Ed Department: Worst of All Worlds

For a while this morning, CNN was running a curious quote from Neal McClusky, Education Guy at Cato Institute.

If [Trump] says, 'We're going to have a 50% reduction in staff,' there is reason to be concerned about how the system will work: Is that enough people? We're going to learn whether or not they can do the job with fewer of them.

Some folks pounced on that quote (which seems to have since disappeared from the story) as "proof" that Cato wanted government to work after all, but as McClusky reassured his Twitter followers, he was as adamantly against the department as always (true that--say what you like, but McClusky is nothing if not consistent).

But his comments on the halving of the department shows how MAGA can have the worst of all possible worlds.

McMahon has reiterated that her intent is to dismantle the department entirely, and I have argued that this would get in the way of the Truskian goal of using funding as leverage to force school districts to comply. Except that I may have given them too much credit, because one of the big piles of money that they have to use as leverage is IDEA funding, and it turns out that McMahon isn't even sure what IDEA is, as she revealed to Laura Ingraham. “Well, do you know what? I’m not sure I can tell you exactly what it stands for, except that it’s the programs for disabled and needs [students].”

So I suppose asking for a detailed list of which positions were cut and how it was determined that they were excess-- yeah, never mind. What we've seen at this point is "a bunch of everything."

But if they can cut the department to the point that it can't do its jobs, that's nearly as good as dismantling it. Especially since it sets up an argument before Congress of "Look, the thing isn't working anyway, so you might as well dissolve it."

I have spent plenty of time bitching about the department, which has birthed one dumb idea after another while simultaneously failing to aggressively pursue the objective of making sure all children get the equitable chance for education they're entitled to. But this is not a move that can even pretend to be about doing a better job (nor, to be fair, has anybody pretended that's what this is about). The Department put many education-related grants under one roof rather than requiring districts and states to go paper chasing different pieces of the government for their pile of money. And the department offered protection to students whose rights to a non-sucky education were threatened. Plus bonuses like teacher training assistance, which is also axed.

So now we move to keeping those functions in the department, but requiring the department to do it badly, a sort of enforced inefficiency.

McMahon represents a different brand of uninformed incompetence from Betsy DeVos. DeVos was so bad at her job, she couldn't get much of anything done. McMahon doesn't know what she's doing--but to just smash stuff up, she doesn't have to know much. "I want a new computer," says your child, and you reply that they already have a perfectly good one, even if it's a little slow and doesn't work exactly the way they want it to. So they smash it with a rock. "Can I have a new computer now?"

Presidents Musk and Trump have gone after any piece of government that is about taking care of others, especially if it's got plenty of money lying around that could be used to prop up private corporations. It seems unlikely that anyone is going to rescue the department of education any time soon.