The Democrat Party and many in Congress are pitching fits at the thought of President-Elect Donald Trump finally delivering on Ronald Reagan’s promise to abolish the US Department of Education.
Some are arguing that Trump doesn’t have the authority to do this. Others are claiming that kids will become illiterate retards if he gets rid of the department.
Trump has nominated school reformer and former pro wrestling guru Linda McMahon to be his Education Secretary, which seems like a strong signal that he plans to follow through. So, can he do it?
Of course, he can.
The “Department of Education” in its current form was created when Congress split the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare into two different departments in 1979 (DOE and HHS) under President Jimmy Carter. The Democrats did this because two federal agencies equal a much bigger bureaucracy than one streamlined one.
The Department of Health, Education, and Welfare was created by President Dwight Eisenhower, under Reorganization Plan No. 1 of 1953. That’s a key point in the argument over whether Trump has authority to abolish the Department of Education. The department was created by a president and it can obviously be abolished by a different president.
As the head of the Executive branch, a president has plenary authority to create, organize, reorganize, or abolish Executive branch departments. The only role that Congress has in the process is to decide whether or how much to fund those departments. Trump is the boss of the Executive branch. He decides whether he wants to keep, reform, or get rid of departments.
One thing that gets lost in the hyperventilating about the Department of Education is the fact that it sucks at its one job. The Department of Education has 4,400 federal employees in Washington, DC. They have an annual budget of around $637 billion.
Guess how much of that money ends up in your local schools? Around $1,700 per pupil and change, or around $88 billion. For every $1 that the Department of Education spends on schools, it spends $5 on… well, nobody really knows where the other $549 billion a year goes.
States spend an average of $15,000 per pupil on education these days. Only $1,700 of that comes from the federal government. The rest is from state and local taxes.
Donald Trump and JD Vance are not talking about abolishing the federal per-pupil funding. Their plan involves continuing to send that money to the states. Getting rid of the Department of Education cuts the federal budget by more than half a trillion dollars per year.
Think about what your local schools lose in exchange for that $1,700 per pupil from the federal government. In exchange for 8.8% of your child’s education, your local school surrenders all control over curriculum to the federal Department of Education. That’s how we ended up with all this tranny bullsh*t in the schools.
The carrot is the $1,700 per pupil in federal funding. The stick is when Joe Biden rewrites Title IX and forces your local school to allow hairy perverts to shower with your daughters in the locker room.
Abolishing the Department of Education will return control of the schools to the state and local governments. Instead of wasting time on teaching kids about identifying 46 different genders and the 3 pillars of Islam, schools can spend more time teaching kids important things like how to read and how to manage their personal finances.
We have kids being handed high school diplomas in places like Chicago now who cannot read. After 13 years of public schooling under the control of the federal Department of Education, these kids don’t even know the alphabet.
Education in this country is a mess. President Trump wants to make it great again. That starts with getting the federal government out of our local schools.
Abolishing the Department of Education has been a part of the official Republican Party Platform since 1980, the year after it was created. President Ronald Reagan failed to do it. President George HW Bush failed to do it. President George W. Bush made it worse by signing Sen. Ted Kennedy’s (D-MA) “No Child Left Behind Act” into law.
President Trump is going to do it. The 4,400 federal employees who manage to spend $549 billion a year on nothing in particular had better pack their bags.
