Donald Trump will sign an executive order today to begin the process of eliminating the Department of Education.
Trump promised during the campaign that he would abolish the DOE, as has every other Republican president since 1981. Trump’s executive order will make it very difficult for Education Department employees to carry out their assignments, much like his makeover of USAID.
Trump’s order will direct Education Secretary Linda McMahon to “take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure the Department of Education and return education authority to the States, while continuing to ensure the effective and uninterrupted delivery of services, programs, and benefits on which Americans rely,” according to NBC News.
Many of those services and programs used to be run by a dozen or more agencies and departments until 1980, when Jimmy Carter created the Department of Education to bring them all under one agency. An efficiency effort to consolidate education services and programs in one place backfired spectacularly when bureaucratic momentum began to carve out huge fiefdoms, assuming powers and responsibilities far beyond any “efficiency” mandate.
This year, the Education Department has an $80 billion budget. That’s up from $69 billion in 2015. The department also manages a $276 billion Education Stabilization Fund (ESF) that’s supposed to help students catch up after the disastrous teachers’ union-backed shutdown of schools during the pandemic.
The evidence of that failure keeps pouring in.
“NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress) scores reveal a national crisis — our children are falling behind,” Harrison Fields, the White House principal deputy press secretary, told Fox News. “Over the past four years, Democrats have allowed millions of illegal minors into the country, straining school resources and diverting focus from American students.”
“Coupled with the rise of anti-American CRT and DEI indoctrination, this is harming our most vulnerable,” he added. “President Trump’s executive order to expand educational opportunities will empower parents, states, and communities to take control and improve outcomes for all students.”
Problems with the Education Department go far beyond illegal alien minors or Critical Race Theory. The rot is institutional. It’s a systemic failure of will and a lack of imagination that is making our schools into centers for underachieving.
“The reality of our education system is stark, and the American people have elected President Trump to make significant changes in Washington,” McMahon said in the March 3 memo. “Our job is to respect the will of the American people and the President they elected, who has tasked us with accomplishing the elimination of bureaucratic bloat here at the Department of Education — a momentous final mission — quickly and responsibly.”
Despite spending billions of dollars on education, student outcomes haven’t fared any better. The White House cited 13 Baltimore high schools in which no students tested proficient in mathematics in 2023, as well as money spent to teach “radical ideologies.”
“The Trump Administration recently canceled $226 million in grants under the Comprehensive Centers Program that forced radical agendas onto states and systems, including race-based discrimination and gender identity ideology,” the fact sheet states.
Under the Biden administration, schools have been forced to redirect resources to comply with “ideological initiatives,” social experiments and obsolete programs, the White House said.
In addition, Trump has supported bringing education back to the states and a rethinking of schools.
Naturally, the teachers’ unions are fighting the loss of their primary gravy train.
“The Department of Education, and the laws it is supposed to execute, has one major purpose: to level the playing field and fill opportunity gaps to help every child in America succeed,” the American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten said in a March 5 statement. “Trying to abolish it — which, by the way, only Congress can do — sends a message that the president doesn’t care about opportunity for all kids. Maybe he cares about it for his own kids or his friends’ kids or his donors’ kids — but not all kids.”
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Indeed, the hard part is now trying to convince almost every Republican in the House and Senate, plus at least seven Democratic senators, to defy Weingarten and her millions of dollars in campaign contributions and thousands of campaign volunteers and vote to abolish the Education Department.
I suspect that the Republicans will need to score big wins in 2022 to be able to abolish the department entirely. In the meantime, McMahon will try to gum up the works as best she can.
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