February 26, 2025
Can Trump Do What Reagan Couldn’t, and End the Department of Education Con Job?
By William Sullivan

Speaking from the Oval Office, President Trump was asked how soon he wanted the Department of Education to be closed.

He responded:

Oh, I’d like it to be closed immediately. Look at the Department of Education. It’s a big con job. They ranked the top countries in the world. We’re ranked 40, but we’re ranked No. 1 in one department: cost per pupil. So we spend more per pupil than any other country in the world, but we’re ranked No. 40… if we’re ranked No. 40, that means something is seriously wrong.

There are two important points being made in this statement.

The first is the simpler one, and it is that the education Department is costly and hasn’t produced positive results.

And he’s certainly not wrong.

Consider that, since 1980, $3.6 trillion were confiscated from American taxpayers and deployed by the agency, and the outcome is that roughly 30% of American eighth graders can read at grade level. Only 26% of American high school students are proficient at mathematics.

But many of us have known for a long time that the education Department is an expensive failure. The second, more important point that Trump is making, is that it has always been a Democrat con job.

Democrats sold the Education Department to the public as an agency that is designed to help improve student outcomes and ensure access to education for poorer students. What it really is, unfortunately, is a machine for laundering money via patronage schemes to promote Democrat policies nationwide.

In very specific and historical terms, it works like this:

Say, Barack Obama decides that some states have adopted what his administration believes is a very progressive and exciting new set of standards for education called Common Core, and they want to apply this progressive standard nationwide. Problem is, some states don’t agree that it’s a good idea, so they don’t voluntarily adopt the standard. So, they bury billions of dollars for education purposes in a $700-plus billion piece of legislation that no one in Congress took the time to read.

Then, the Department of Education works closely with selected friendly tribunals like the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) to decide which states would be awarded those allocated billions for education. PARCC is, as you might have guessed, foundationally tied to Common Core.

Common Core was all just a voluntary program, Americans were told. “State adoption of the standards was by no means mandatory,” said the Common Core State Standard Initiative at the time. But if a state decided not to adopt Common Core standards in public school curricula, the federal government would threaten to withhold federal money from the state.
This understandably pressured state and local politicians to adopt what was being pushed by the federal education Department, so by 2010, 40 states had adopted the Common Core standards for English and math (and we know how that turned out). If they didn’t comply and accept the money, then it would be reported that the state didn’t get however many millions of dollars from the federal government, and the politicians’ reelection would be in jeopardy.

This practice of the federal government strongarming state and local politicians to fall in line with a progressive agenda is a Democrat specialty, dating back to at least the FDR days, as he held confiscated federal money over the heads many politicians who may have been waffling on whether to back his terrible New Deal policies that arguably made the depression of the 1930s a Great one.

The Department of Education was just another mechanism designed to accomplish that goal, specifically in the realm where children might be best indoctrinated to accept progressive dogma.

Now, consider that Common Core is all but dead today, and it is yet another failure on the ash heap of progressive failures. But take the methodology by which Common Core was wedged into nearly every state in America, and substitute Common Core with Critical Race Theory (CRT) or transgender ideology, both of which are unpopular, yet still infecting public education everywhere in America today.

Both Barack Obama and Joe Biden used the Education Department as a cudgel to get states to adopt policies that would allow boys-pretending-to-be-girls to compete against female athletes across the country, for example. Democrats had no problem with that, of course, because the education Department’s patronage has always been a tool to advance left-wing pursuits, and Republicans have typically whined about it while doing nothing.

Things have been this way, in regard to the Education Department, for 45 years. The agency was established under the Carter administration, and Ronald Reagan ran for president in 1980 while promising to eliminate it. It was recognized early on that the Department was “an unnecessary centralization and bureaucratization of an educational system that had been getting along fine without a Cabinet-level federal agency,” as Robert Spencer puts it at FrontPage Magazine. But in the end, “the swamp beat the Gipper, and the Education department stayed open.”

So, imagine Democrats’ surprise when Trump finally turned the tables on them.

Actually, you don’t have to imagine it, because they are losing their minds at this very moment over Trump saying that he will do to Democrats what Democrats have done to conservatives for 45 years.

Addressing the Governor of Maine, Janet Mills, who has declared that she would not comply with the federal guidance by Trump’s Department of Education to protect girls’ sports from intrusion by boys-pretending-to-be-girls, Trump said:

Well, you better do it. You better do it. Because you’re not gonna get any federal funding at all. And by the way, your population, even though it’s somewhat liberal -- although I did very well there -- your population doesn’t want men playing in women’s sports. So, you better comply, otherwise you’re not getting any federal funding.

When she said that she’d “see [him] in court,” Trump was amused. “Good, I’ll see you in court. That should be a real easy one. And enjoy your life after governor, because I don’t think you’ll be in elected politics.”

Once again, the only reason that most states adopted the absurd policy of allowing boys to play in girls’ sports is because Obama and Biden threatened to withhold federal money from them if they didn’t comply. Trump is just being more open about what he’s doing, and that’s because he has no reason to hide it like Obama and Biden did.

One reason he’s not inclined to hide it is that Trump’s federal guidance is popular. Recent reports show that nearly 80% of Americans agree that “trans-identified” males should not play in girls’ sports, which makes Trump’s position about as safe as any issue can be for a president.

But here’s the more important thing, particularly as it relates to anyone trying to sell the stupid idea that Trump wants to be some kind of dictator or something.

Trump currently wields this powerful lever which allows the federal government to unconstitutionally infringe upon state and local governments’ rights to determine their own path for education of American youth, and he is wielding it precisely as his Democrat predecessors did. But rather than seeking to expand that agency’s financing and influence, as a tyrant would do, he has stated unequivocally that he wants to eradicate that agency altogether, so that neither a future Republican nor a Democrat can wield the power in the way that it has been abused for the past 45 years.

That is not what a tyrant would do. That’s what a hero who puts his country above himself would do.

Here's hoping that Trump can succeed in abolishing the Department of Education where the Gipper failed. It would be a small, but crucial step in restoring the limited federal government that the Founders envisioned.