US Education Department takes merciless $1 billion cut

DOGE boss Elon Musk has subjected the US Department of Education to almost $1 billion in cuts while Donald Trump considers how to dismantle it altogether without legal obstacles.

At least 169 contracts pertaining to the department's Institute of Education Sciences (IES), which tracks US students' progress, were scrapped in a ruthless purge by the unelected Musk whose powers have just been enlarged by a new order signed by Trump.

US Democrat senator Patty Murray said in The Guardian that Musk was “bulldozing the research arm of the Department of Education – taking a wrecking ball to high-quality research and basic data we need to improve our public schools. Cutting off these investments after the contract has already been inked is the definition of wasteful.”

She added: “Elon Musk doesn’t care if working class kids in America get a good education, so whittling down the Department of Education means nothing to him. Make no mistake, this is just the first step Donald Trump and Musk are taking to abolish the Department of Education, leaving our public schools with fewer resources and support to pay for massive tax cuts for billionaires and giant corporations.”

Speaking anonymously, insiders have indicated that the order to dismantle the department will be signed sometime this month by the President and will stipulate a two-tier strategy for closing the department down and farming its powers and responsibilities out to other agencies, something that will require congressional approval, Politico reports.

Donald Trump made it clear in his  inaugural speech that the US public education system would be in the firing line given his conviction that it is among the "horrible betrayals" visited upon the American people.

“We have an education system that teaches our children to be ashamed of themselves — in many cases, to hate our country despite the love that we try so desperately to provide to them,” he told his audience at the inauguration ceremony on January 20.

“All of this will change starting today, and it will change very quickly,” he added to deafening applause.

Now we know what Trump has in mind when he referred to these drastic changes to the public school system, which neither he nor his children attended.

Trump himself was driven to his private school, Kew-Forest School in the Queens neighborhood of Forest Hills, by the family chauffeur until bad behavior saw him moved to a military academy, reports PBS.

All five of his children by his three marriages were educated at private schools, including the youngest Barron from his current marriage to Melania.

Part of the President's vision for US education is growing "school choice" private sector with tax breaks for people wanting to send their kids to private schools.

Republicans believe the government should help parents pay for private schooling but teachers’ unions and many Democrats say such a program negatively impacts the public system that educates 50 million US children, Reuters reports.

One of Trump’s main beefs with the public system is that it offers students a perspective on America’s history that clashes with the traditional version.

In his July 4 address in 2020, Trump maintained that students were led to “believe that the men and women who built it were not heroes but villains,” leading to the toppling of statues such as that of George Washington, The Washington Post reports.

Trump plans are set to alter how the department investigates civil rights complaints to “reshape civil rights enforcement towards their (the Republicans’) ideological purposes,” Rachel Perera, a fellow at the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institute, told The Guardian.

In fact, Trump has promised to get the department to investigate “anti-white” civil rights violations, which could interfere with race discrimination investigations, Perera added.

To be led in the interim by Linda McMahon, who is yet to have her nomination confirmed, the public school curriculum is to be changed to include a ban on race and s e x education.

“While they seek to reduce or eliminate [the department], they are directly seeking to insert the federal government in reviewing and determining appropriate curriculum content for students and programming run by schools,” said Sarah Hinger, the deputy director of the ACLU racial justice program, in The Guardian.

“We’re really seeing a whole flip of the idea of the federal government’s role in education,” she added.

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