Bernd Debusmann Jr
Reporting from Washington
Calls to dismantle – or abolish – the Department of Education stretch back long before Trump’s return to the White House, all the way back to its inception.
On the campaign trail soon after the department was created, Ronald Reagan described the department as a “new bureaucratic boondoggle” that allowed Washington, rather than “local needs and preferences”, to determine how American children were to be educated.
For 43 years, his vision for the department – backed by members weary of “big government” federal control over state issues – went unrealised.
Similar arguments were made by Republicans during subsequent administrations, although a lack of Congressional support made efforts to dismantle or eliminate the agency impossible.
“I do not believe we need a federal department of homework-checkers,” then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich told the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities in 1995.
Many of the same arguments are being made today – with the added injection of ferocious national “culture wars” that Trump’s team has highlighted both during the campaign and while back in the Oval Office.
Now, those Republican efforts seem to have come to fruition, with Trump’s signing of an executive order to work towards close the department.