The government shutdown shows the U.S. Department of Education (ED) truly is redundant and unnecessary, according to its secretary.
Many Americans who are not on welfare and do not have government jobs have barely noticed the shutdown. Indeed, the fact that the government shutdown has not in the least stopped our schools from functioning proves how useless the Education Department truly is, Secretary Linda McMahon explained on X.
McMahon shared her thoughts online on Wednesday, as the Democrats continued to drag out the government shutdown to demand taxpayer-funded healthcare for illegal aliens. “The Democrat government shutdown has forced agencies to evaluate what federal responsibilities are truly critical for the American people,” she said. And despite what leftist activists want us to believe, the results have not been in favor of her department’s continued existence.
“Two weeks in, millions of American students are still going to school, teachers are getting paid, and schools are operating as normal,” McMahon emphasized. “It confirms what the President has said: the federal Department of Education is unnecessary, and we should return education to the states.”
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President Donald Trump signed an executive order in March launching the process to eliminate the ED altogether. McMahon, appointed by Trump to oversee the gradual transition of education back to the states, is trying to turn the shutdown into an example of just why she and Trump believe the department has no solid reason for existence.
McMahon explained her current strategy: “The Department has taken additional steps to better reach American students and families and root out the education bureaucracy that has burdened states and educators with unnecessary oversight.”
She ended, “No education funding is impacted by the RIF [Reductions in Force] including funding for special education, and the clean CR supported by the Trump Administration will provide states and schools the funding they need to support all students.”
Constitutionally speaking, education should never have been the purview of the federal government, which has simply made it much more leftist, inefficient, bureaucratic, and (in the case of universities) expensive. And yet, American students’ scores are more abysmal than ever, reaching historic lows as of this year in reading and math.
In his executive order, Trump slammed “the experiment of controlling American education through Federal programs and dollars — and the unaccountable bureaucracy those programs and dollars support — has plainly failed our children, our teachers, and our families.”
He highlighted the waste to no effect: “Taxpayers spent around $200 billion at the Federal level on schools during the COVID-19 pandemic, on top of the more than $60 billion they spend annually on Federal school funding.” But education hasn’t improved, and it will not be improved by the Education Dept. The department’s elimination will save billions of taxpayer dollars and end a failed and increasingly unjustifiable experiment in federal government meddling.
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