Similar instructions were given to the U.S. Agency for International Development, which provides aid to the world's needy, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which protects Americans from unscrupulous lenders.
Both agencies' headquarters were then shuttered as part of Trump's efforts to shrink the size and cost of the federal bureaucracy. Trump's Republican Party views USAID as pursuing a liberal agenda and the CFPB as an example of government overreach by the Democratic Obama administration.
The Education Department, which was created in 1980, employs about 4,000 people.