WASHINGTON — A Senate committee voted Thursday to advance Linda McMahon’s nomination to serve as President Donald Trump’s education secretary, bringing her closer to leading an agency the Republican president wants to shut down.

The Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions voted 12-11 along party lines to send her nomination to be considered by the full Senate.

At her confirmation hearing, McMahon said she wants to “reorient” the Education Department. Since his campaign, Trump has called for the department to be abolished, but McMahon acknowledged that only Congress could shut it down completely.

“We’d like to make sure that we are presenting a plan that I think our senators could get on board with,” she said.

Pressed on the fate of the agency’s core initiatives, McMahon said Trump wants them to be more efficient but isn’t out to defund them. She suggested certain roles could be moved to other agencies, saying the department’s civil rights arm could go to the Justice Department.

She pledged to preserve federal Title I money for low-income schools, Pell grants for low-income college students and the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, all of which were created by Congress.

At the same time, McMahon promised to cut off federal money from schools that defy Trump’s orders against transgender athletes in women’s sports, campus antisemitism and diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives across the country.

Democrats were alarmed by McMahon’s response to questions about Trump’s order to ban DEI programs in schools. Asked if African American history classes could trigger a loss of federal money, McMahon said she wasn’t certain and needed to look into it.

McMahon, a billionaire Trump ally and former CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment, brings less experience in education than many others in the role. She was a member of the Connecticut board of education for about a year in 2009, and she’s a longtime trustee at Sacred Heart University. She left the WWE in 2009 and led two unsuccessful bids for the U.S. Senate in Connecticut.

Republicans were mostly unified behind McMahon at the hearing, though Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska raised concerns that Trump would ask McMahon to overstep her authority and interfere with local control of schools.

The White House is considering an order that would direct the education secretary to dismantle the Education Department while urging Congress to fully abolish it.

Even without the order, the Trump administration has fired or suspended more than 100 Education Department employees. Dozens of contracts have been canceled by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.

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Republican efforts to exclude people in the U.S. illegally from numbers used to divvy up congressional seats among states have begun anew, with four Republican state attorneys general suing to alter the once-a-decade head count even before President Donald Trump’s second term in office began Monday.

Trump joined in the battle immediately upon returning to office, signing an executive order on Monday that rescinded a Biden administration order and signaled the possibility of a push by his new administration to change the 2030 census. Those efforts may get a boost from the GOP-controlled Congress, where Republican U.S. Rep. Chuck Edwards from North Carolina earlier this month re-introduced legislation that would put a citizenship question on the census form.

During his first term, Trump signed an order that would have excluded people in the U.S. illegally from being included in the 2020 census numbers used to allot congressional seats and Electoral College votes to each state. The GOP president also mandated in a second order the collection of citizenship data through administrative records. A Republican redistricting expert had written that using citizen voting-age population instead of the total population for the purpose of redrawing congressional and legislative districts could be advantageous to Republicans and non-Hispanic whites.

Trump issued the memos after the U.S. Supreme Court blocked his earlier attempt to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census questionnaire. The high court said the administration’s justification for the question “seems to have been contrived.”

Both Trump orders were rescinded when President Joe Biden arrived at the White House in January 2021, before the 2020 census figures were released by the U.S. Census Bureau, the nation’s largest statistical agency.

“I think it’s an open question about how much energy the administration and Congress will try to bend the statistical system to its will,” historian Margo Anderson said about Trump’s second term. “Not because they wouldn’t like to, but because there are other parts of the national government that they are more interested in.”

The Fourteenth Amendment says that “the whole number of persons in each state” should be counted for the numbers used for apportionment, the process of allocating congressional seats and Electoral College votes among the states based on population. The numbers also guide the distribution of $2.8 trillion in federal dollars to the states for roads, health care and other programs.

The lawsuit filed Friday by the GOP attorneys general of Kansas, Louisiana, Ohio and West Virginia seeks to exclude people in the country illegally or temporarily from the numbers used to apportion congressional seats. It claims that Ohio and West Virginia each unfairly lost a congressional seat and an electoral vote after the 2020 census because people in the U.S. illegally were included, and that each of the four states stands to lose a congressional seat and electoral vote after the 2030 census if that doesn’t change.

Projections released last month by Election Data Services don’t show those four states losing seats after the 2030 census. The projections instead say California, New York and Illinois — states with Democratic majorities — are likely to lose the most seats and electoral votes.

The Census Bureau on Tuesday didn’t immediately respond to an email seeking comment.

Opponents of the citizenship question on the 2020 census said it discouraged participation by immigrants and residents who were in the country illegally, resulting in inaccurate figures. A Census Bureau simulation released in 2023 indicated that a significant number of noncitizens were missed in the count, which took place during the last year of the first Trump administration and at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Demographers and researchers expect the second Trump administration to change or reverse recent actions by the Biden administration related to U.S. statistical agencies. They include combining into a single question race and ethnicity questions that previously were asked separately on forms and adding a Middle Eastern and North African category.

Many experts also expect planned questions about sexual orientation and gender identity on the most comprehensive survey of American life to be on the chopping block. Some have concerns that Trump will politicize the Census Bureau with large numbers of political appointees, with little experience, as happened during his first term. The Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025” policy guidebook for a Republican presidential administration advocated putting “committed political appointees and like-minded career employees” in bureau positions so they could “execute a conservative agenda.”

“They could easily put in the same type of idiots they put in last time for political purposes,” said Andrew Beveridge, a sociology professor at Queens College and the CUNY Graduate School and University Center, who is an expert on the census. “I would assume that he will do what he tried to do before.”

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WASHINGTON — Republicans will control the White House and both houses of Congress come January. But President-elect Donald Trump’s intent to nominate loyalists to fill key Cabinet posts has set up a possible confrontation with the Senate, which has the constitutional responsibility for “advice and consent” on presidential nominees.

Trump and his Republican allies are talking about going around the Senate and using temporary recess appointments, which last no more than two years.

Invoking that authority could result in a fight that lands at the Supreme Court. Trump might also have to claim another, never-before-used power to force the Senate into a recess, if it won’t agree to one.

In its 234 years, the Supreme Court has decided only one case involving recess appointments. In 2014, the justices unanimously ruled that Democratic President Barack Obama’s recess appointments to the National Labor Relations Board were illegal.

But they disagreed sharply over the reach of the decision. Five justices backed a limited ruling that held the Senate wasn’t actually in recess when Obama acted and, in any event, a break had to be at least 10 days before the president could act on his own.

Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for the other four justices, would have held that the only recess recognized by the Constitution occurs between the annual sessions of Congress, not breaks taken during a session. That would have ruled out the appointments Trump may be considering after the new Congress begins in January and he is sworn into office.

Just two justices, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor, remain from the five-justice bloc that took the view that preserved the president’s power to make recess appointments during a session of Congress. Three others, John Roberts, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, joined the Scalia opinion that would have made it virtually impossible for any future president to make recess appointments.

The rest of the court has become more conservative since then, a result of Trump’s three high court appointments in his first term. Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett have no record on this issue, which rarely arises in the courts. Nor does Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, a 2022 appointee of Democratic President Joe Biden.

A more conservative Supreme Court might come out differently today, though it’s by no means certain. Once the court decides a case, the ruling is regarded as precedent that is not lightly discarded. So even some justices who initially dissent from a ruling will go along in later cases on a similar topic.

Scalia, an icon of the right, applied his originalist approach to the Constitution to conclude that there was little doubt what the framers were trying to do.

The whole point of the constitutional provision on recess appointments, adopted in 1787 in the era of horse and buggy, was that the Senate could not quickly be summoned to fill critical vacancies, he wrote.

Reading a summary of his opinion aloud in the courtroom on June 26, 2014, Scalia said the power to make recess appointments “is an anachronism.”

The Senate always can be convened on short notice to consider a president’s nominations, he said.

“The only remaining practical use for the recess appointment power is the ignoble one of enabling presidents to circumvent the Senate’s role in the appointment process, which is precisely what happened here,” Scalia said.

It’s not likely to happen quickly. Only someone who has been affected by an action taken by an official who was given a recess appointment would have the legal right, or standing, to sue. In the NLRB case, Obama made his recess appointments in January 2012.

The board then ruled against Noel Canning, a soft drink bottling company in Yakima, Washington, in a dispute over contract negotiations with a local Teamsters union. The company sued, claiming that the NLRB decision against it was not valid because the board members were not properly appointed and that the board did not have enough members to do business without the improperly appointed officials.

The Supreme Court’s ultimate decision came nearly 2 1/2 years later.

Among the most prominent people who were first given recess appointments and later confirmed by the Senate are Chief Justice Earl Warren, Justice William Brennan and Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan. Among those who left office after failing to win a Senate vote is John Bolton, who was given a recess appointment as U.N. ambassador under Republican President George W. Bush.

A separate novel legal issue could arise if Trump were to invoke a constitutional provision that his allies suggested would allow him to force the Senate to adjourn, even if doesn’t want to, and enable him to make recess appointments.

Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution includes a clause about congressional adjournments that has never been invoked. Trump’s allies read it as giving the chief executive the power step in when the House and Senate can’t agree on when to adjourn. The provision reads that “in case of disagreement between them, with respect to the time of adjournment, he may adjourn them to such time as he shall think proper.”

But some scholars, including conservative ones, argue that the House has no power to force the Senate to adjourn, and vice versa. Congressional adjournments are spelled out in Article I, which requires one chamber to consent when the other wants to take a break of more than three days. Under this view, the president could intervene only when one house objects to the other’s adjournment plan.