America's Talking - Trump Dismantles Education Department, Will ‘Fully Preserve’ Programs

Episode Date: March 21, 2025

(The Center Square) – In a move that will undoubtedly incite legal challenges, President Donald Trump dismantled the U.S. Department of Education via executive order Thursday, sending education policy back to the state level. The long-promised, controversial order preserves and redistributes the Education department’s responsibilities to other federal agencies and departments. Education Secretary Linda McMahon will facilitate the closure process.Support this podcast: https://secure.anedot.com/franklin-news-foundation/ce052532-b1e4-41c4-945c-d7ce2f52c38a?source_code=xxxxxxFull story: https://www.thecentersquare.com/national/article_632f6ec9-869e-4ad9-b6b2-860ded687230.html Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Greetings, everyone, and welcome to America in Focus, powered by the Center Square. I'm Dan McAulb, chief content officer at Franklin News Foundation, publisher of the Center Square Newswire Service. As he bowed during his campaign for president and after taking office, President Donald Trump on Thursday signed an executive order to begin dismantling the U.S. Department of Education. What does that mean and how will it impact state education departments and local schools. Joining me to discuss this is Casey Harper, Washington D.C. Bureau Chief for the Center Square. Casey, let's start with Trump's actions. What did he do on Thursday? Yeah, he fulfilled a long-awaited campaign promise, something Republican, or conservatives, rather, not all Republicans, but conservatives

have been talking about, dreaming about promising for a long time. That is, dismantling the Department of Education. Now, to be clear, Trump does not have the legal authority to outright abolish it. The Department of education was created by Congress, by law. And so he can't just with a stroke of a pin totally destroy the agency. He's tried to do that with others and already been rebuffed by the courts. But this does dismantle it. Trump has claimed that he would cut the spending on the Department of Education in half. That gives you an idea of the scope that he's expecting this to do. And so, you know, we can talk about the implications of this. The Department of Education is a vast bureaucratic apparatus that oversees a lot of different things, but a lot of critics the Department

Education have said, well, a lot of the most important things that the Department of Education does could just be moved to other agencies while a lot of the bureaucratic, you know, nonsense that they do could be just ended. So, for instance, you know, you might think of school lunches, but that's actually the U.S. Department of Agriculture handles that, not the Department of Education. You might think of all the student loans and grant funding. And, you know, that's a good question. That would impact a lot of Americans if their student loans are somehow affected or the Pell grants. But the Treasury Department could theoretically handle that.

I mean, if you're just making payments on a loan, does that, you know, couldn't you just pay the Treasury Department? Like the way you pay your taxes. And then, you know, there's other things like the civil rights investigation. So if there's problems on campuses, the Department of Education, the Department of Education, of the team that investigates it, but could the Department of Justice theoretically do that? And so what you learn as you look more and more into the Department of Education is it doesn't spend a lot of time actually educating anyone. It doesn't set curriculums. It doesn't hire or pay teachers. It doesn't really do much educating at all. It handles a lot of bureaucratic

different programs. It distributes grants for different things. But ultimately, education is handled at the state level. Now, with that being said, this move is really controversial. It cannot be fully fulfilled without lawmakers and Congress getting behind it. And right now, I just, I don't think Trump's going to be able to get the votes in the Senate to make that happen. Casey, taking the entire history of the United States into the equation, factory been, you know, we're going to celebrate our 250th anniversary as a country next year. The Department of Education isn't all that old. In fact, it's really... You're older than the Department of Education. Yes, I am. It was created under the Jimmy Carter administration in 1979.

Since then, it has spent more than $3 trillion in taxpayer money on various initiatives. In signing the order, one of the things Trump emphasized was that student outcomes aren't any better today than they were when the department was created. In fact, we trail most countries when it comes to education outcomes. So the agency has spent $3 trillion since 1979. Trump says it's not accomplishing anything. What do you say to that? Yeah, I mean, we do go near the bottom of the list for developed nations, of course, not the whole world, but for developed nations. Economies were pretty low and we spend more than anyone.

It's, you know, he's right about that. It's definitely an indictment of the education system in the U.S. And, you know, there's a lot of questions about why is that? We can spend a lot of time talking about why is that. But it's probably more useful for this conversation to say, how do you fix those problems? And who's more likely to fix it? Let's say, you know, students are struggling in a Dayton, Ohio school district, and the mass scores are low. Now, who's going to be able to better fix that?

A local school board member, local, you know, parents board, maybe a local state, like a state, Ohio state commission that's tasked with these kind of of things or a team of like Ivy League bureaucrats who live down the street for me here in the DC area. You know, I mean, it's just kind of like who, you know, make all this money. What do they know about, you know, what happened was happening in Dayton, Ohio? And do they actually spend any time helping these students? And I think it actually creates this problem, an accountability problem because, you know, I don't know if you've ever been on a team, Dan, where you have like more than one person in charge of something. If you have like maybe three or four people in charge, what happens is everybody kind of expects other people

to solve the problem. So the state leaders look to the federal government, the department of education, expect them to fix the problem. And the department education is not going to fix it. And they say, well, education is the state's issue. You know, they handle most of that. And so the buck keeps getting passed back and forth between them. And no one ever actually has to take the blame for why things are going poorly. Because if you blame the department education, you can say, well, it's a state's issue. You blame the states to say, well, we need more funding from the department education. And, you know, maybe they do. The Department of Education is taking trillions of dollars over these decades and little to show for it. But all that being said, I don't think the average American really

knows the ins and outs the Department of Education. And generally, cutting education funding, I think is a hard sell for people who are politically disengaged and don't understand what the Department of Education actually does. It just sounds bad. Do you want to cut education funding? Well, as a gut reflex, probably not. Education's important. So you're going to have to know a level of detail and the complexity. situation to support it. So I think that's why it's a hard sell for politically. The polling shows that Americans are kind of skeptical of the idea. One of the biggest concerns, and we're almost out of time here, Kay's one of the biggest concerns from states and local school districts was that,

you know, the federal government helps fund particularly rural school districts, lower income school districts, funds programs for children with special disabilities and special needs. Trump said that that funding is going to remain fully intact. So I don't know if that alleviates any concerns or not, but final word, Casey. Yeah, he said that all the, quote, critical functions of the U.S. Department of Education will remain intact. You know, I guess they get to decide what that means. So, yeah, I think a lot of the things it will be most controversial to get rid of are going to stay there.

I mean, you could ask on a macro level, why does money have to go all the way to D.C. to get sent back to date in Ohio? Why can it? Maybe it just needs to go to the statehouse. Ohio and then sent back to Dayton or whichever city it may be. But for now, I don't think we're going to fix that problem or that question as the federal government continues to go trillions of dollars into debt. That is also last thing, Dan, as we close up, is there's going to be legal challenges to this as well. I'm sure every turn Trump is facing legal challenges and this won't

be any different. Thank you for joining us today, Casey. Listeners can keep up with this story and more at the center square.com.