The Department of Education has been a boondoggle since its inception.

Education should be done at the local and state level. Parents should be in charge of the education of their children, whether in private school or public school. The reality is that the more local the education, the more it reflects the needs, desires, and wants of the parents, who, of course, are the ones most aligned with the interests of their children.

Instead, we in the United States have increasingly devolved authority to the federal government. Virtually all of the agencies have been hijacked — as we’ve now been learning — by a Left-wing bureaucratic mess designed to be a permanent pipeline of cash to the friends of the Democrats.

This is particularly true of the Department of Education. In fiscal year 2024, the Department of Education spent $268 billion. That is a lot of money. And since 1980, the spending has increased 372%, which is almost double the increase of the size of the rest of the federal government’s.

Most of that goes to subsidize precisely the sort of indoctrination centers that have been churning out radicals in extraordinary numbers, corrupting our body politic for decades.

If you did not like the Hamas Tentifadas on campus last year, you can blame the fact that we as a society decided it was deeply imperative to send all of our teenagers to institutions of higher education that indoctrinate them in trash. You can blame that on the fact that our primary, lower, and secondary education institutions have been indoctrinating kids in Left-wing values for decades.

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Last year, the Department of Education spent $165 billion on higher education. That’s nearly half the total funds spent by the entire department. That money went to colleges and universities to prop up the great scam that is higher education. Those are grants to students to major in lesbian dance theory.

You’re wondering, how did they get that money? The answer is you got to pay for it. Just $40 billion went directly to elementary and secondary education. Even if you wanted the money going to small kids, it is not predominantly going to them. It is going to the very large overgrown children who are 19 and 20 years old, majoring in nonsense.

The dollars went indirectly to the lower level, to the grifters and cretins of the unions, like the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the National Education Association (NEA). It did not flow directly to them, but when federal dollars subsidize schools that are in bed with the AFT and the NEA, the work of Randi Weingarten is subsidized.

What have been the priorities of the Department of Education in the recent past? Joe Biden’s Secretary of Education, Miguel Cardona, wrote in last year’s budget summary, “The investments proposed in President Biden’s new budget reflect this Administration’s deep belief in education as the foundation of all opportunity in America. … The President’s budget would also expand career-connected learning in our schools and provide more pathways to well-paying careers, as well as raise the bar for college affordability, inclusive student success, and driving more equitable outcomes in higher education.”

Equity, of course, is effectively a code word for racial quotas. That’s how Biden saw it. Biden requested $100 million for developing and implementing strategies to promote diversity in schools and classrooms. But that is not just in reference to racial quotas; it is in reference to the curriculum itself — to what is taught.

President Trump came into office pledging to kill DEI programs at our nation’s schools. The Department of Education has apparently handed out $1 billion in DEI grants since 2021 alone, according to Parents Defending Education. That included $490 million in grants for race-based hiring schemes, which are illegal under the Constitution; $169 million for DEI-based mental health training; and $343 million on general DEI programs. That’s just over the past few years.

So what exactly did the Biden administration do after the Supreme Court banned affirmative action last year? The DOE then released resources to assist colleges and universities to basically end-around the law. You remember: Joe Biden tried to do this.

On August 14th, 2023, the Biden administration issued what was called the “Dear Colleague” letter, an advisory letter from the federal government to a variety of institutions designed to tell them how they wanted the law applied. The goal, apparently, was to substitute mushy words like “overcoming adversity” for explicit racial quotas.

Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights at ED Catherine E. Lhamon wrote, “Even after the Court’s decision sharply limited a tool that colleges and universities with selective admissions practices have used to create vibrant, diverse campus communities, colleges and universities may still lawfully work to admit, support, retain, and graduate racially diverse student bodies. Today’s resources explain practices that remain legally viable and confirms the Federal government’s robust civil rights protections in schools.”

In other words, ignore the Supreme Court.

People who keep shouting about Trump and constitutional crises ignored the Supreme Court of the United States, openly and basically saying they would defy the Supreme Court in pursuit of their diversity agenda.

There is no bigger boondoggle than the Department of Education, which is why they are screaming bloody murder over what Trump is doing.

These public sector teachers unions, in many states, collect union dues from their teachers, and then pay off Democratic politicians with those dues. They campaign for Democrats. Democrats then sign massive, ridiculous pork-laden contracts with the AFT to enrich everybody; then, the AFT does it all over again. That’s the game.

Does the AFT care about students? Of course not. They are not a priority. We learned just as much during COVID when the AFT pushed incredibly hard for students never to go back to school, claiming they weren’t safe.

Randi Weingarten said that despite every piece of evidence, you couldn’t let your kids go back to school to die of COVID. It didn’t matter that a paucity of children were dying of COVID. All that mattered to Weingarten was that her teachers got to stay home, teach on Zoom, and still get paid their salaries.

The tale that Democrats are trying to tell is that your kid is going to lose their cherished public school education because Trump wants to kill the Department of Education. 

But the vast majority of funding for public school in the United States comes at the state and local levels. It is not coming from the federal government.

What comes from the federal government is very often attached to precisely the kinds of interest groups to which the Democrats want it attached.

Former Biden Education Secretary Cardona has claimed that what Trump is doing is a form of monarchy. He said, “I’m all in favor of reviewing what works best, and I’m even in favor of assessing policy, whether you agree with it or not. But I’m not in favor of the change that’s happening, which is going from democracy to a monarchy. And we’re seeing examples of that in every agency. And it’s really troubling. And I think the American people, regardless of party, should be worried about what’s happening now.”

He’s lying. He’s not in favor of auditing anything. He’s not in favor of checking out the curriculum.

According to Democrats, when a regulatory, bureaucratic agency pumps out $300 billion a year to the friends of Cardona, that’s called democracy. But it’s monarchy when the new president comes in and says we’re not doing that anymore.

Whatever you want to call it, give me more of it.