Trump Admin dismantling Dept. of Education — mass firings underway

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Trump Advisers Weigh Plan to Dismantle Education Department​

Administration officials are discussing executive order that could shut down key functions of the agency​


"Trump administration officials are weighing executive actions to dismantle the Education Department as part of the campaign by billionaire Elon Musk and his allies to shrink federal agencies and slash the size of the government workforce.

The officials have discussed an executive order that would shut down all functions of the agency that aren’t written explicitly into statute or move certain functions to other departments, according to people familiar with the matter. The order would call for developing a legislative proposal to abolish the department, the people said. Trump’s advisers are debating the specifics of the order and the timing, the people said. ..."

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Musk has his fingers in all the schemes to eliminate services that don't directly benefit the 0.1% ...
 
Continued

"... Some administration officials, including the team working with Education Secretary nominee Linda McMahon, say the White House should wait to release any executive order until after McMahon’s Senate confirmation hearing, people familiar with the matter said. McMahon’s hearing hasn’t been scheduled, as the Senate is awaiting her ethics paperwork. Some Trump advisers worried that the White House’s recent freeze on federal assistance complicated Russell Vought’s confirmation as director of the Office of Management and Budget, and they are eager to avoid a similar scenario that could endanger McMahon.

... The Education Department is among the agencies that Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency is looking at as part of its efforts to overhaul federal bureaucracy, the people said.

Some of Musk’s representatives were working out of the main Education Department building in Washington.

Fully abolishing the department would require an act of Congress, and lawmakers have for years shown little interest in doing so. Trump unsuccessfully tried to merge the education and labor departments in his first term.

...Trump’s aides could replicate the approach they used to disassemble the core functions of the U.S. Agency for International Development. [MY NOTE - Note the past tense/fait accompli treatment on USAID disassembly]

In recent days, Musk’s representatives have gained access to sensitive documents at the agency, shut down its website, deactivated email addresses and told employees not to come to the office.

Eliminating the Education Department—or even cutting funding to it—could be politically risky. A recent Wall Street Journal poll found that 61% of registered voters opposed getting rid of it. Most Americans preferred to protect funding for education and other domestic priorities over cutting taxes, the same poll found.

The Education Department was created in 1979 under former President Jimmy Carter, urged on by the National Education Association, the country’s largest teachers union. In terms of head count, the Education Department is the smallest of all the cabinet-level agencies.

The existence of the education department is codified in law, and so is much of what it does. Key activities include providing grants for low-income students, regulating how schools serve students with disabilities, enforcing civil-rights laws, and administering the federal student-loan program. ..."
 
Moving this over from the UNC and Ed. Thread

HPAD stands for Historians for Peace and Democracy. The "Repudiation" mentioned in the first sentence is linked just below this document. It is followed by a link to the trump administration's executive order of January 29 titled "Executive Order Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling."
Dear HPAD members,
Here is AHA Executive Director Jim Grossman's emphatic repudiation of Trump's attack on educators. And below is our Steering Committee's own unequivocal response, which we urge you to circulate as widely as possible:
~~~
“Who controls the present controls the past,” wrote George Orwell in 1949. Authoritarian regimes have long tried to rewrite history to advance their political objectives. The Trump administration’s executive order of January 29, 2025, titled “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling,” follows in this tradition.
The document accuses educators of “imprinting anti-American, subversive, harmful, and false ideologies on our Nation’s children.” One of its targets is “gender ideology extremism,” or the acknowledgment that transgender people exist. Another is “discriminatory equity ideology,” meaning a concern for values like equity and diversity. These “false ideologies” are allegedly accompanied by an “anti-American” telling of US history. In its place, the order directs public schools, on pain of defunding, to practice “patriotic education.” A patriotic history curriculum involves the following:
(i) an accurate, honest, unifying, inspiring, and ennobling characterization of America’s founding and foundational principles;
(ii) a clear examination of how the United States has admirably grown closer to its noble principles throughout its history;
(iii) the concept that commitment to America’s aspirations is beneficial and justified; and
(iv) the concept that celebration of America’s greatness and history is proper.
There is an obvious incongruity in accusing educators of indoctrination while mandating that they inculcate students with a fairy-tale version of US history. A curriculum cannot be “honest” if it is ideologically dedicated to “celebration of America’s greatness” and to conveying the “noble” and “inspiring” character of US rulers. Indoctrination as used in the document seems to mean not the dictionary definition of the term, but any critical inquiry that does not adhere to “patriotic” predispositions. In this and other respects, the authors’ argumentation is of very low caliber.
We do, however, take this executive order seriously. As historians we know how labels like “subversive” and “anti-American” have been used to justify firing, imprisonment, deportation, torture, and murder by the US government and its allies around the world. In recent years the US education system has been dragged further in that direction. State and local governments have banned thousands of books, fired educators, and scared many others into self-censorship. This edict is the latest assault on critical thought, at a time when confronting our world’s multiple emergencies demands more of it, not less.
As historians we also know that, to the extent this country indeed reflects “noble principles,” it is thanks to the very groups now being targeted by the Trump administration: working people of all colors and national origins who have fought for freedom and dignity, critically-minded educators and students, women and LGBTQ activists, and the Indigenous peoples whose expulsion and murder is glorified in “patriotic” history books. In these same groups lies our hope for the future.
The Orwellian madness of our moment can only be countered through collective action and solidarity. We stand ready to support educators, labor unions, community organizations, and others who resist the descent into barbarism.
In solidarity,
Margaret Power and Van Gosse, H-PAD Co-Chairs

From the AHA: On the K–12 Education Executive Order - AHA

From trump: https://archive.md/885nt
 
"Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past."

a mentor of mine impressed upon me something similar many years ago :

"The power to define is the power to control "
 
How is none of this setting off major alarms within both parties? I guaran-cotdamn-tee you if this was a Dem thing, the 25th would be invoked by now. What the actual phuck.
When every day is a paradigm shift, it's difficult to know where you can find your footing.
 
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