Teachers Unions Brace for Executive Order Dismantling Department of Education

Teachers unions are “spitting mad” about President Donald Trump cutting the Department of Education’s workforce and the possibility of an executive order further dismantling the 45-year-old agency.

Trump will sign an executive order aimed at dismantling the agency Thursday, the White House confirmed to The Daily Signal. The order directs Education Secretary Linda McMahon to take all necessary steps to facilitate the agency’s closure, while continuing to ensure that some services, programs, and benefits continue.

American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten said staffing cuts at the Department of Education on March 11 were an “evisceration by a thousand cuts.” The cuts reduced the workforce by roughly half—from 4,133 to about 2,200. 

“It’s a disaster symbolically as much as a disaster in reality,” she said on MSNBC.

National Education Associate President Becky Pringle said Trump and Elon Musk are “stealing” from our schools. The NEA is America’s largest teachers union.

“People don’t know what the Department of Education does,” she said. “Educators know, and parents who have students with disabilities, they know, too, but it is about educating folks all over the country and every congressional district that every student will be impacted,” she said.

However, all 50 states have their own individual education departments that could largely take over the operations of the federal agency, according to Heritage Foundation education expert Jonathan Butcher. Essential federal responsibilities performed by the Education Department can be taken over by other agencies directly related to those responsibilities.

For instance, Butcher said, the DoE’s Office of Civil Rights can go to the Department of Justice, the Nation’s Report Card can go to the Census Bureau, and the Treasury Department can handle student loans.

Yet the heads of the teachers unions remain in favor of continuing to spend taxpayer dollars on funding the Department of Education, which began operations near the end of Jimmy Carter’s presidency in 1980 and which provides material and political benefits to the teachers unions.

“We know exactly what’s going to happen to our students when you have a government, Trump and Musk, who are are stealing from our schools,” Weingarten said. “And not just that, their plan to voucherize and privatize our public schools, we know what they’re doing. They want to dismantle public education in this country, and we know that public education is the foundation of this or any democracy.”

Weingarten said cutting the Department of Education takes “opportunity away from kids that don’t have it.”

“So, billionaires—kids of billionaires—they have it, they go to private schools,” the AFT boss yelled. “Everyone else, 90% go to public schools. Don’t take away their opportunity.”

“Sorry, I’m really angry about this … I’m really angry,” Weingarten said.

The NEA and AFT did not provide comments to The Daily Signal by time of publication.

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