Ex-Education secretary says Trump should shut down department she led

In their failed bid to keep the White House, Democrats fixated outsize attention on Project 2025, a conservative blueprint for an incoming Republican administration. 
Progressives painted the document as scary and something to fight. And while President-elect Donald Trump disavowed any direct ties to the project, he is advocating for some of its ideas. 
Chief among them is eliminating the U.S. Department of Education, an idea Trump mentioned frequently on the campaign trail. 
It’s not a new concept, however. In conservative and libertarian circles, it’s been discussed for years, and for good reasons.
After all, in the decades since the creation of a federal education department in 1979, taxpayers have spent hundreds of billions of dollars and not gotten much in return. 
The department consumes roughly $80 billion a year, and that number keeps going up even as test scores have gone down (especially after schools remained closed during the COVID-19 pandemic).
The department employs more than 4,000 people, and this bureaucracy has saddled states with lots of red tape. All the oversight, however, hasn’t translated into better results for kids – which was the whole point of escalated federal involvement. 
A better idea? Send more of the funding directly to the states, where school boards and parents can have more say in their children’s education. 
No one has been more of a proponent of this idea than former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos. DeVos, who oversaw the department during Trump’s first term, knows firsthand the inefficiencies and ineffectiveness of the department. 
Trump last week nominated former wrestling executive and former Small Business Administration head Linda McMahon to be his next Education secretary, so DeVos won’t have the job a second time.
Even so, she wants to help the second Trump administration dismantle the Education Department in any way she can. 
I spoke with DeVos last week about why she supports getting rid of the department she once ran. 
“I think you need to back up and start from asking the question, ‘Has the Department of Education actually been successful in its mission?’ And I would say by any measure, no, it’s been an abject failure,” DeVos told me. “And so looking at the failure after trillions of dollars spent and kids still in a downward trajectory, particularly following COVID academically, what can you do to depower this federal agency that is not aligned around what’s right for kids, but is totally aligned around an agenda driven by what’s right for adults and their issues?”
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Trump can’t just snap his fingers and dissolve the department. Congress would have to pass the legislation first, and though Trump will have a Republican-controlled House and Senate, it’s not by a large margin. 
Even if the Education Department sticks around in some form, its former chief believes there’s room for improvement.
“Shy of that, there are many ways you can turn back to states, local communities and importantly, directly to families, the resources appropriated by Congress,” DeVos said. “Let’s talk about turning that decision-making to the most local level possible and rendering the bureaucracy meaningless in that equation and by virtue of that, eliminating the need for those positions.”
That would benefit both kids and taxpayers. 
If federal regulations and oversight couldn’t improve U.S. education, perhaps more robust school choice could. 
In the past few years, a dozen states, including Arizona and Florida, have passed sweeping school choice reforms – offering universal private school options to families. It looks like Texas could be next in 2025. More are likely to join.
It’s this kind of progress at the state level that further lends the federal bureaucracy moot. 
“I think it would be the simplest, and it would be effective in that it would give each state the opportunity to target those resources most directly to the kids who need the most help and to do it in different and creative ways” DeVos said. “We always talked about the states being the laboratories for democracy. They also compete with one another, and that’s a good thing because a state that sees a neighboring state doing something better and attracting more families, or more investment, or both might then change their decision-making around what they’re doing.”
DeVos continues to support a federal school choice tax credit program and is hopeful Congress will take up the idea. She sees it as a way to support what states are already doing – or to encourage more to follow suit. 
“They (parents) are the ones best situated to figure out what kind of education is going to best work for that child,” she said. “And we’ve seen the support for this go up amongst every demographic in the last few years.”
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Since Democrats haven’t shown any interest in reforming the Education Department, DeVos knows it’s up to Republicans to address what’s broken. She’s hopeful about what Trump and Republicans in Congress could accomplish. 
And she’s hopeful, even though she and Trump had a falling out over his actions on Jan. 6, 2021, which DeVos called “not defensible in any way.” She resigned the following day, after calling into question whether the 25th Amendment could be invoked to remove the president. 
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DeVos seems to have put the past behind her to fight for what’s best for kids and parents: “I am very optimistic that this second term is going to be one of progress for the American people at the most local level to really deal with and address some of these very vexing problems that this current administration has let get far worse under Biden’s leadership. 
“And I have great optimism that in a second term, President Trump is going to accomplish a lot of really important things on behalf of the American people.”
I hope she’s right.
Ingrid Jacques is a columnist at USA TODAY. Contact her at [email protected] or on X, formerly Twitter: @Ingrid_Jacques