Eliminate The Department Of Education? Congress Is Now Considering It
A newly introduced piece of legislation looks to terminate the Department of Education altogether, claiming to be a waste of money.
If you count the date, the bill is only 10 words long. U.S. Republican Congressman Thomas Mackie, who represents Kentucky’s 4th District, makes his point perfectly clear with those 10 words – The Department of Education shall terminate on December 31, 2022. That’s it, plain and simple.
While Massie’s bill didn’t offer any more than 10 succinct words, he did offer a bit more by saying on his website, “Unelected bureaucrats in Washington, D.C. should not be in charge of our children’s intellectual and moral development,” said Massie. “States and local communities are best positioned to shape curricula that meet the needs of their students. Schools should be accountable. Parents have the right to choose the most appropriate educational opportunity for their children, including home school, public school, or private school.”
If this bill and its brief wording seem to be a shock, it shouldn’t be. See, this isn’t the first time Massie and his co-sponsors have introduced this bill. Back in 2017, Massie went after the Department of Education, a department that has long drawn the ire of many Republicans. In fact, former President Donald Trump appeared very willing to remove the Department of Education when he said in his book, Great Again: How to Fix Our Crippled America, “A lot of people believe the Department of Education should just be eliminated. Get rid of it. If we don’t eliminate it completely, we certainly need to cut its power and reach.”
Massie took that to heart and in 2017 pushed forward his bill, HR 899 – The Department of Education shall terminate on December 31, 2018. At the time of the bill’s introduction, New York Law School professor, David Schoenbrod, commented on it by saying via NPR, “Whatever you think about the Department of Education, the idea you could eliminate it with a one-sentence bill is just posturing. Posturing is not something that’s just done by Democrats or by Republicans. It’s done by both.”
The reason he felt this way, which is probably the same reason this new version of HR 899 won’t move forward, is that there are no details. Massie offers no solutions on what to do with the 2018 Department of Education’s $68 billion budget, which has since ballooned to almost $96 billion for 2022.
The Department of Education has been in business making decisions on your tax money since 1980. Former President Ronald Reagan, in 1981, decided it, along with the Energy Department, was no longer necessary. President Reagan said at the time that there is no need for the Energy Department to solve the country’s basic energy problems. He felt at the time that “the ingenuity of consumers, business, producers, and inventors” would be able to handle energy issue decisions.
Along with that, President Reagan had a single thought when it came to the Department of Education and that was to eliminate it. He felt that education, in general, was the “responsibility of local school systems, teachers, parents, citizen boards, and State governments” and that “by eliminating the Department of Education less than 2 years after it was created, we cannot only reduce the budget but ensure that local needs and preferences, rather than the wishes of Washington, determine the education of our children.” Ever since Massie tweeted out his HR 899 bill this morning, he has been hit with a lot of pushback. Much of it comes from those who were quick to point out Massie’s state of Kentucky standing as the 45th ranked state in education.
Will this bill finally move forward or will it not? Is the Department of Education finally doomed to dissolve? Have they been a benefit for our public education system or a total waste of taxpayers’ money? The proposal is likely to fail again, but with the war on education being positioned front and center in politics, it might just push through.
