Some House Democrats were not happy about being blocked from entering the Department of Education on Friday.
They’ve gotten word that President Trump is expected to issue an executive order to abolish the department, and they’re in panic mode.
The department was created in 1979 as a political payoff by Democrat President Jimmy Carter to the National Education Association, the largest labor union in the country.
This teachers’ union basically operates as a money-laundering operation for the radical Left: more than 98% of their campaign contributions went to Democrats in the 2024 election cycle.
This incestuous relationship isn’t new, either. The share of their contributions to Democrat politicians has exceeded 87% for every election cycle over the past three decades, according to available data shared by OpenSecrets.
No wonder Democrat politicians are freaking out. The jig is up.
It’s past time to get rid of this unconstitutional waste of time and money. President Trump campaigned on its elimination, was favored by voters on the issue of education, and won the parent vote by 9 points. He has a mandate to make it happen.
Shuttering the Education Department and dividing its budget among the states would allow for more local control as states spend education dollars as they see fit — fantastic for places that already respect the rights of parents to direct the upbringing of their children.
But in states like New York, where most politicians would rather cater to special interests, the money might be used to continue undermining education freedom.
On the campaign trail, Trump conceded this potential downside to his plan. At a Pennsylvania rally, six weeks before election day, he said, “I’m going to close the Department of Education and move education back to the states.”
He noted that states like Iowa – which has school choice for all families – would do well controlling their own education systems, but that “four or five [states] will be terrible.”
“You’ll probably have a problem in California,” he added.
To solve this problem, any legislation Congress passes to shut down the Department of Education must say that a state can only receive block-grant funding from the shuttered department if it has a robust school-choice program.
This requirement would have little (if any) effect on red states, which are already passing bills to empower all families with school choice.
In fact, 13 states with legislatures controlled by Republicans — most recently Tennessee, just last week — have passed universal school choice policies in the past four years alone.
We’ve seen more advancement on school choice in the past four years than in the preceding four decades.
This plan would give union-controlled lawmakers in blue states an incentive to listen to their actual constituents: parents.
Congress could require states to enact a school choice initiative available to all families — either through education savings accounts or scholarships — to receive federal funding.
The requirement could stipulate that the federal dollars must be used for school-choice initiatives, or that the state could instead decide on a voucher system, allowing state-level dollars to follow the child (as is already the case in many red states).
Lawmakers could additionally prohibit states from imposing arbitrary caps on the number of charter schools permitted to open — greatly benefiting the tens of thousands of New York families currently on waiting lists to get their children a better education.
This would be a rare federal mandate in which a funding requirement would not subvert local control. After all, the most local level of control is the family unit, not the state.
School choice is on the Republican Party platform, and the GOP has control of the House and the Senate in addition to the Oval Office.
Republicans have a golden opportunity to help Linda McMahon, the next secretary of education, body-slam the Department of Education once and for all and return education back to parents.
They are their children’s first educators, and they know their children’s needs better than bureaucrats in offices hundreds or thousands of miles away.
Corey DeAngelis is a senior fellow at the American Culture Project and the national bestselling author of “The Parent Revolution: Rescuing Your Kids from the Radicals Ruining Our Schools.”
