WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump is preparing to gut the U.S. Education Department to the full extent of his power, directing his administration to slash spending while pressuring employees to quit. Yet his promise to close the department is colliding with another reality: Most of its spending — and its very existence — is ordered by Congress.

An executive order in preparation by the White House appears to recognize the limits of the president’s power. The planned order would direct his education chief to start winding down the agency but urge Congress to pass a measure abolishing it, according to sources familiar with the plan.

At a White House press conference Tuesday, Trump quipped about the first task for Linda McMahon, his nominee for education secretary.

“I want Linda to put herself out of a job,” Trump said.

Trump campaigned on a pledge to close the department, saying it has been infiltrated by “radicals, zealots and Marxists.” In the nearly five decades since the agency was created, conservatives have made occasional attempts to shut it down, with critics saying it wastes taxpayer money and inserts the federal government into local education decisions.

Trump is expected to give his education chief a deadline to deliver a plan for the agency’s winddown. Yet even some of his allies question how far he can go without Congress. Some of the department’s most significant programs are required by federal legislation, including Title I money for low-income schools and federal student loans.

That was a source of frustration during Trump’s first term in office, when his education chief repeatedly sought budget cuts but instead saw Congress increase the agency’s spending each year.

What’s more, Trump’s quest to shut down the department could be complicated by his own agenda. Already, he has created new work for the department, including plans to promote “patriotic” education and efforts to go after schools that teach controversial lessons on race and gender. The agency also has opened new investigations into colleges, after Trump ordered a crackdown on campus antisemitism.

What Trump can actually do to cut spending could be limited to tiny fractions of the budget, according to one source with knowledge of the plan. It would hardly dent the department’s $79 billion annual budget.

The sources spoke on the condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to discuss the plan publicly.

Getting support from Congress would provide another test of Trump’s sway. Some Republicans have raised doubts about the popularity of closing the department or slashing its programs, which support Republican and Democratic states alike.

The House considered amending a bill to close the agency in 2023, but 60 Republicans joined Democrats in opposing it. Last week Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Kentucky, against introduced legislation to close the agency. The one-sentence proposal said the Education Department “shall terminate on December 31, 2026.”

Yet there are signs that Trump is determined to deliver his promise.

Dozens of Education Department employees were put on paid leave on Friday in response to an executive order banning diversity, equity and inclusion efforts in the federal government. Most of the workers don’t work in DEI but had taken an optional diversity course promoted by the department, according to a union that represents department staff. Trump’s order called for government DEI officials to be fired to the “maximum extent allowed by law.”

The White House has also pressured federal workers to quit. Education Department workers were among those who received an offer to leave their jobs by Feb. 6 and receive a buyout worth seven months of salary.

A fresh wave of angst enveloped the agency when a team from Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency showed up at the department’s offices this week. An Education Department spokesperson confirmed a team was on site Monday but did not provide details on the nature of its work. Musk’s colleagues have already sought to close the U.S. Agency for International Development and to gain access to sensitive payment systems at the Treasury Department.

Trump’s comments at his press conference raised alarms among schools and states that rely on federal money. Federal funding makes up a small portion of public school budgets — roughly 14% — but it adds targeted support for low-income schools and special education, among other grant programs.

In Minnesota, Democrats in the state assembly warned about the potential impact of Trump’s order on Tuesday. Sen. Mary Kunesh said she was worried the order could disrupt funding and called for more clarity on the plan.

“Imagine if we have billions of dollars frozen at the federal level,” Kunesh said at a press conference. “How are we going to make sure they have the curriculum they have to learn?”

Some Republicans in Minnesota’s Legislature said there was no reason to panic without full details of the order.

Those details are expected to be sorted out by Trump’s education chief, and the president didn’t immediately say whether he would look to preserve the department’s core work.

One potential model is found in Project 2025, a blueprint for Trump’s second term created by the conservative Heritage Foundation. The proposal calls for many of the department’s biggest programs to be parceled out to other agencies.

Under the Project 2025 plan, Title I funding, the largest source of federal money to public schools, would be moved to the Department of Health and Human Services and given as block grants to states for them to spend as they please, with no strings attached. The Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights would shift to the Justice Department.

Trump has sought distance from Project 2025, though he has hired some of the staff behind it, and on some issues there’s considerable overlap with his own platform.

Democrats in Congress were quick to jump on Trump’s plan. Sen. Edward Markey, D-Mass., a member of the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, called it an “attack on educators, families and students.” He vowed to fight it.

Trump’s plan could complicate the confirmation hearing for McMahon, a billionaire professional wrestling mogul and longtime Trump ally. Some advisers had asked the White House to keep the order quiet to avoid thorny questions, and others are pushing for it to be signed after her confirmation. No date has been set yet for her Senate hearing.

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Associated Press writer Steve Karnowski contributed from Minneapolis.

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The Associated Press’ education coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. The AP is solely responsible for all content. Find the AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

Collin Binkley And Bianca Vázquez Toness, The Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump has nominated Neil Jacobs to lead the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, turning to the man who was his acting NOAA chief in 2019 when Trump altered an expected hurricane impact map in what became known as the “Sharpiegate” scandal.

After Alabama meteorologists had contradicted an earlier Trump tweet warning of Alabama being in a storm’s path, the Jacobs-led agency chastised them. That eventually drew criticism of Jacobs and his political higher-ups in a Department of Commerce inspector general’s report on Sharpiegate.

NOAA oversees the National Weather Service, National Marine Fisheries Service, the National Ocean Service and other offices. Along with many other federal agencies, NOAA was targeted in Project 2025, a conservative blueprint for change in a second Trump administration. That document called to “break up NOAA,” criticizing the agency as “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry.”

Jacobs is a scientist at the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, where he has spearheaded efforts to combine different computer forecasting systems for weather and climate into a single system. He was chief atmospheric scientist at Panasonic Avionics Corporation and is a fellow at the American Meteorological Society.

His appointment was first reported by Axios.

In 2019, when Hurricane Dorian was bearing down on the U.S. East Coast, forecasters at the National Hurricane Center gave it a zero or minimal chance of hitting Alabama. But then-President Trump tweeted the state “will most likely be hit (much) harder than anticipated.”

Forecasters in Birmingham, Alabama, tweeted that ”Alabama will NOT see any impacts from #Dorian.” They said they didn’t know about the president’s tweet at the time and were responding to worried residents.

Dorian never made landfall in the United States, skirting the coast of North Carolina, and had no major impact on Alabama, about 600 miles (965 kilometers) away.

Three days after Dorian’s landfall, President Trump displayed an earlier National Hurricane Center warning map that had been altered with a black marker to include Alabama in the potential path of the storm. The president is known for his use of Sharpies.

Political back-and-forth went on for days, often in the early hours of the morning, according to the inspector general’s report. That included one text at 1:08 a.m. that said the Commerce secretary wanted “a chronology of who said what about Alabama from first briefing to the last,” followed by a 2:30 a.m. phone call to Jacobs that went unanswered. A Jacobs aide sent a 3:48 a.m. email with a chronology.

Jacobs told the inspector general that “things went crazy in the middle of the night” and that when he woke up to read all the messages his “anxiety level went through the roof.” He said some of the suggested statements from his bosses “doesn’t sound like something I want my name on.”

The next day, Jacobs’ agency issued an unsigned statement saying the Birmingham weather office’s statements “were inconsistent with probabilities from the best forecast products available at the time.”

Days later, Jacobs went to a meteorologists convention in Alabama and, appearing almost in tears, thanked the criticized Birmingham forecasters, saying “No one’s job is under threat — not mine, not yours.”

He later added: “Weather should not be a partisan issue. I’ve known some of you for 25 years. I haven’t changed. I’m the same Neil I was last Thursday,” referring to the day before the NOAA statement was issued.

The Commerce Department’s watchdog agency blasted agency and department leaders over Sharpiegate, saying they “unnecessarily rebuked NWS forecasters for issuing a public safety message about Hurricane Dorian in response to public inquiries — that is, for doing their jobs.”

A 2020 outside report from a group of academics was also critical of Jacobs over the incident. At the time, NOAA’s acting chief scientist, Craig McLean, criticized the lack of discipline against Jacobs and his communications chief.

“While there may be found causes of sympathy for the oppressed and meek subordinates of domineering autocratic ogres, I hardly can find sympathy in this scintilla of an argument for clemency,” McLean wrote. “If not the single highest person in NOAA, who will stand for the Scientific Integrity of the agency and the trust our public needs to invest in our scientific process and products?”

Despite that history, Jacobs drew support last month from several weather professionals at the American Meteorological Society meeting in New Orleans. They told The Associated Press they hoped Trump would bring Jacobs back to lead NOAA, especially compared to some other rumored choices.

“I think the Neil Jacobs appointment is a strong pick,” Victor Gensini, a professor of meteorology at the Northern Illinois University said.

Jacobs also attended the convention. In a session about his main project — the unified weather forecast system — he recounted to his fellow meteorologists how he had testified a few years earlier at a congressional hearing on a bill reauthorizing NOAA.

Jacobs said then that there was bipartisan support for what the meteorologists were doing.

“All they did was say how awesome it is, how important weather forecasting is for the country,” Jacobs said. “If you read the news and don’t watch that (hearing) you wouldn’t believe that ever happens in D.C.”

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The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

Seth Borenstein, The Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — A Treasury Department official wrote a letter Tuesday to federal lawmakers saying that a tech executive working with Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency will have “read-only access” to the government’s payment system.

The official sent the letter out of concerns from members of Congress that DOGE’s involvement with the payment system for the federal government could lead to security risks or missed payments for programs such as Social Security and Medicare.

DOGE, a Trump administration task force assigned to find ways to fire federal workers, cut programs and slash federal regulations, has raised concerns about its intentions and overruling of career officials at multiple agencies. Democratic lawmakers have voiced frustration over the lack of transparency and public accountability, saying that Musk’s people might illegally withhold payments to suit their political agenda.

The official said that the ongoing “review” has “not caused payments for obligations such as Social Security and Medicare to be delayed or re-routed.”

The letter said that Tom Krause, who is also listed online as the CEO of Cloud Software Group, was working at Treasury as a “special government employee.” The letter also said that Krause is conducting the effort in coordination with career treasury officials.

Treasury’s payments are managed by the Fiscal Service, which conducts over 1.2 billion transactions annually and accounts for 90% of federal disbursements. The official said the review is about payment integrity.

However, some Democrats are not convinced about the notion that DOGE has read-only access.

“Some Republicans are trying to suggest that Musk only has ‘viewing access’ to Treasury’s highly sensitive payment system as if that’s acceptable either,” said Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., Vice Chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, in a statement.

“But why on earth should we believe that — particularly when he is saying the exact opposite loudly and repeatedly for everyone to see?”

Josh Boak & Fatima Hussein, The Associated Press

FRANKFORT, Ky. (AP) — Kentucky lawmakers completed their work Tuesday to reduce the state’s individual income tax rate, delivering on a top Republican priority just five days into this year’s session.

Final passage came on a 34-3 Senate vote to lower the tax to 3.5% from 4% at the start of 2026. The bill goes to Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear, who has said he supports the tax cut. It continues a downward trend in the personal income tax since the GOP gained full control of the legislature in 2017.

“It’s been said that there are only two things in life that are certain -– it’s death and taxes,” Republican Sen. Chris McDaniel said Tuesday. “We’ve added another thing that’s fairly certain — which is the General Assembly is going to do everything in its power, and frequently with success, to lower your taxes. And that’s what House Bill 1 is all about.”

Supporters say the lower tax rate will promote long-term economic growth and population gains in Kentucky by enabling people to keep more of the money they earn.

The tax cut push in Kentucky comes as President Donald Trump has proposed tax cuts for individuals and businesses, while governors and lawmakers in some states are seeking to cut more. The movement for more tax cuts comes after most states already have slashed income, sales or property taxes in recent years, and it’s pressing ahead even though state revenue growth has been slowing or stagnating.

In Kentucky, Sen. Cassie Chambers Armstrong, one of three Senate Democrats voting against the tax cut bill, said the results would be lopsided, with wealthy Kentuckians benefiting disproportionately from it.

The Democratic lawmaker said she values putting money back in Kentuckians’ pockets, pointing to options she’s supporting to help struggling families most in need of tax relief — a refundable child tax credit for low-income families and a sales tax exemption for diapers.

That brought a response from Republican Sen. Michael Nemes, who touted the relief for Kentuckians from the income tax cut. “They earned it,” he said. “It’s their money, not ours.”

The latest income tax cut is expected to save taxpayers another $718 million annually, supporters said.

House budget committee Chairman Jason Petrie said last month there’s a “tremendous amount of room to keep the budget balanced” with the lower income tax rate in 2026.

The measure won united support from Senate Republicans, while Democrats were divided.

Sen. David Yates, among Democrats backing the bill, said it “feels safe” to lower the income tax in the current economic climate but added the state should maintain a diverse tax structure. If the personal income tax keeps dropping until being eliminated, other taxes will increase, he said.

“Because you have to have taxes in order to run a system of government,” Yates said.

Cutting the state’s personal income tax has been a recurring priority for Republican lawmakers.

Since the passage of a tax overhaul in 2022, the individual income tax in Kentucky has gradually been reduced by increments of a half-percentage point, conditioned on meeting benchmarks to ensure revenues are sufficient to meet state spending needs.

As part of that tax overhaul, the state sales tax was extended to apply to more services. Critics say lower-income families were hurt the most by putting sales tax on more services.

The House overwhelmingly passed the latest income tax cut on the third day of this year’s session in early January. Lawmakers met four days last month before heading home for the rest of January, which is customary in 30-day sessions in odd-numbered years.

The Senate took up the bill Tuesday, the first day that lawmakers reconvened since the January break. Republicans have supermajorities in both chambers.

With the latest personal income tax cut headed to the governor’s desk, the next question will be when the rate will be reduced again and by how much.

Several Senate Republicans said Tuesday that the latest cut is another step toward what they hope is the ultimate result — eliminating the individual income tax.

GOP Sen. Gex Williams raised the prospect of making deeper incremental cuts in the income tax in future years, perhaps by three-quarters of a percent or a full 1%. Williams said he hopes that begins in the 60-day legislative session in 2026, when lawmakers will craft the state’s next two-year budget.

“I am looking forward to this next session, that we will be able to strive for a greater than one-half percent cut,” Williams said.

Bruce Schreiner, The Associated Press

SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador (AP) — El Salvador has offered to take in people deported from the U.S. for entering the country illegally and to house some of the country’s violent criminals — even if they’re American citizens.

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, after a meeting Monday with El Salvador President Nayib Bukele, proclaimed it the most “unprecedented, extraordinary” offer the country has yet received during the ongoing wave of global migration.

Details on the deal are scant, and immigration and constitutional experts question its legality. Here’s what you need to know:

What’s El Salvador offering?

Bukele, who took office in 2019, says he’s offering a release valve for America’s vast prison system.

Writing on X, he said the Central American nation will allow the U.S. to “outsource” part of its inmate population, but it will only take in convicted criminals.

The U.S. would have to pay El Salvador to house the prisoners, though he did not disclose an asking price.

Bukele said the going rate would be “relatively low” for the U.S., but significant for his country — enough to make its “entire prison system sustainable.”

Where do they want to house U.S. criminals?

Bukele has proposed housing U.S. criminals in the mega-prison his administration opened in 2023 to tame MS-13 and other powerful street gangs.

The maximum-security facility is about 45 miles (72 kilometers) southeast of the capital city of San Salvador and is known as CECOT, a Spanish acronym that translates to “terrorism confinement center.”

The facility can house up to 40,000 people across eight sprawling pavilions, where each cell holds up to 70 prisoners.

Human rights organizations say the bare-bones setting is overly harsh. Inmates are not allowed visitors or time outside.

They are served just one meal a day and are not offered educational or reintegration programs typically found at other prisons, save for the occasional motivational talk or exercise regimen under strict supervision.

The prison’s dining halls, break rooms, gym and board games are for guards only, and administration officials have said inmates will never return to their communities.

Is this even legal?

Deporting foreign nationals to countries other than their native land is legal, but deporting American citizens is almost certainly not.

Under U.S. immigration law, a country such as El Salvador can accept someone deported from the U.S. who isn’t a citizen of that country if the person’s homeland refuses to accept them, says Theresa Cardinal Brown, a former homeland security official under the administrations of Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama.

What’s more, she noted, deportation is a legal term that applies only to someone physically removed from the country because they have violated some provision of the immigration act, which applies only to “aliens.”

So what about American citizens?

Naturalized U.S. citizens, in rare cases, can be denaturalized and revert to green-card status, such as if they lied on their initial immigration forms or committed a serious crime such as funding a terrorist group, according to Stephen Yale-Loehr, an immigration law expert and retired Cornell Law School professor.

Green card holders can then be deported if they’re convicted of any number of crimes, including murder, assault, burglary, tax evasion, domestic violence and illegal firearms possession, he said.

Natural-born U.S. citizens, however, maintain their citizenship through the U.S. Constitution’s 14th Amendment, which outlines the rights guaranteed to all citizens, such as due process and equal protection under the law.

“So, just as President Trump can’t eliminate birthright citizenship by himself, so too the U.S. government cannot deport U.S. citizens, even if they have committed crimes,” Yale-Loehr said.

Why is El Salvador doing this?

El Salvador is attempting to turn the page on decades of civil war and violence from MS-13 and other street gangs that long made it one of the most dangerous countries in the world.

Under Bukele, the country of 6 million residents declared a state of emergency in 2022, suspending constitutional rights and launching a fierce crackdown on gangs that’s led to the arrest of more than 80,000 people.

Bukele’s popularity has soared as crime plummeted to a record low of 114 homicides last year, but human rights groups have complained that many people are being unjustly detained without due process rights.

Has this been done before elsewhere?

The U.S. and other nations have reached deals to deal with migrants but nothing quite like what El Salvador’s leader proposes.

Britain has an agreement with Rwanda to send asylum-seekers to the East African country, though the accord has been stymied in the U.K. courts.

Trump also struck agreements with El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras to take in U.S. asylum seekers in 2019, during his first term as president.

Guatemala was the only one of the three agreements that took effect. More than 900 people from El Salvador and Honduras were sent, but few sought asylum and instead continued on to their own countries in what became known as ” deportation with a layover.”

President Joe Biden canceled the three agreements in 2021.

What are the next steps?

Trump praised the offer Tuesday, saying it would serve as “great deterrent” but acknowledged it might not pass legal muster.

“I’m just saying if we had a legal right to do it, I would do it in a heartbeat,” he said in the Oval Office. “I don’t know if we do or not. We’re looking at that.”

Rubio similarly called El Salvador’s offer “generous,” but stressed that the Republican administration will need to study the proposal before making any commitments.

“There are obviously legalities involved,” he said Tuesday at a news conference in San Jose, Costa Rica, with Costa Rican President Rodrigo Chaves. “We have a constitution. We have all sorts of things.”

That hasn’t stopped Bukele from making the most of the renewed attention.

He’s joked El Salvador would even take in disgraced former U.S. Sen. Bob Menendez, who was sentenced last week to 11 years in federal prison for accepting bribes of gold and cash and acting as an agent of Egypt.

“Yes,” Bukele wrote on X, “we’ll gladly take him in.”

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Marcelo reported from New York. Associated Press reporters Elliot Spagat in San Diego, Matthew Lee in San Jose, Costa Rica, and Michelle L. Price in Washington contributed to this story.

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Follow Philip Marcelo at twitter.com/philmarcelo.

Philip Marcelo And Marcos Alemán, The Associated Press

FRANKFORT, Ky. (AP) — Kentucky lawmakers completed their work Tuesday to reduce the state’s individual income tax rate, delivering on a top Republican priority on just the fifth day of this year’s session.

Final passage came on a 34-3 Senate vote to lower the tax to 3.5% from 4% at the start of 2026. The bill goes to Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear, who has said he supports the tax cut. It continues a downward trend in the personal income tax rate since the GOP gained full control of the legislature in 2017.

“It’s been said that there are only two things in life that are certain -– it’s death and taxes,” Republican Sen. Chris McDaniel said during the debate Tuesday. “We’ve added another thing that’s fairly certain — which is the General Assembly is going to do everything in its power, and frequently with success, to lower your taxes. And that’s what House Bill 1 is all about.”

Supporters say the lower tax rate will promote long-term economic growth and population gains in the Bluegrass State by enabling people to keep more of the money they earn.

Sen. Cassie Chambers Armstrong, one of three Senate Democrats voting against the bill, said the results would be lopsided, with wealthy Kentuckians benefiting disproportionately from the tax cut.

The Democratic lawmaker said she values putting money back in Kentuckians’ pockets, pointing to options she said would help struggling families most in need of tax relief. She touted a refundable child tax credit for low-income families and a sales tax exemption for diapers — proposals she is pushing.

That brought a quick response from Republican Sen. Michael Nemes, who touted the relief for Kentuckians provided in the income tax cut. “They earned it,” he said. “It’s their money, not ours.”

The latest income tax cut is expected to save taxpayers another $718 million annually, supporters said.

House budget committee Chairman Jason Petrie said last month that there’s a “tremendous amount of room to keep the budget balanced” with the lower individual income tax rate in 2026.

The measure won united support from Senate Republicans, while Democrats were divided on the issue.

Sen. David Yates, among the Democrats backing the bill, said it “feels safe” to lower the income tax in the current economic climate but added that the state should maintain a diverse tax structure. If the personal income tax keeps dropping until being eliminated, other taxes will increase, he said.

“Because you have to have taxes in order to run a system of government,” Yates said.

Cutting the state’s personal income tax has been a recurring priority for Republican lawmakers.

Since the passage of a tax overhaul in 2022, the individual income tax in Kentucky has gradually been reduced by increments of a half-percentage point, conditioned on meeting benchmarks to ensure revenues are sufficient to meet state spending needs. State officials announced last year that the state had met the financial conditions needed to set in motion another cut in the tax rate for 2026.

As part of the tax overhaul three years ago, the state sales tax was extended to apply to more services. Critics say lower-income families were hurt the most by putting sales tax on more services.

The House overwhelmingly passed the latest income tax cut on the third day of this year’s 30-day session in early January. Lawmakers met four days last month before heading home for the rest of January, which is customary in 30-day sessions in odd-numbered years.

The Senate took up the bill Tuesday, the first day that lawmakers reconvened since the January break. Republicans have supermajorities in both chambers, and the importance of the tax cut was reflected in it being designated as HB1, signifying its top-priority status.

With the latest personal income tax cut headed to the governor’s desk, the next question will be when the rate will be reduced again and by how much.

Several Senate Republicans said Tuesday that the latest cut is another step toward what they hope is the ultimate result — eliminating the individual income tax.

GOP Sen. Gex Williams raised the prospect of making deeper incremental cuts in the income tax in future years, perhaps by three-quarters of a percent or a full 1%. Williams said he hopes that begins in the 60-day legislative session in 2026, when lawmakers will craft the state’s next two-year budget.

“I am looking forward to this next session, that we will be able to strive for a greater than one-half percent cut,” Williams said.

Bruce Schreiner, The Associated Press