Blowing Up The Ed Department

The executive order has finally been signed, and it clarifies... nothing. Lord knows I have often beefed with the department and prayed it would improve, but this is definitely not that.

A photo op with children as a prop. The bulk of it is a bunch of bullshit about the many failings of education and a made-up number about what we've spent ($3 trillion? Really? Can I see the back of the envelope you got those figures from?). The actual meat of the order is this paragraph:

The Secretary of Education shall, to the maximum extent appropriate and permitted by law, take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education and return authority over education to the States and local communities while ensuring the effective and uninterrupted delivery of services, programs, and benefits on which Americans rely.

If I were someone from Team Dismantle The Department, I would call this pretty weak sauce. Like that whole "maximum extent appropriate and permitted by law" thing-- within those limits the list of things they can do is fairly short. I can't believe I'm sending you to something from the Education Reform Now people, but these are crazy times, and they have a pretty handy quick explainer about who can legally do what. And it's not much.

Of course, that's within the restrictions of law, and under the current regime's legal theory of "Whatever Dear Leader Wants To Do Is Right And Legal And Anyone Who Disagrees Is A Traitor Who Should Go To Jail," "maximum extent appropriate and permitted by law" is meaningless tissue paper.

The regime also has at hand its favored tool for gutting departments-- firing everyone and making the department functionally non-functional (as someone on social media noted, when you remove 30% of the parts of a plane, it does not fly 30% slower). Trusk has already gutted the Civil Rights wing of the department as well as the Center for Education Statistics, which among other things ends the NAEP test that Trusk cited as proof that US education is sad. NCES would also be needed to come up with the numbers that Title I and IDEA would use to distribute funds, so that's another wrinkle.

The regime has made its basic talking point "Look at all the money we spent on this department, and we didn't get higher test scores." This is a misdirection. This post from Rep. Sylvia Garcia (D-TX 29th)--

"We're going to send education back to the states" is also a baloney talking point-- the states already have responsibility, control, and most of the funding for education. Some would just like to exercise all that without any accountability to anyone. Also, some folks would like to be free of paying taxes to educate Those Peoples' Children.

We still don't know exactly what Trusk and McMahon are going to attempt specifically. Turn IDEA and Title I into block grants (then slowly zero them out) per Project 2025? Use the money to force compliance with MAGA culture panic edicts? Move some of the programs to other departments? Put Wells Fargo in charge of the college loan portfolio (after they buy a $100 million membership at a Trump golf course)? Cut the department to three people, let it fall apart, and declare victory? Cut IDEA and Title I funding to $1.50? Plenty of those things would be illegal, but that just means a fight in the courts, the results of which are double uncertain--uncertain they'll fall correctly, and uncertain that Trusk will pay any attention to the court ruling.

We don't really know any more than we did before the executive order, other than he's saying more loudly that he wants the department gone. So discussion continues to center on conjecture about what would result if X happened.

That's stressful, because the one thing we know is that whatever he does, it will be bad-- bad for education, bad for students, bad for the country.