One of the most despised branches of government is the U.S. Department of Education, which persistently piques the ire of conservatives and advocates for education reform because of its wasteful spending and serious state power over education policies.
Last week, President Donald Trump said he would like to see the Department of Education” closed immediately”, calling it a” con job”. He noted that America spends more per student than almost every other nation while producing subpar educational benefits.
Hundreds of millions of dollars in waste have already been cut by Department of Government Efficiency ( DOGE ) auditors. Secretary-designate Linda McMahon, who had her Senate confirmation hearing last Thursday, may be prepared to help eliminate a decades-long mud account of waste, fraud, and mistreatment woven deeply into the government.
That will allow Trump and McMahon to redirect education funding to localities and states while significantly reducing the agency’s footprint, even though, as McMahon acknowledged on Thursday, total abolition will require 60 Senate votes, which are unlikely to be sufficient.
” DOGE]has ] a lot to chew on at the Department of Education, which has spent billions of taxpayer dollars on funding progressive ideology and indoctrination”, Bob Eitel, president and co-founder of the Defense of Freedom Institute, told The Federalist. ” Overall administrative bloat is a major issue that costs taxpayers billions and doesn’t help students.” We are confident that the Trump administration will quickly undo unnecessary spending.
Eitel should be aware that during the Bush administration, he served as deputy general counsel to Education Secretary Betsy DeVos for the majority of Trump’s first term.
In recent days, DOGE has announced substantial cuts at the Department of Education. Just over the weekend, DOGE revealed the department eliminated 70 diversity, equity, and inclusion ( DEI ) training grants totaling$ 373 million. According to a report from one of the department’s funded trainings, teachers were instructed to “engage in ongoing learning and self-reflection to confront their own biases and racism, and develop asset-based anti-racist mindsets.”
Cuts like this are “perfect examples of how the left has used a federal bureaucracy as a way station to fund progressive pet projects,” Eitel told The Federalist. Every dollar spent on corrosive DEI training should have been spent on students or given back to the taxpayers.
On Thursday, the Department of Education announced it made over$ 350 million in cuts, targeting Regional Educational Laboratories ( REL ) and Equity Assistance Centers.
” Equity Assistance Grants “are” some of the worst offenders,” Eitel said. They are an” Obama-era invention designed to infuse DEI into schools.”
The agency” terminated 10 contracts totaling$ 336 million with]REL] “after” review of the contracts uncovered wasteful and ideologically driven spending not in the interest of students and taxpayers,” the announcement said”. For example, the Regional Educational Laboratory Midwest has been advising schools in Ohio to undertake’ equity audits’ and equity conversations,” the release added.
Additionally, the department ended funding for four Equity Assistance Centers worth$ 33 million, which supported gender identity, critical race theory, and divisive training for state and local education boards as well as school boards.
However, despite these limitations, the Trump administration needs to find all of the ways left-wing ideologies are laundered through the Education Department. For example, Title VI Higher Education grants, Eitel said”, have been used on profoundly un-American initiatives.”
In order to prepare students for work in national security, Title VI of the Higher Education Act ( HEA ) was originally intended to fund international language and area studies at universities. However, Title VI HEA grants have primarily been used to create racial tension on college campuses.
In a letter to Biden Education Secretary Miguel Cardona in December 2023, representatives from DFI and other education advocates cited numerous instances in which schools received Title VI HEA grant funding for National Resource Centers ( NRC ) but instead used those funds for anti-American propaganda.
A substantial, growing body of evidence supports the claim that these NRC and related grants are actually undermining these interests in the context of critical theory ( i .e., viewing every subject through the lens of the oppressor and the oppressed ),” the letter said. This indoctrinates K-12 teachers and students in higher education with the myth that America and its allies, like Israel, are unquestionably oppressors on the global stage.
From a Title VI-funded center at the University of Texas-Austin, the letter highlighted materials like” Kurricane Global Citizenship” and” Starting and Sustaining Critical Race Literacy in the Classroom.”
The letter also explains how a Title VI grant-funded joint venture between Duke and the University of North Carolina produced a conference on” Love and Desire in Modern Iran,” as well as academic papers like Amihri Hatun: Performance, Gender-Bending, and Subversion in the Early Modern Ottoman Intellectual History. At least for those endeavors, the Office for Postsecondary Education ( OPE ) found them to be an improper use of federal tax dollars, but only directed the program to” revise” and justify its” list of activities.”
According to the letter, OPE reviewed the activities of Duke and UNC’s joint” Middle East Studies “program after investigating an” anti-Semitic “rapper performance at the program’s 2019″ Conflict over Gaza” conference and the” subsequent discovery of swastikas drawn on campus and anti-Semitic flyers in a UNC library.”
DFI also claimed that the Federal Student Aid program is overstaffed and ready for cost-cutting, suggesting high-level ( highly paid ) officials are” committed to and never leave, leading to administrative bloat at higher costs than necessary.”
DOGE should also look into the Borrower Defense to Repayment ( BDR) program, which is intended to assist borrowers in recovering damages if they were defrauded by their schools. Might the Biden administration, which notoriously attempted to hand student debt over to taxpayers, have been less than diligent in confirming students ‘ stories before helping them out on the taxpayer’s dime?
Competitive grants are another area that DOGE can check for cuts. The Department of Education” spends about half of its man-hours on just 5 % of its budget in the form of competitive grants,” Eitel said, suggesting these grants” ought to be done away with and instead block granted to the states.”
Block grants are another long-standing educational objective of Republicans that allows the federal government to fund states ‘ education in one lump sum with no restrictions on the extent of the federal government’s regulations. As opposed to being dictated by federal bureaucrats, these grants give states and localities the ability to tailor education dollars to their own needs.
As McMahon said in Thursday’s hearing” ,]President Trump ] pledged to make American education the best in the world, return education to the states where it belongs, and free American students from the education bureaucracy through school choice.”
DoGE and McMahon must take a microscope to each and every office and program within the department, expose how it has been abused, and redirect its funding toward the benefit of American students in order to become the “best in the world.”
Breccan F. Thies is an elections correspondent for The Federalist. He previously covered issues of culture and education for Breitbart News and the Washington Examiner. He is a Publius Fellow at the 2022 Claremont Institute and holds a degree from the University of Virginia. You can follow him on X: @BreccanFThies.
