President-Elect Donald Trump started to move toward abolishing the Department of Education after he promised on the campaign trail to fulfill the longtime Republican policy objective.

The agency, which was elevated to the Cabinet level by President Jimmy Carter half a century ago, has been the subject of conservative criticism for leveraging federal power over education across the country. Trump vowed on the campaign trail that he was “dying to get back” into the White House so that he could “ultimately eliminate the federal Department of Education.”

“We will drain the government education swamp and stop the abuse of your taxpayer dollars to indoctrinate America’s youth with all sorts of things that you don’t want to have our youth hearing,” the former commander-in-chief promised to a crowd of Wisconsin voters this fall.

Trump tapped Linda McMahon, a former wrestling executive who led the Small Business Association under his first term, to serve as Secretary of Education, revealing that she would extend school choice to “every state in America” and “send education back to the states.”

Christopher Rufo, a conservative activist known for his advocacy against critical theory and his work to expose plagiarism within elite universities, will meanwhile advise Trump in the coming months on how to withhold funds from universities which advance diversity measures. Rufo said on social media that he would convince Trump to abolish the discriminatory programs, as well as “lay siege to the Ivy League universities” and “shut down the Department of Education.”

South Dakota Republican Senator Mike Rounds has filed legislation to shutter the Department of Education half a year after the bill is passed, sending some programs to other federal agencies and eliminating the rest if they are not moved elsewhere in the bureaucracy.