President-elect Donald Trump has nominated the founder of World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) and its transformational chairman, Linda McMahon, as the nominee for Secretary of Education.
A longtime Trump ally, McMahon led the Business Administration during Trump’s first term as president and donated millions of dollars to his presidential campaign.
Trump has criticized the Department of Education, vowing to close it — a job McMahon may be given after Trump returns to the White House in January 2025.
Trump previously nominated Mehmet Oz, a celebrity doctor and TV host whose methods have been scrutinized, to lead the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS).
The two picks on Tuesday — along with Trump’s choice of Howard Lutnick as commerce secretary — follow a pattern of presidential elections that appoint loyal supporters to top cabinet posts.
McMahon has a long history with the WWE and Trump, who used to make occasional appearances at wrestling matches. She founded a wrestling league with her husband in 1980, resigning as CEO in 2009 to make a failed bid for the US Senate.
He has little background in education, but served on the Connecticut state board of education from 2009 to 2010.
He is chairman of the board of the pro-Trump think tank America First Policy Institute, which means his confirmation in the Republican-majority Senate is likely. His is one of several top jobs that will require a vote of approval in the upper house of Congress.
Announcing her choice for Truth Social, Trump wrote: “For the past four years, as board chair at the America First Policy Institute, Linda has been a fierce advocate for parents’ rights.”
He said McMahon would “lead” the effort to “bring education back to BACK”, regarding his promise to close the door.
Republicans have accused the Department of Education of pushing what they call “sophisticated” political views on children, including gender and race. They want the agency’s authority to be given to the US states, which are responsible for most of the education issues.
McMahon was named in a lawsuit filed last month involving WWE.
It is alleged that she, her husband and other company leaders allowed young boys to be abused by the ringside announcer who died in 2012.
The McMahons deny any wrongdoing. An attorney representing the pair told USA Today Sports that the allegations are “false” from media reports that are “absurd, defamatory and completely irrelevant”.
Trump previously nominated Mehmet Oz to run the powerful agency that oversees the health care of millions of Americans.
Oz, who was chosen to lead CMS, trained as a surgeon before finding fame on the Oprah Winfrey Show in the early 2000s.
Oz has been criticized by experts for promoting what they call bad health advice about weight loss drugs and “miracle” cures, and for suggesting malaria drugs as a cure for Covid-19 in the early days of the epidemic.
“There may be no doctor more qualified and capable than Dr. Oz to make America healthy again,” Trump said in a statement.
Trump’s transition team said in a statement that Oz “will work with him [health secretary nominee] Robert F Kennedy Jr to deal with the industrial problems of sickness, and all the chronic diseases left in its wake”.
Like McMahon, Oz will need to be confirmed by the Senate next year before he can officially run the agency.
CMS oversees the nation’s largest health plans, serving more than 150 million Americans. The agency regulates health insurance and sets policy that governs the prices doctors, hospitals and pharmaceutical 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 “eliminate waste and fraud within our country’s most expensive government agency”. The Republican Party platform promised to increase transparency, choice and competition and expand access to health care and prescription drugs.
Oz, 64, trained as a cardiothoracic surgeon – specializing in heart and lung surgery – and worked at New York City’s Presbyterian Hospital and Columbia University.
After appearing on many episodes of Oprah, he started The Dr Oz Show, where he gave health advice to viewers.
But the line between inspiration and science on the show wasn’t always clear, and Oz recommended homeopathy, alternative medicine and other treatments that critics called “pseudoscience”.
He was criticized during a Senate hearing in 2014 for endorsing unproven pills that he claimed would “get fat out of your system” and “push fat out of your belly”.
During those scenes Oz said he didn’t sell any specific nutritional supplements on his show. But he has publicly endorsed off-air products and his financial ties to health care companies were revealed in a filing made during his 2022 run for the US Senate in Pennsylvania.
During the Covid-19 outbreak, Oz promoted the anti-malarial drugs hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine, which experts say are ineffective against the virus.
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