US President-elect Donald Trump has picked former World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) CEO and his transition co-chair, Linda McMahon, as his nominee for education secretary.
A long-time Trump ally, McMahon led the Small Business Administration during Trump’s first presidency and donated millions of dollars to his presidential campaign.
Trump has criticised the Department of Education, and has promised to close it down – a job McMahon could be tasked with after Trump returns to the White House in January 2025.
Trump earlier chose Mehmet Oz, a celebrity doctor and former TV host whose approaches have come under scrutiny, to lead the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS).
The two selections on Tuesday – along with Trump’s choice of Howard Lutnick for commerce secretary – follow a pattern of the president-elect nominating loyal supporters to top roles in his cabinet.
McMahon has a long history with the WWE and Trump, who used to make occasional appearances at wrestling matches. She co-founded Titan Sports with her husband in 1980, which then became the parent company of WWE later that decade.
She resigned as CEO in 2009 in order to undertake a failed bid to run for the US Senate.
McMahon has little background in education, but did serve on Connecticut state’s board of education from 2009 until 2010.
She is the board chair of the pro-Trump think tank the America First Policy Institute, meaning her confirmation in the Republican-majority Senate is likely. Hers is one of a number of top jobs that will require a vote of approval in the upper chamber of Congress.
Announcing his pick on Truth Social, Trump wrote: “For the past four years, as the chair of the board at the America First Policy Institute, Linda has been a fierce advocate for parents’ rights.”
He said McMahon would “spearhead” the effort to “send education BACK TO THE STATES”, in reference to his pledge to close the department.
Republicans have accused the education department of pushing what they describe as “woke” political ideology on to children, including on gender and race. They want the agency’s authority handed to US states, which run most education matters.
McMahon was named in a lawsuit filed last month involving the WWE.
It alleges that she, her husband and other company leaders knowingly allowed young boys to be abused by a ringside announcer who died in 2012.
The McMahons deny wrongdoing. A lawyer representing the pair told USA Today Sports that the allegations are “false claims” that stem from “absurd, defamatory and utterly meritless” media reports.
Trump earlier picked Mehmet Oz to run the powerful agency that oversees the healthcare of millions of Americans.
Oz, who was selected to lead the CMS, trained as a surgeon before finding fame on The Oprah Winfrey Show in the early 2000s.
Oz has been criticised by experts for promoting what they called bad health advice about weight loss drugs and “miracle” cures, and suggesting malaria drugs as a cure for Covid-19 in the early days of the pandemic.
“There may be no physician more qualified and capable than Dr Oz to make America healthy again,” Trump said in a statement.
The Trump transition team said in a statement that Oz “will work closely with [health secretary nominee] Robert F Kennedy Jr to take on the illness industrial complex, and all the horrible chronic diseases left in its wake”.
Like McMahon, Oz will need to be confirmed by the Senate next year before he officially takes charge of the agency.
The CMS oversees the country’s largest healthcare programs, providing coverage to more than 150 million Americans. The agency regulates health insurance and sets policy that guides the prices that doctors, hospitals and drug companies are paid for medical services.
In 2023, the US government spent more than $1.4tn (£1.1tn) on Medicaid and Medicare combined, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
Trump said in a statement that Oz would “cut waste and fraud within our country’s most expensive government agency”. The Republican Party platform pledged to increase transparency, choice and competition and expand access to healthcare and prescription drugs.
Oz, 64, trained as a cardiothoracic surgeon – specialising in operations on the heart and lungs – and worked at New York City’s Presbyterian Hospital and Columbia University.
After he appeared in dozens of Oprah segments, he started The Dr Oz Show, where he doled out health advice to viewers.
But the line between promotion and science on the show was not always clear, and Oz has recommended homeopathy, alternative medicine and other treatments that critics have called “pseudoscience”.
He was criticised during Senate hearings in 2014 for endorsing unproven pills that he said would “literally flush fat from your system” and “push fat from your belly”.
During those hearings Oz said he never sold any specific dietary supplements on his show. But he has publicly endorsed products off air and his financial ties to health care companies were revealed in fillings made during his 2022 run for the US Senate in Pennsylvania.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, Oz promoted the anti-malaria drugs hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine, which experts say are ineffective against the virus.
