Here in D.C., the past few weeks have been a whirlwind. During the inaugural ceremonies, President Trump pulled out his Sharpie and started signing executive orders (EOs). He hasn’t slowed down since. The barrage has overwhelmed educators, journalists, and advocates. Before they’ve had time to digest the last EO or declaration from DOGE chief Elon Musk, here comes another. It’s easy to lose perspective.

A veteran reporter called the other day to check on a rumor that Trump was about to issue an EO abolishing the Department of Education. I asked what the EO was expected to say, and the reporter said it would urge Congress to act and Trump’s appointees to shrink the department. That sounded, I observed, less like an EO than a press release and a memo to his staff. But the confusion was understandable; there’s a lot of uncertainty about what’s happening and a lot of catastrophizing rhetoric. In the spirit of trying to bring some clarity to a muddled situation, here are a few points I’ve found myself making again and again.

For starters, I’ll note that I’ve got mixed feelings about all this. I heartily endorse most of the substance of Trump’s executive orders relating to education, but I also agree that governance-by-fiat is a lousy way to run a republic. I think Trump’s first few weeks have been remarkable for their pace and ambition but also a predictable response to Biden’s precedent-setting approach to executive orders. (This is what happens, unfortunately, when Obama’s “pen and phone” presidency becomes the norm.) I’m no fan of the imperial presidency, but I also have trouble crediting complaints about a “constitutional crisis” from those who were untroubled by Biden’s unconstitutional student-loan forgiveness schemes or FBI investigations into frustrated parents.

Critics have insisted that Trump’s orders on DEI, gender identity, and antisemitism are antithetical to small-government conservatism. They have a point. Of course, that kind of Reaganite restraint no longer dominates in Trump’s GOP. (And the Trump critics who espouse this newfound respect for small-government Reaganism tend to be laughably insincere, given that many had great fun during Trump 1.0 denouncing diligent Reaganites like Paul Ryan, Mike Pence, and Betsy DeVos.)

In any event, MAGA populists have concluded that Reaganism is a self-defeating strategy today. They’ve decided that it amounts to a status quo in which Democratic administrations move education to the left and then Republicans just try to dial things back a bit, while struggling to fend off the teacher unions, the higher education lobby, and a hostile bureaucracy. The result is a steady leftward march that’s only slowed by occasional speed bumps. The GOP’s MAGA wing believes that the only way to reverse that dynamic is by unapologetically seizing the levers of government like Democrats do and then using them to pursue other ends—such as, say, race-blind equality rather than race-based equity.

Now, the Reagan-MAGA tension creates a lot of ambiguity when it comes to education in Washington. After all, Trump has promised both to abolish the Department of Education and that Washington will lead when it comes to driving DEI and antisemitism out of schools and colleges. How do you square that? The mainstream media explanation is that it’s just hypocrisy. A more nuanced view posits that the administration’s ultimate goal is to reduce Washington’s sway in schools and colleges but that accomplishing this requires first uprooting the discriminatory practices and destructive dogmas abetted by past federal activity. Indeed, some conservatives versed in deterrence theory argue that only when Republicans harness the Department of Ed like this will Democrats discover the merits of shrinking Washington’s footprint.

There’s also a whole lot of “chicken little” going on. Take Trump’s short-lived “spending freeze.” Within hours, reporters were calling me, sharing all kinds of assertions about what it would mean, and asking for a response. (As the details filled in, it turned out that most of their emphatic claims were wildly off-base.) I kept explaining that we didn’t really know what the EO meant yet; it could be a big deal . . . or it could be a nothingburger. It would depend on which funding streams were involved, how long the pause might last, what kinds of changes the administration would pursue, and what would happen in the courts. Then, later that day, a federal judge put an injunction on the whole thing. Those who’d made excited claims in the morning sparked some frenzied news stories and even stoked a few embers of RESISTANCE, but they’d also made it tougher to sort legitimate concerns from idle speculation. Oh, and they’d burned some of their credibility.

Look, many of Trump’s EOs are broad and aspirational. While their issuance is certainly noteworthy, the real impact won’t be clear for a while. It’ll depend on how they’re operationalized and how legal challenges play out. That makes it useful to focus less on what White House press releases say and more on what officials do: Dismantle DEI advisory councils and remove DEI-related web pages at the Department of Education? Done. Eliminate pronouns from government emails? Done. Reinstate the DeVos Title IX rules governing campus sexual misconduct? Done. These are all actions that the Trump administration has already taken. But when it comes to more ambiguous pledges to promote school choice, combat campus antisemitism, or eliminate the Department of Education? What matters is what actually gets done.

We just don’t yet know how much of what we’ve seen these last few weeks will prove to be ephemeral. I mean, I don’t believe that Trump can abolish the Department of Education without congressional authorization. But I’d also never have believed that Biden could give away $400 billion in student loan forgiveness without an act of Congress. So, I guess we’ll see. It’s likely that Trump’s more dramatic moves will be stymied in court, but only after the facts on the ground have changed. Ultimately, it’s those particulars—not the bombastic rhetoric—that will matter.

Frederick Hess is an executive editor of Education Next and the author of the blog “Old School with Rick Hess.”