WASHINGTON —

The U.S. Department of Education announced new steps Tuesday in President Donald Trump’s push to downsize the federal agency .

Trump signed an executive order in March that called for eliminating the Education Department, but his administration has previously acknowledged that dissolving it entirely would require an act of Congress , which created the agency in 1979. Advertisement

For now, the department is moving forward with plans to shift key services to other parts of the federal government through six new interagency agreements.

"The Trump Administration is taking bold action to break up the federal education bureaucracy and return education to the states,” U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon said in a statement. “Cutting through layers of red tape in W

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