The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is being set up by President-elect Donald Trump, and will be run by people from outside the Beltway to cut away the mounds of fat from the federal government. There's a lot of fat to be cut away. The ratio of fat to useful tissue may well be double-digits to one; it's hard to know, but we can suspect that the DOGE under Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy will be finding out.
Eliminating or at least minimizing entire Cabinet-level agencies is on the table. So, let's look at some of those agencies and evaluate the reasons for their continued existence — and the arguments for their dissolution.
This time, let's look at the Department of Education (ED).
The ED traces its lineage to the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, which was founded in 1953. Before that, there was no formal federal department in charge of education issues. In 1980, that department was divided by statute into the Department of Education and the Department of Health and Human Services. The role of the Department of Education is, purportedly, to "raise the bar" on education in the United States, from kindergarten through university levels.
Explore the U.S. Department of Education's call to action to transform education and unite around what truly works — based on decades of experience and research — to advance educational equity and excellence. The Biden-Harris Administration has made billions of dollars in crucial investments to strengthen education in schools, colleges, and universities across America.
Numbers don’t lie, right? But they also don’t always tell the whole story. That’s the case with the most recent results from a key global education test, the Program for International Student Assessment or PISA.
In the past, PISA results have often spurred anguished discussion about why U.S. students are so far behind other countries like Finland, Korea and Poland. But the most recent rankings, released in December 2023, indicated that U.S. 15-year olds moved up in the international rankings for all three subjects – math, reading and science. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona credited the largest federal investment in education in history – roughly $200 billion – for keeping the United States “in the game” during the pandemic. (The tests were administered in 2022.)
But that rosy spin hides a much grimmer picture. Rankings may have risen, but test scores did not. The only reason the U.S. rose is because academic performance in once higher ranking countries, such as Iceland and the Slovak Republic, fell by even more since the previous testing round in 2018. Neither India nor China, which topped the rankings in 2018, participated in the 2022 PISA. In math, the U.S. rose from 29th place to 28th place, still in the bottom half of economically advanced nations of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), an international organization of 38 member countries that oversees the PISA exam.
So, not very well.
The problem is that schools, if the government must be involved at all, should be held strictly at the municipal or county level, or a the state level in the case of colleges and universities. Better still, privatize the lot; eliminate any government control over the schools, and repeal the taxes that pay for government schools if we can, or refund them to parents in the form of vouchers if we must. Let a thousand flowers bloom!
See Related: WATCH: Hannah Cox Slams Education System, Explains Why School Choice Is a Must
Who Let the DOGE Out? Elon, Vivek Already Targeting Wasteful Spending
The fact is that we got along very well until 1953 with no federal Department of Education in any form. I remember my father showing me an 8th-grade textbook he found in a thrift shop and bought for a quarter, as it reminded him of books he (born in 1923) had studied in his own school years. It was an American history text, and it included study questions such as "Discuss events leading up to and during the Whiskey Rebellion, including President Washington's response, and how it affected the prevalent view of taxation."
Imagine the blank looks you'd get asking an 8th-grader a question like that today.
But if we are to discuss whether there is any reason to retain a federal Department of Education, this is still the most important thing to consider:
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
There is, and never has been, any constitutional authorization for the federal government to be involved in education in any way. At all. Education is not an enumerated power of Congress nor of the Executive Branch. This being the case, not only should the Department of Education be shut down, but if we are to abide by the Constitution, it must be shut down.
Education in the United States is failing. Our kids are falling behind in basic skills like reading, writing, and arithmetic, while the school boards are instead spending resources on transgender issues and drag queen story hours. Our university system is a shambles, with the Ivy League having descended into indoctrination centers for socialism and universities across the fruited plain offering BS Ethnic Underwater Dog-Polishing degrees and the like. The Department of Education has failed in its stated purpose. There's no reason to keep it around - no educational reason, and no constitutional reason.
Set the DOGE loose, Elon and Vivek. The ED can go.
Previously on RedState: Targets for the DOGE: Do We Need the Department of Energy?
