Back in the sixties, there was a monthly contest at Lackland AFB, with a cash prize for anyone suggesting a helpful new way to improve base efficiency. An enterprising airman won the contest two months in a row. His first win was for suggesting that two existing forms be replaced with one new form. The next month, the same airman won again, for suggesting eliminating the new form. I don’t know where that airman is today, but he should be the patron saint of a controversial newly-minted government department.
Government agencies and compost piles have a lot in common: Besides having a high level of horse shit, both can benefit from periodic stirring up. Rarely, however, does either benefit from having a hand grenade tossed into the mix.
The chief complaint about Musk (besides his enormous wealth) seems to be that he is unelected. I would point out that the agencies that are under review are chock full of unelected bureaucrats, who have been formulating regulations for decades. Depending on which flavor of newspaper you read, the actions of D.O.G.E. are described as either draconian or brilliant.
While we are discussing unelected government employees, remind me again just how many primaries Kamala Harris won?
The Constitution, Article II, Section I, allows the President to run the Executive Branch of the government, "The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America." If President Trump wants to delegate that authority to someone else, he has the right to do it.
As I write this, D.O.G.E. seems to be shutting down the Department of Education but is obviously doing it wrong. The correct method would be to weld the doors shut during one of the three or four daily working hours and then fumigate the building. Since the Department claims that only a quarter of its staff works remotely, the fumigation would eliminate the majority of the rats. Perhaps a bounty could be placed on the escapees. (My experiences working at Enema U may have slightly influenced my opinions about the Department of Education.)
President Carter created the Department of Education (DofE) back in 1978, separating it from the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) which changed its name to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). It should be noted that within a few decades, the new HHS had as many employees as the old HEW plus all the new employees at the DofE. This type of growth, splitting, and regrowth is typical of all government agencies, malignant cancer cells, and university committees.
This is where I suppose that I should list all the reasons why the Department of Education should be closed. Centralized control is inefficient, local control is more responsive to a diverse population, state control would foster experimentation while being more adaptable to local conditions, and it would eliminate administrative duplication, and so forth and so on. There is the uneasy alliance between the Department of Education and the National Education Alliance. I could talk about the needless paperwork that I—and every other teacher in the country—had to fill out to satisfy the hair brained whim of some nameless bureaucrat in Washington. There are a lot of reasons to close the Department, but most of them don’t really matter.
The real reason the Department of Education should be closed is that it simply has not worked. Despite a cast of thousands, an annual budget of hundreds of billions of dollars, and endless studies—by every conceivable measure, education in the United States has grown steadily worse since the institution of the Department of Education.
The US spends as much or more per student (in some communities, much more) than every other developed nation. We rank roughly in the middle of industrialized countries when it comes to teacher pay. Our schools are modern, air-conditioned, well-lit, and clean, and they are equipped with the latest in technology. For more than four decades they have been overseen by a Federal agency whose budget has gone up annually by more than the rate of inflation. Yet, despite all of this—or perhaps because of it—student test scores are abysmal compared with the rest of the world. Clearly, it is time to try something else. Damn near anything else!
Maybe letting 50 different states try 50 different ideas will work. Maybe creating a new and different Department of Education along a different model will work. Perhaps we should just copy what some other country is doing. I don’t know the correct answer to the problem of education, but one thing is certain: neither does the current Department of Education.
While there is no doubt that President Trump is the constitutionally designated head of the Executive Branch, there is still some doubt whether he can close a department or lay off all the workers within a department without congressional approval—that will have to be decided in federal court and will probably take years.
In the meantime, when Musk gets tired of D.O.G.E., I wonder if he would consider doing the same sort of job at Enema U? I think it would be possible to cut the university budget by at least 20% with the changes going unnoticed by most of the faculty and any of the students.
Amen. Giant unwieldy bureaucracies cannot do things nearly as effectively as intelligent folks on the ground on the scene. Decentralized command and control is why the top heavy German Army was so frustrated with fighting Americans during World War II. There were too many decision makers to account for in planning strategy. German generals were tied to the script handed down from above. Hitler took a nap and no one moved the Panzers on D-Day and the allies overran the defenses at the waterline that Rommel tried to tell his fellow generals were the key to stopping the invasion. We have all these people with education PhD's. They ought to be able to figure out how to run schools in their own hometowns.
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