Two pieces about the Department of Education. Why are conservatives so anxious to dismantle it? Is it their knee-jerk resentment of any kind of federal authority, imposition of standards, of regulations? Is it that students of one state cannot be expected to match the achievements of students of other states? (An argument I read against Common Core, years ago.)
NY Times, Michael C. Bender, 6 Mar 2025: Why Republicans Want to Dismantle the Education Department, subtitled “President Trump’s fixation reinvigorated the debate over the role of the federal government in education, and created a powerful point of unity between the factions of his party.”
Right from the start, Republicans opposed President Jimmy Carter’s signature on a 1979 law creating the department, citing beliefs in limited government control, fiscal responsibility and local autonomy.
They argued that education should be primarily managed at the state and local levels rather than through federal mandates.
A year later, Ronald Reagan won the White House, his third attempt at the presidency, thanks to a promise that he would rein in a federal government that he said had overstepped its bounds on myriad issues, including education. In 1982, Mr. Reagan used his State of the Union address to call on Congress to eliminate two agencies: the Energy Department and the Education Department.
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The Education Department’s primary role has been sending federal money to public schools, administering college financial aid and managing federal student loans. The agency enforces civil rights laws in schools and supports programs for students with disabilities.
Civil rights! You can see why conservatives would be concerned.
Mr. Trump rarely mentioned education during his first presidential campaign in 2016, other than to criticize Common Core standards, which aimed to create some consistency across states.
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But Mr. Trump is adept at seizing on issues that resonate with his conservative base. During his 2024 campaign, that meant adopting the concerns of the parents’ rights movement that grew out of the backlash to school shutdowns and other restrictions during the coronavirus pandemic.
That movement gained steam by organizing around opposition to progressive agendas that promoted mandating certain education standards and inclusive policies for L.G.B.T.Q. students. Activists contended that these policies undermined parental rights and values.
Parental “values”. And now, the DoE is linked to the banishment of DEI. Project 2025 wanted to dismantle DoE too. Which the Project claimed was staffed by workers who “inject racist, anti-American, ahistorical propaganda into America’s classrooms” which I take to mean anything that contradicts the conservative party-line about America being the greatest nation ever and slavery wasn’t so bad and so on.
Also: The Project noted
that student test scores have not improved despite 45 years of federal spending. But it does not explain how that might change by giving more power to state and local school districts, which have spent exponentially more on education during that same time.
I can’t speculate why test scores have gone done, but I’d guess fragmenting education funding by states would not help matters.
Ultimately, the arguments about “returning” anything to the states echoes the “states’ rights” platform that these same states claimed, and that triggered the Civil War, when really the rights those states wanted to preserve were about slavery.
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Repeating some of this:
AP News, 6 Mar 2025: Trump wants to dismantle the Education Department. Here’s what it does
I’ll condense:
- Student loans and financial aid;
- Civil rights enforcement;
- College accreditation;
- Money for schools.
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So, between these two pieces, my takeaway: Conservatives don’t like the DoE because they resent federal control of local matters, and they especially resent civil rights issues being enforced in their states. And conservatives seem unconcerned that, without federal supervision and funding, rich states will fund better education than poor states.
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Quick takes:
NY Times, news analysis by Erica L. Green, 8 Mar 2025: ‘You Can’t Pin Him Down’: Trump’s Contradictions Are His Ultimate Cover, subtitled “President Trump’s shifting positions and outright lies have presented the American public with dueling narratives at every turn.”
So Trump’s inconsistencies and incoherence are a feature, not a bug?
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NY Times, Editorial Board, 8 Mar 2025: Musk Doesn’t Understand Why Government Matters [gift link]
(I’d say, again, that the core problem is thinking of the government as a business, to make money. It’s not.)
Mr. Musk claims that the government is a business in need of disruption and that his goal is to eliminate waste and improve efficiency. And he’s right: The federal government is often wasteful and inefficient. Taxpayers, business owners and recipients of federal benefits all know the frustration of navigating the federal bureaucracy. There are huge opportunities, in particular, for the government to make better use of technology.
But DOGE is not building a better government. Instead, its haphazard demolition campaign is undermining the basic work of government and the safety and welfare of the American people. Mr. Musk directed the firing of nuclear safety workers, necessitating a frantic effort to rehire them just days later. He ended federal funding for Ebola monitoring, and despite his subsequent acknowledgment that it might be a good idea to keep an eye on Ebola, it still has not been fully restored. The government at Mr. Musk’s behest has disrupted cancer research, delayed work on transportation projects and sought to close the agency established after the 2008 financial crisis to protect consumers from being robbed by banks.
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Trump is planning his own invasions?
Salon, Ross Rosenfeld, 8 Mar 2025: Trump can’t criticize Putin’s invasion. He’s threatening his own, subtitled “If Trump were to criticize Putin’s invasion, it would make it more difficult for him to justify his own actions”
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The Atlantic, Tom Nichols, 7 Mar 2025: The Pentagon’s DEI Panic, subtitled “What are the nation’s warfighters so afraid of?” [gift link]
These people are simple-minded. Nichols’ take cuts to the core issue.
What are the lethal warfighters of the Pentagon so afraid of?
The most likely answer is that they’re afraid of Trump, but the larger problem is that the MAGA movement—including its supporters in the military and the Defense Department—is based on fear and insecurity, a sense that American culture is hostile to them and that Trump is the protector of a minority under siege. Many members of this movement believe that the “left,” or whatever remains of it now, is engaged in a war on the traditional family, on masculinity, on American capitalism, on Christmas and Christians. They see DEI as one of the many spiritual and moral pathogens that threaten to infect fine young men and women (especially white ones) and turn them into sexually decadent Marxists.
They also seem to believe that the way to stop this is to engage in rewriting history so that impressionable young Americans don’t accidentally encounter positive images of Black or female or gay service members. After all, there’s no telling where that leads.
This trepidation reflects a lack of faith in their own children and their fellow citizens, and it is produced in the same bubble of isolation and suspicion that makes parents fearful of letting children move away, especially to go to college.
The fear and backlash of the losing side?
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Trump is deliberately wrecking the economy?
Salon, Amanda Marcotte, 6 Mar 2025: “Not fit to have a job”: Trump victim-blames veterans, workers for his war on the economy, subtitled “When Grandma’s Social Security check goes missing, Trump and Musk plan to call her a ‘fraud'”
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He’s undermining his own plans.
Politico, Robert D. Kaplan, 6 Mar 2025: Opinion | Trump Does Not Know How to Run an Empire, subtitled “Even if he doesn’t know it, Trump’s war on the bureaucracy is in direct conflict with his plans to exert power abroad.”
