to four charter schools as well as an “online academy,” according to her company website. All are closely aligned with Hillsdale College, which develops conservative, or “classical,” curriculum for charter schools across the country.

Any pay Donalds has received from OptimaEd isn’t known, but she listed a 2022 salary of $183,326 from the Optima Foundation. According to the non-profit’s most recent tax filing, she took no direct salary from the foundation in 2023, but those same records show the non-profit paid $143,415 for “payroll services” to Optima Management Services, a for-profit company founded by Erika Donalds in 2022.

Calls and emails left by the Florida Trident for Erika Donalds went unreturned.

While Donalds’ profiting from legislation sponsored by her husband isn’t illegal, it does raise ethical concerns, said University of Central Florida political science professor Aubrey Jewitt.

“It’s not a great look when a legislator pushes to pass a bill that would directly help their spouse’s business,” Jewitt said. “But on the other hand, it is the 21st century and sometimes those situations are perhaps unavoidable.”

As far as eliminating the Department of Education, that’s highly unlikely to happen, as it would require an act of Congress and a supermajority of 60 votes in the Senate, said Jack Schneider, a professor of education at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and co-author of the recently released book, The Education Wars. 

But installing an education secretary with “disdain and contempt” for the DOE can do real damage to its mission, he said, specifically by refusing to enforce federal regulations and forcing colleges to “jump through different kinds of hoops” to be eligible for federal loans and Pell grants.

“Putting someone in charge of the Department of Education [who] doesn’t believe in the fundamental premise of public education,” Schneider said, “is a way of neutering the department and its influence.”