President Trump is winning big victories.
His big victory of the day is slashing and burning his way through the Department of Education, which he has proposed to eliminate completely.
People don’t seem to understand what it is that the Department of Education actually does. They seem to believe that all public schools all over the country are paid for by the federal government. That is not true. The vast majority of public school spending is state and local spending, as it should be, because there is no legitimate reason why a taxpayer in Florida should subsidize the public school education of a student in California.
The truth is that the vast majority of money spent via the Department of Education is federal student aid on college loans. In other words, the cost of college has skyrocketed due to the gigantic subsidies that are paid for by your taxpayer dollars to colleges that are then churning out good little Left-wing apparatchiks.
Looking at the Department of Education by subcomponent for fiscal year 2025, the largest outlay by far comes from the Office of Federal Student Aid — roughly $68 billion just on federal student loan aid.
Remember when Joe Biden wanted to radically expand that? Why?
Because those are all his friends.
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The number one place the pipeline of dollars flows from permanent employees in the federal government to permanent staffers in the blue infrastructure around America is higher education, which is subsidized by the American taxpayer.
It should not be. This could all be done privately. All of it. It would be better if it were done privately, a case I have made previously. The reason this would be better is because students would actually be forced to consider whether they need a degree in lesbian dance studies, as opposed to simply taking money from the federal government, subsidized over the course of 30 years, to get a degree in lesbian dance studies.
We’ve artificially inflated the necessity for a degree in this country. There are numerous jobs in this country that now require a degree but didn’t before. Why?
Because when the number of people going to college increases, the expectation that people will have gone to college increases as well.
A signal category error in higher education in the United States was made back in the 1960s. The dunderheads in the federal government looked at the stats and saw that college graduates made more money than high school graduates. Their conclusion was not that college graduates earn more than high school graduates because they were going into professions that made more money. Rather, their conclusion was that this was a lack of opportunity for high school graduates in general. Thus, if we could artificially boost the number of high school graduates who go to college, then the overall income in the United States would somehow be boosted.
Instead, this resulted in everybody being pushed up one level. So now, graduate students make a lot more money than undergraduate students, who make a lot more money than high school graduates — which just prolongs the time before entry into the workforce. So people who do not need a college degree for the job they are currently doing spend four years incurring anywhere from $100,000 to $200,000 in debt on the taxpayer dime, subsidized, before they get to go to a job they certainly could have done going straight into the workforce when they were 18 years old.
It is a scam. It is a massive scam. Notably, this doesn’t mean everything in our universities is a scam. For specific career paths, universities can be great. For science, technology, engineering, math, and STEM fields, people need a degree because it prepares them for a higher-level job that requires higher levels of training.
But there are many people who believe that colleges and universities should be a prerequisite to entry into public life because they somehow create good citizens.
That died long ago.
The argument for liberal arts colleges died with the Left’s takeover of those liberal arts colleges.
It used to be that universities and colleges in the United States inculcated a sense of virtue and citizenship. The occasional college or university still does that. Some of them are sponsors of my show. Others are startup universities. Some are Christian universities. But they are few and far between.
The reality is that the vast majority of colleges and universities take in high school students and turn out Left-wing thinkers or people who are apathetic about politics with a degree that costs much money subsidized by taxpayer dollars.
Cutting the Department of Education has been a Republican agenda item since the 1980s. But only President Trump has actually taken that seriously. All credit to him.
Linda McMahon, the newly-approved Secretary of Education, is taking over a department that has already been cut by roughly 50%.
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What about the proper jobs of the Department of Education, such as the Office of English Language Acquisition (which is designed for people to learn English in the country) or other parts of the DOE you might want to maintain? Those are shifted out of that department and the department is killed entirely so that it can’t be rebuilt from within by the Left.
The Department of Education is one of the most bloated parts of the federal government. The total budget and budgetary resources of the Department of Education amount to roughly $100 billion. All of that can be cut.
The Left, of course, is screaming over this. Unions are freaking out, which is a good sign. Randi Weingarten, the head of the American Federation of Teachers and one of the most loathsome figures in American public life, is a person who helped keep kids out of school for two years to get her constituents (i.e., union members) paid to effectively do nothing while wrecking kids for a couple of years on the basis of pseudoscience. Weingarten moaned that the Trump administration would wind up boosting funding for school choice.
You mean the most popular civil rights policy of our era might be boosted? That parents might have the opportunity to take their kids out of failing public schools and put them in better private schools or competitors?
Oh, no.
Of course this is bad for her because her entire shtick is “taxpayers should fund me, Randi Weingarten, and my jerks over at the AFT to indoctrinate your kids or keep them out of school entirely.”
All of this is very good.
It’s a big win for the Trump administration, and we hope that it continues.
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