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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.
