WASHINGTON — Congress may have created the Department of Education in 1979, but don’t expect this GOP-controlled Congress to try and salvage their predecessors’ handywork.
With the squiggle of his black permanent marker, President Donald Trump signed a new executive order targeting the agency Republicans accuse of indoctrinating American children with DEI — diversity, equity and inclusion.
“The Department of Education’s become a means to impose all sorts of woke programs and requirements on education,” Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) told Raw Story. “They haven't been a benefit; they've been an impediment to education.”
Democrats beg to differ.
Besides being astounded that their GOP counterparts let the Trump administration unwind the work of the legislative branch, they argued that the U.S. Department of Education was intended to act as a shield protecting the nation’s most disadvantaged.
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"It's not only giving up the power, it's also what the Department of Education is there for. It's there primarily to enforce civil rights," Rep. Bobby Scott (D-VA), the top Democrat on the House Education and Workforce Committee, told Raw Story.
To Scott, Trump and his administration revealed their true reason for unwinding any and all diversity programs they find throughout the federal government.
"In the old days, a cry for states’ rights was the battle cry for segregationists. They were against civil rights, and now you're seeing that back again,” Scott said. “The civil rights of students are at risk when you get rid of the Department of Education and let the states handle it.”
Even with the threat of reverting back to America’s segregational roots, Republicans are eager to put states back in the driver’s seat when it comes to the education of the nation.
Instead of trying to protect the congressionally-mandated Department of Education, these days, Republicans on Capitol Hill are already, seemingly, lighting the fuse the administration plans to use to destroy the federal backbone uniting public schools spread across America’s 50 diverse — and disparate — states.
For now, that means Republicans are content to just let Trump, Elon Musk and multi-billionaire Education Secretary Linda McMahon work their will, even as Congress is currently cut out of the agency’s planned radical redesign.
“I'm kind of watching the debate,” Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-AK) told Raw Story.
“Do you get worried, though, about Congress ceding its power slowly?” Raw Story asked. “Or, like, at what point do you guys weigh in on this?”
“You know, I mean, all remains to be seen,” Sullivan said.
That doesn’t mean Republican lawmakers don’t have their own ideas to overhaul the department their party loves to loathe.
“We should keep some functions and move them into other agencies and generally get out of the education business in Washington,” Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-SC) told Raw Story.
Still, for now, senior senators like Graham are hands off.
“How much of a role does Congress need to have in this?” Raw Story asked.
“I don't know. There'll come a point where you know what statutorily authorized can't be changed by executive action, but a lot of it can be,” Graham said. “So I think it's the more they get into rearranging it, the more we’ll know.”
While Democrats cried foul, Republicans giddily watched the administration do their constitutionally mandated jobs for them. It’s almost as if GOP leaders have kept their distance as Trump and his team dismantled decades worth of bipartisan education efforts.
“Do you worry about Congress ceding too much power?” Raw Story pressed. “At what point do you guys have to join the effort?”
“We'll weigh in when it’s necessary,” Cornyn said as he entered an elevator in the Capitol.
There’s nothing new — or even very novel — about Trump taking aim at the Department of Education. Last year, Sen. Mike Rounds (R-SD) introduced the Returning Education to Our States Act that would carefully dismantle the agency.
The former governor has lobbied Education Secretary McMahon to adopt his proposal, which seeks to strip out individual programs from the agency, such as the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, special education or even student loan programs, and house them in a different agency.
Rounds plans to meet with the new secretary again soon to discuss his sweeping, if methodical, measure.
“My plan, as you know, doesn't destroy the department, it takes it apart,” Rounds told Raw Story. “We spent a year and a half going through and looking for the offices that are there that Congress has authorized, and we have pulled them and put them back where they were originally found before the department was created.”
Stripping those programs out will save the federal government “a little over a billion dollars a year, but that's with all of the other proceeds going back to the states,” Rounds estimated. “No loss of funding to any program that's been authorized by Congress and no loss to the states on money that could be going forward or, basically, grants.”
“Is your bill kind of essential?” Raw Story asked. “Like, the White House and secretary, they’re going to take initial steps and then you guys will go back over it with legislation?”
“I don’t know,” Rounds said. “I spoke to her before her confirmation. Told her about it. She said she'd like to work with us, and we've continued on with creating the bill so that it would be a reasonable way to dismantle the program — get rid of the regulatory, bureaucratic oversight that just drives the states crazy — but still keeps in effect all the funding and all the specific programs.”
Even if the flurry of attacks on agencies being witnessed by the Trump administration feels novel, none of this is new, especially when it comes to Republican efforts to eradicate the federal government’s decades-long role in public education.
Many Republicans ran for office promising to dismantle the Department of Education it was known.
Before he ever even imagined serving in Washington, Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) was propelled into politics by local education policy.
The two-term senator — who’s up for reelection this cycle — jump-started his political career with a stint as president of his daughter’s high school PTA. Then, he joined the North Carolina legislature, including serving three terms as speaker.
As he climbed the proverbial political ladder, Tillis said education policy was always a central plank of his campaigns, especially his first run for federal office in 2014.
“I can remember vividly because there was a mantra in my campaign,” Tillis told Raw Story. “There were about 5,000 people in a department that didn't exist when I graduated from high school making over $100,000 a year.”
That’s an eye-popping salary for people living in North Carolina, where the median household income is just under $70,000. Tillis said every penny counts that goes to a classroom.
“Why don't we think about what really needs to be done?” Tillis said. “If it needs to be done in Washington, are there resources that can flow to the states and give them more freedom to educate our kids and relieve them of some of the constraints that I think cause some public schools to perform at a lower level than some of the options?”
While Democrats are open to a top-down review of the Department of Education, they’ve been aghast watching Musk and his largely unaccountable Department of Government Efficiency army flex as they dismantle agencies established by Congress.
Publicly at least, Republicans aren’t worried by the aggressive actions Trump, Musk and McMahon have promised and delivered on at the Department of Education.
“Moving ahead without Congress, do you worry that you guys are ceding a little too much power?” Raw Story asked.
“Well, that’s an issue because you’ve got to follow the law. Period. Full stop. If we see any evidence that they're not, then that's a problem,” Tillis said. “There's a question about the separation of powers, but I'm not there yet because I think they're actually trying to force the issue. Intuitively, I could see where about half of what the DOE is doing either doesn’t need to be done or should be done by the states.”
The question many parents nationwide have asked is, what about the other half?
States’ rights are one thing. Racism is quite another.
To Democrats, the Department of Education was needed to combat segregation. And they maintain it’s still essential as Trump and his team work to eradicate diversity programs.
"If attacking civil rights is part of your agenda, the Department of Education just gets in the way," said Scott, the ranking Democrat on the House Education Committee. "Those who are not standing up to this need to own the result. I don't know if we have the votes with the Republican majority in the House and Senate. I don't know. They obviously don't want to stand up to it. They don't even want to ask questions."
The federal role in education, according to Scott, is protecting minorities, including low-income students, English as a second language learners, students with disabilities, LGBTQ, and even children from rural, largely conservative communities.
Scott said there’s a lot more at play with Trump and his team than simply empowering local communities to control their own classrooms.
"You really have to put this in the context of the fact that during President Trump's first term he appointed dozens of judges who refused to say during their confirmation hearings whether or not they thought Brown v. Board of Education was properly decided in 1954,” Scott said of the landmark Supreme Court ruling to desegregate public schools. “As if we've got to discuss whether or not segregated schools is a good idea or not.”
For now, as the minority party on Capitol Hill, Democrats are seemingly resigned to being spectators, if loud and disruptive ones.
Scott said his party isn’t going to let up pressure on the GOP until they start taking their constitutional duty of oversight seriously.
"We ask questions about what's going on, and we don't get answers. If a majority of the members of Congress asked the question, we could subpoena individuals to come to testify to give us answers," Scott told Raw Story. "But the majority — the Republicans — are not interested in answers. We don't get answers."