audio version of the segment here > Do we really need a Federal Education Department
Jay Weber Show transcript 11-18-25
I love this: President Trump’s education secretary, Linda McMahon, seemingly coming out of nowhere to say:did the educational system even notice that the federal education department was just shut down for 43 days?
It’s a great question-and the answer is ‘no’. Not a single American or ‘American educator’ seemed to be put out by the fact that the dept of education in dc has been shuttered for 43 days.
Which means…not a single educator across the country was frustrated that they ‘couldn’t get their needs met’ because the education department was shut down.
Why? Because the federal education department genuinely is useless…and doesn’t need to exist.
Linda McMahon was put in charge by trump- to find a way to kill off the dept of education- which isn’t easy-at all-given the way that it has been structured and then ‘expanded’ over the years by the congress.
Yet, it doesn’t have any duties that cannot be easily reassigned to a different agency.
McMahon is making the argument that i have made for decades now: education should be left up to the state and local governments- and it was- until 1978 when jimmy carter and congressional democrats -literally-felt they needed to give a big political gift to the national teachers’ unions and create this completely useless department.
Mostly, this department has been a way for democrats to protect teachers’ unions and help force their agenda onto the country’s schools-over decades-and it does so little for the kids or the parents that- genuinely- it was just shut down for 43 days and no one made a peep. I didn’t run across a single story about how ‘people were upset’ they couldn’t get what they needed out of the education department.
That’s because the only thing the districts really ‘need’ out of the education department is the federal funding that gets funneled to them. And as McMahon and Trump have argued ‘all thru term one and into term two’: we can easily funnel that money to them thru a different agency…or better yet….block grant it… so the federal education dollars are sent to the states and/or districts directly- with no strings attached: here, use this where you need it…instead of democrats and the teachers unions forcing you to use it on things-they want- it used on.
Block granting this funding and closing the education department would be the ultimate ‘win’ here for conservatives and all Americans.
Her X post came on the same day that the USA-today published a column by her that made the case: hey, the department just went through the longest shutdown in 45 years. Did you miss it?
I have been waiting 30 years to see a presidential administration and/or congress take this idea seriously:we -honest to God- do not need a federal department of education.
Carter and the democrats- honest to God-only created the department as a sop to the teachers’ unions and to give them governmental control over our public schools.
And this farce has lasted 45 years. It’s high time it stopped.
But, but…the polls have shown that closing the dept of education is unpopular…the leftists claim. Bologna. Folks, the generic polls-do- show that-but it’s only because the vast majority of Americans
Don’t even know what the dept of education does. It just ‘sounds like’ a department in government that sounds kind of important, doesn’t it?
And that’s why most Americans naively say we should keep it.
But as a non-profit organization just discovered in a poll that they commissioned: once you tell voters what the education department ‘does’ and ‘doesn’t do’.... the results flip. Most Americans support killing it off…once they know more about it
Like everything else: if republicans can manage to break thru the leftist propaganda and their media accomplices….and tell the American people what they want to do-and why they want to do it-
It’s the republican party’s platform that most Americans end up supporting.
Imagine if we had had an honest news media over the last decade. There’s no way trump would have lost out on a second consecutive term-and his landslide in that race would have been even bigger than it was over Kammy last fall.
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