It’s Time to Humanely Euthanize the Department of Education

On March 3, the Senate voted to confirm Linda McMahon as the Secretary of Education. Predictably, professional activist class leftists and their mouthpieces in the Democratic Party went apoplectic. They screamed about McMahon's supposed lack of qualifications and Donald Trump's threat to democracy by his not-so-thinly veiled threats to completely dismantle the Department of Education. "Linda McMahon fails to make the grade," said Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA)—one of the least accomplished members of that august institution.

The response from conservatives and Tea Party veterans? MORE, PLEASE.

The greatest accomplishment Sec. McMahon could hope to achieve is to be the last Secretary of Education in American history, overseeing the destruction of the department. That's Trump's goal, too: "I told Linda: 'Linda, I hope you do a great job and put yourself out of a job.' I want her to put herself out of a job." Its spending and programs cry out for review and restructuring by DOGE, or some other similarly motivated watchdog. Mission creep has become its mission. Time for it to be humanely euthanized.

The Department of Education Has a Moribund History

President Jimmy Carter signed the bill to form the Department of Education in 1979 after Congress decided they needed to break up the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare and create separate bureaucracies out of it. This fulfilled a promise he made to the much-loathed National Education Association (NEA) to increase federal spending on education. (His interview with the NEA during the 1976 campaign makes for a fascinating read, by the by.)

The budget for its initial year, 1980, topped out at $14 billion. Its budget as of 2024 stood at $268 billion. The breakdown:

The Office of Federal Student Aid funds higher education aid programs like Pell Grants. Elementary and secondary school spending is used to fund Title I, special education programs, and school improvement programs.

The Institute of Education Sciences (IES), which is the smallest division of the Department of Education, funds education research and teaching effectiveness in the US. It also collects and analyzes education data through the National Center for Education Statistics, a sub-agency of IES.

For all that money spent, educational outcomes have not shown significant improvement. Average national reading test scores showed modest initial improvement by 1980, but remained largely flat after that. Math test scores, on the other hand, stayed completely flat until the 1990s. According to a study by the left-leaning Pew Research Center in 2017:

How do U.S. students compare with their peers around the world? Recently released data from international math and science assessments indicate that U.S. students continue to rank around the middle of the pack, and behind many other advanced industrial nations.

One of the biggest cross-national tests is the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), which every three years measures reading ability, math and science literacy and other key skills among 15-year-olds in dozens of developed and developing countries. The most recent PISA results, from 2015, placed the U.S. an unimpressive 38th out of 71 countries in math and 24th in science. Among the 35 members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which sponsors the PISA initiative, the U.S. ranked 30th in math and 19th in science.

The most recent failure of the Department of Education? The fiasco of FAFSA—the Free Application for Federal Student Aid. Originally billed as a streamlined process for applying for college financial aid, the program became a bureaucratic nightmare, causing more headaches than it solved for applicants.

FAFSA is emblematic of the failure of the entire bureaucratic morass at the Department of Education.

Dept. of Ed. Veteran Says It Never Served a Purpose

A former staffer at the department, who wished to remain anonymous, told Restoration News that in the early 1990s, the first message received was: "The entirety of the Department of ED could be abolished tomorrow and no one would notice... save the front office of General Counsel and the Secretary's front office. That's all that is needed to run current programs."

"When Carter started ED," this staffer said, "all of the other agencies used the formation of a new agency as a way to relieve themselves of problem employees. Those employees were sent to staff ED. And that's what I got to supervise: Rejects from the other agencies."

One such employee did nothing during work hours but submit Freedom of Information Act requests for any information as to why the department had not granted him a promotion.

This former staffer gave recommendations centered on disassembling the Department of Education and sending its functions to other areas where they belong. FAFSA can go to the Treasury Department (if it survives at all); programs created under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) can live at the Department of Health and Human Services, along with several other programs. Civil rights enforcement and litigation can go to the Department of Justice, where they can receive a necessary overhaul. Other programs can go to the State Department. Still more programs created by Congress can be contracted out. The remaining programs can be sent back to the states where they belong.

(READ MORE: Sanctuary Schools Protect Illegal Aliens)

Higher Ed: Unaffordable and Ineffective

The former department staffer also had several reflections on the dismal state of higher education today.

"When I attended a private college in California," she said, "it was $3k a year all in. UC schools were only $2,000. Costs were reasonable, not driven up by the availability of federal student loans.

Flash forward today—that same college is now $90,000 a year.

"Why?" you ask. I recently asked a former Dean that question and he said, drily, "because it can" [emphasis added].

That point bears repeating: the availability of easy student loans has driven up the price of college. Roughly double the number of students are entering college today as opposed to the 1970s, and they're all flush with cash. Colleges have no incentive to offer low-cost alternatives.

Restoration News covered this in 2023 when discussing the "white whale" of progressivism—student loan forgiveness:

But how can students afford to take out loans like this? Massive government subsidies, grants, and consumer-friendly loan terms that increase the pool of money available to colleges. Consumers’ access to easy credit has left these schools awash in riches they never could have conceived prior to the early 1990s, when the Clinton administration made it a priority to get as many high school students as possible to college. (They had the same aim with homeownership, under the revamped Community Reinvestment Act. Look how well that turned out.)

As many have pointed out, when you remove the consumer from the direct price consequences and the decision points all along the process, market forces get shifted to a third-party payer. All too often, that’s the federal government. Just like in healthcare, insurance, and mortgages, the more the government promises to cover expenses, the more distorted the consequences for fiscally unsound behavior.

Controlled Demolition

In an interview in November, former Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos endorsed the idea of dismantling the agency. According to TownHall:

"President Trump will need to partner with Congress to actually get that done, but there are many steps that can be taken to re-empower states and local communities and importantly, families," DeVos said in the interview about for former president's plan and give power back to the states.

"The bureaucrats at the Department of Education aren't doing the job. They haven't done the job for more than four decades to close achievement gaps, they've only widened," she added.

"The Department doesn't really add any value anywhere," she stated, adding that only 9 percent of spending for K-12 comes from the federal government but over 90 percent of the regulation comes from Washington.

"It's not what's best for students, it's what's best for lobbyists," she said.

Writing at City Journal, Christopher Rufo correctly identifies the problems contained in the Department of Education, while calling for its "controlled demolition."

The next stage of the conflict between Trump and the bureaucracy looks to be the Department of Education, which the president has correctly identified as a hotbed of left-wing ideologies. Almost every Republican presidential candidate since 1980 has promised either to shrink or abolish the department, but its budget has only grown. 

Restoration News reported those "left-wing ideologies" after Trump won reelection. Those include the racist "equity" agenda, promoting illegal immigration, grooming kids into the LGBTQ agenda, removing God and pushing climate nonsense, and creating discipline problems in schools across the country by pushing "restorative justice."

Rufo's take on the department lays out its functions and how to disperse them. "The administration must first understand that the Department of Education administers three primary activities," Rufo writes. "College student loans and grants; K-12 funding; and ideological production, which includes an array of programs, grants, civil rights initiatives, and third-party NGOs that create left-wing content to push on local schools."

He believes those should be dismantled in stages. The financial aid programs should be spun off to an "independent financial entity"—in other words, privatized. That's only fair, since very few people remember that the Affordable Care Act seized control of the formerly private student loan industry to use the interest on loans to pay for Obamacare.

Rufo agrees that K-12 funding should then be block-granted to the states, getting the Department of Education out of that process altogether. In the final stage, he suggests shutting down the "centers of ideological production" and ending the funding the department sends to a vast array of NGOs.

He notes the potential complications in the process, but suggests an agreement Trump could make with the Republican-controlled Congress to delegate reorganization authority to the president—which has historical precedent through a large chunk of the 20th century.

Leftist Freak Out

As is their inclination, the activist class of radical progressives is having one of their regularly scheduled meltdowns. Over at Mother Jones, they have gone into mourning, replete with their signature redefinition of language:

The Senate voted 51-45 to confirm McMahon after Democrats spent hours opposing the confirmation and a pending bill to ban trans girls and women from women’s sports from kindergarten through college. After confirming McMahon, Senate Republicans immediately, and ultimately unsuccessfully, moved to end debate on the bill, which would codify Trump’s change to Title IX that classifies trans-inclusive athletic policies as sex discrimination.

Created by Congress in 1979, the Department of Education is one of the largest agencies in the federal government, responsible for the disbursement of tens of billions of dollars each year for everything from preschool readiness programs to grants for low-income college students and school funding for students with disabilities. It holds more than $1.5 trillion in federal student loans from 43 million borrowers. It’s also responsible for ensuring that schools comply with a variety of federal laws, including Title IX, which prohibits sex discrimination, and Title VI, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race or national origin.

No recognition, naturally, of the idea of doing any of these things more efficiently or fairly. Those bureaucrats need to put food on the table! Preferably with as little work produced as possible!

The Firings Will Continue Until Morale Improves

It didn't take long for Donald Trump to start taking a cleaver to the Department of Education. X user BehizyTweets reported on Feb. 12:

Mass firings have begun at federal agencies. President Trump is reportedly firing dozens of employees at the Department of Education and the Small Business Administration. Employees at the Department of Education received an email saying, “The Agency finds, based on your performance, that you have not demonstrated that your further employment at the Agency would be in the public interest." The firings have impacted employees across the department from the general counsel’s office to the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitation Services to the Federal Student Aid office. WOW! The man means business. 

On March 4, the day she got to the office, Sec. McMahon released a letter detailing the department's "Final Mission." It reads, in part:

American education can be the greatest in the world. It ought not to be corrupted by political ideologies, special interests, and unjust discrimination. Parents, teachers, and students alike deserve better. 
 
After President Trump’s inauguration last month, he steadily signed a slate of executive orders to keep his promises: combatting critical race theory, DEI, gender ideology, discrimination in admissions, promoting school choice for every child, and restoring patriotic education and civics. He has also been focused on eliminating waste, red tape, and harmful programs in the federal government. The Department of Education’s role in this new era of accountability is to restore the rightful role of state oversight in education and to end the overreach from Washington. 

America will benefit in untold ways from this final mission. No longer will bureaucrats thumb their noses at the taxpayers who presume incorrectly they provide some sort of "civil service." No longer will hundreds of billions of dollars go down a rat hole every year, only to produce worse student outcomes. No longer will beltway swamp creatures create woke mandates for local school districts that will cost them funding if not followed.

It's long past time for the Department of Education to be euthanized.

(INVESTIGATION: The Department of Education is Even Worse Than You Think)