Former Education Secretary Arne Duncan issued President Trump a warning over plans to shutter the Department of Education, decrying “you break it, you own it.”
Duncan, in an interview with CNN’s John Berman on Friday, was asked about a reported executive order Trump is expected to sign that will give newly minted Education chief Linda McMahon the greenlight to begin dismantling the department. Despite the order not being unveiled Thursday or Friday, the Obama-era official claimed the move could create a “bureaucratic nightmare.”
“Folks like Trump are sort of cowards at heart, and so it’s hard to tell what will happen,” Duncan told Berman. “If they just simply move parts of the Department of Education to other agencies — to Treasury, to HHS, to Labor, whatever — what you just have is a bureaucratic nightmare.”
“You know when you walk into stores and they say ‘You break it, you own it?’ If banks start to fall apart in D.C. because they have moved things around, they are going to own it,” he continued. “And it’s something they’re not going to want to see happen if they start to take away educational opportunity away from vulnerable children.”
McMahon confirmed Friday that Trump is still expected to move forward with the plan. A draft order obtained by multiple outlets directs the secretary to dismantle the department as much as she can without congressional approval — which is necessary to completely abolish an agency.
She added that control over educational institutions would be up to the states if the department were fully shuttered.
Duncan, wearing an “Education is a Human Right” shirt, seemingly laughed off the administration’s argument.
“I’ll be the first guy to say ‘mission accomplished.’ He can put that banner up,” the former chief said, referring to Trump’s claims that states should control their own education. “Because guess what? That’s already where the action is … Everything he says is so dishonest. So disingenuous.”
“As you know, 90 percent of K-12 funding is already at the state and local level,” he added. “So that action is already at the states.”
What the Education Department does, according to Duncan, is provide “additional resources” for the most vulnerable children. He went on to list some main priorities, including providing access to high-quality pre-K schooling, feeding hungry children at lunch time, providing quality education for kids who live below the poverty line or in rural communities, assisting English-language learners, providing accommodations for 7.5 million children with special needs and offering Pell Grants for young adults to attend college.
“If he starts to touch resources, hurting our most vulnerable young people, where their only chance in life is to get a great public education [and] go to college, it’s going to be a major, major backlash and he’s going to wake up mama bear and papa bear at home,” Duncan told Berman.
“You can lie to parents about a lot of things, but if you start taking away opportunities from their children … he better watch out,” he said.
After tapping McMahon to lead the department, Trump made it very clear that he wanted her to “put herself out of a job.” Since being confirmed by the Senate earlier this month, she has largely stuck to that goal and sent out a “final mission” to employees after taking the post.
The administration, primarily Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), has already cut more than a billion dollars of education contracts. The move, which DOGE argued cuts “woke” wasteful spending, has prompted others to sound the alarm on educational research and learning outcomes for students.
Duncan told NewsNation in an interview last month that he didn’t believe Congress would vote to nix the department.
“That’s not going to happen,” he said at the time.
