Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt Briefs Members of the Media, Nov. 20, 2025
November 20, 2025 · The White House · 0:35:41
Embedded from the source channel — never re-uploaded. Watch on YouTube
What happened
Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt briefed reporters on November 20, 2025, joined by Secretary of Education Linda McMahon. Leavitt opened by noting that First Lady Melania Trump and Second Lady Usha Vance had traveled the day before to Marine Corps Air Station New River and Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, to meet students, educators, military families, and Marines.
On the economy, Leavitt said the September jobs report showed 119,000 new jobs added, “more than double expectations,” with construction jobs up 19,000, wages up 3.8 percent over the year, and real wages on pace to increase roughly $1,200 for the average worker this year — all as she stated the figures at the podium. On Thanksgiving costs, she said the national average price of a gallon of gas on Thanksgiving Day was projected to be the cheapest since 2021 and that the American Farm Bureau Federation’s annual survey put the cost of cooking Thanksgiving dinner down about 5 percent from the year before, as she stated them.
McMahon then announced that, “to shrink the bloated federal bureaucracy, the Department of Education just entered into new interagency agreements with four agencies — the Departments of Labor, Interior, Health and Human Services, and State,” which would deliver legally required programs while shifting educational authority toward states and local districts, as she described the agreements. She argued the recent 43-day government shutdown, during which the department furloughed 90 percent of its staff, had shown the department was not necessary, as she put it.
On Ukraine, Leavitt said Special Envoy Steve Witkoff and Secretary of State Marco Rubio “have been working on a plan quietly for about the last month,” engaging both Russia and Ukraine equally, and that “the President supports this plan. It’s a good plan for both Russia and Ukraine,” as she stated it.
Why it matters
The briefing’s hard news is on the Education hub: the interagency agreements are a concrete, dated step in the administration’s stated project of closing the Department of Education by moving its programs to other agencies. The Ukraine passage is the White House’s first on-record description that day of who built the peace plan and how long it had been in work.
Scoreboard watch
Scoreboard candidate: the Education Department’s interagency agreements with Labor, Interior, HHS, and State, announced at the podium on November 20, 2025, as a step toward closing the department. The jobs and wage figures are flagged as stated at the podium. Flagged for the scoreboard editor; no entry is published from this page.
Sources: The White House, “Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt Briefs Members of the Media, Nov. 20, 2025” (official upload, embedded above). Figures and characterizations as stated at the podium.
On this page