Trump to Department of Education: "You're fired! Again!"

Is ice or heat better for whiplash? Asking for a friend.

That wailing you heard yesterday? Oh, just the collective liberal reaction to the SCOTUS decision allowing Donald Trump to resume swinging a wrecking ball through the bureaucratic Jenga tower known as the U.S. Department of Education. From the outrage, you’d think he canceled summer vacation, outlawed oatmilk, and replaced recess with Coal Mining for Kids.

In 1980, Congress gave education its very own Cabinet-level kingdom, splitting it off from the old Department of Health, Education, and Welfare—and with it came an ever-growing army of taxpayer-funded seat warmers. In March of this year, Trump ordered mass layoffs at the department, then followed up with an executive order to dismantle the agency entirely. A district court swiftly ruled the epic downsizing unconstitutional, arguing that it had not been approved by Congress, and temporarily reinstated more than 1,300 workers. The injunction was upheld by a federal appeals court in June.

(I did a deep dive into the history of the DoED back in March when the dung first hit the fan—including Bill Gates’ link to the disastrous Common Core curriculum—if you’re looking for some more nuance or perhaps fodder for your Facebook argument.)

Fast-forward to yesterday when, in a 6-3 vote, the Supreme Court granted the Trump administration’s request to pause the lower court order, officially reversing the reversal of the layoffs (or something that means they can proceed). The massive cuts are part of a plan to “return education to the states” and—gasp!—trim some of that unwieldy federal fat.

Regulators, I’ll have you know, consider fat-trimming a hate crime.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the court’s senior member and resident alarm bell, fired off an angry dissent, predicting that the court’s decision “will unleash untold harm, delaying or denying educational opportunities and leaving students to suffer from discrimination, sexual assault, and other civil rights violations without the federal resources Congress intended.”

No one’s saying civil rights aren’t important—but the idea that scaling back a bloated Beltway agency will “unleash untold harm” is a bit of a leap. Kids won’t be denied educational opportunities just because Karen from Compliance isn’t pushing paper in a windowless office. Protections against discrimination don’t vanish with layoffs; they’re embedded in law. And if you genuinely believe that the absence of the DoED’s “Dear Colleagues” letters outlining how schools should handle sexual assault is going to somehow make our campuses less safe, I’ve got a pet rock with a sparkling personality listed on eBay for just $129 (shipping included!).

“Closing the Department does not mean cutting off funds from those who depend on them,” Education Secretary Linda McMahon said. “We will continue to support K-12 students, students with special needs, college student borrowers, and others who rely on essential programs. As we return education to the states, this administration will continue to perform all statutory duties while empowering families and teachers by reducing education bureaucracy.”

Social media is a predictable mess. Blue-check activists are shrieking about the “death of democracy” (how many times can that poor thing die?), MSNBC is holding a(nother) candlelight vigil for DEI, and a distressed NPR anchor reportedly whispered “but the children…” for 47 uninterrupted minutes on air before dissolving into a puddle.

New York Attorney General Letitia James went on a multi-syllabic, Thesaurus-fueled rant, insisting that the policy “violates affirmative statutory restrictions on the Secretary’s authority to reallocate, consolidate, alter, or abolish statutory functions within the Department.”

(In other words, stay in your lane, Linda.)

In all fairness, if you’d somehow been under the impression that the Department of Education has been doing a bang-up job for the past four-and-a-half decades, I can see how you might be disheartened by this decision. In that case, you might want to take a look at literally any data set not curated by the National Education Association. Because the only thing that’s gone up in the last 40 years is the budget—and maybe the number of college students swooning over socialism (probably because they’ve been told it’s shorthand for “student loan forgiveness”).

Let’s take a stroll down the crumbling corridors of America’s academic progress report, shall we?

In 1980, when the Department of Education became a standalone agency, the federal budget for education was $14 billion annually. Today, it’s over $268 billion—a staggering 1,814% increase between the making of the movie Caddyshack and now. Which might even be considered money well spent, if the U.S. were kicking academic ass—or even not repeatedly having its face smashed into the dirt.

Alas, in that time, reading and math scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)—the “nation’s report card”—have stayed the same or dropped. And according to a report released last year by the National Center for Education Statistics, 28% of American adults ranked at the lowest possible levels of literacy, compared to 19 percent in 2017. That’s not just stagnation; it’s an eleven-figure-a-year participation trophy in the Literacy Limbo World Championships (Motto: “How low can you go?”).

“Learnt” is British. I’ll allow it.

U.S. history is faring even worse. A 2023 NAEP assessment showed that only 22% of eighth graders were proficient in civics (which was two points lower than it was in 2018, and no better than the very first assessment in 1998. Way to go, DoEd!). That’s right: nearly 80% of American middle schoolers couldn’t tell you what the First Amendment protects… but they can probably explain why free speech equals violence and identify colonialism in the cafeteria menu.

Meanwhile, we’ve got a growing army of college graduates who are tens of thousands of dollars in debt and can’t make change without a calculator or locate the North Pole on a map. (“Wait. That’s, like, a real thing?”) Ask them who won the Civil War, and you’re likely to get “uh, Hamilton?” followed by a TED Talk on the patriarchal roots of the grading system.

So when Trump says it’s time to end the stranglehold of the educrats and “return authority over education to the States and local communities,” maybe—just maybe—he’s onto something. The federal Department of Education doesn’t educate anyone. It distributes money, sets arbitrary standards, and holds schools hostage to testing metrics and diversity requirements. It’s the DMV with tenure and a clipboard.

Naturally, liberals are frothing at the mouth. They claim dismantling the DoED is a war on children, teachers, knowledge, and the American way of life. But here’s what they’re really mad about: They’re losing control of the narrative. The centralized curriculum pipeline that turns your kid’s “social studies” class into a lecture on gender pronouns and climate anxiety is suddenly in jeopardy.

Let’s be honest: The idea that overpaid bureaucrats in D.C. know better than local communities how to educate kids is as outdated as chalkboards. And yet for 45 years, we’ve pretended that hiring more administrators with six-figure salaries and an allergy to objective reality was somehow the path to national excellence.

So here we are. Trump lit the match, SCOTUS handed him the gasoline, and the Department of Education is poised to go up like a stack of overdue library books. Liberals are crying. Conservatives are cheering. And somewhere, a kid in Arkansas is learning to read using the Bible and a bass fishing magazine—and can multiply fractions faster than your average high school senior in San Francisco.

Welcome to the post-DoED era. Please turn to page one in your school’s parent-written syllabus. Today’s lesson: “Common Sense.”

Don’t forget to share how you voted and why! :)

That pet rock isn’t the only thing with a sparkling personality I’m selling.