Trump Okays More Charter Waste

At this point, we have more than a few examples of how President Musk's DOGEry is most certainly not about reducing federal waste and fraud. But if you would like a very clear, specific example, let's take a look at the latest decree about charter schools.

The federal Charter School Program has been shelling out grants to launch and expand charter schools since 1994. Analysis of the program by the Network for Public Education shows that one out of every four taxpayer dollars handed out by CSP has been wasted on fraud and/or failure. That means of the roughly 4 Billion-with-a-B dollars handed out by the feds, roughly 1 Billion-with-a-B dollars have gone to charters that closed swiftly, or never even opened in the first place.

The Biden administration (with no small amount of prodding) eventually put some additional rules in place for CSP-- crazy stuff like "find out whether there's any need or desire for the charter school before you open it up"-- and that was followed by howls of outrage from folks in the charter biz. The rules were modest and sensible, but still could have saved a bit of taxpayer money from a program that was wasting a huge pile of money.

So, the current administration could have said, "Cool! You got some fraud and waste spotted and targeted before we even got here. Excellent. Thanks for the help in fighting federal fraud and waste."

That is not what happened.

Instead, yesterday the Department of Education issued an edict saying that the "unnecessary conditions and overly bureaucratic requests for information" would be stopped and that CPS would start handing out money more easily.

It is certainly within the scope of an administration to "adjust" the rules for CSP-- they've been doing that for thirty years. There's just an extra level of irony from an administration whose signature claim is that they are going to protect taxpayer dollars from being wasted, As far as charter schools go, the Trusk administration declares Christmas every day. Take all the taxpayer dollars you want! Some waste is bad, but other waste is fully approved.