For most of the 20th century, the United States workforce seemed to run on rocket fuel, advancing innovation after innovation.
Americans hit the road in the Model T, our air-travel industry made the world spin faster, and movies like “The Wizard of Oz” leapt off screens in Technicolor.
We won two world wars, became a global superpower and put the first man on the moon.
Then came the Department of Education.
Despite spending a staggering $4 trillion since it was established, our investigators at Open the Books have found, the department has done nothing to meet its original mandate — to “promote student achievement and preparation for global competitiveness.”
That’s what President Jimmy Carter pledged when he created the Cabinet agency in 1980.
His primary motivation was to fulfill a campaign promise he made to the National Education Association.
And while Carter’s political move didn’t help him remain in office, the department has endured, despite its failure to meet its goals.
Now, President Donald Trump and Education Secretary Linda McMahon are doing right by taxpayers, working to return education to the states by devolving and consolidating the department’s responsibilities.
Those goals are consistent with the Founders’ vision for our nation — and a historic opportunity to return dollars and decisions to local communities where they belong.
When Open the Books researchers recently analyzed changes in payroll spending among more than 12,500 public K-12 school districts, we found no connection between higher outlays and improved test scores.
In fact, we found a slight negative correlation — most likely because the money went to overhead and administrative spending, not to incentivize and reward effective teachers.
The federal Education Department is part of the problem.
It mostly acts as a giant overhead machine, exerting top-down federal influence on states and districts.
The department spends billions every year on grant programs promoting the left-wing capture of public schooling, and contracts with politically radical private entities.
Its bureaucrats issue costly blanket regulations, subsidize university-level research straying hopelessly far from rigorous science, and underwrite exorbitant student loans, sustaining the rampant waste in academia.
For instance, we found that from 2021 to 2024 the agency spent $13.6 million on the Fulbright-Hays doctoral research program, which sends PhD students around the world to collect data for dissertations like “Transgressing Sonic Boundaries in Anime Music” and “Rethinking Gendered Sexualities Education in Kenya.”
Run a finger down the list of federal grants to K-12 schools and you’ll find $2.4 million to New Jersey’s Delsea Regional High School in 2020 for a project called “The Case for Student Voice as a Change Agent in Schools: A Focus on Culturally Responsive Climate, Equity, and Discipline.”
It’s one of many efforts designed to feed the student-to-activist pipeline, in this case focused on climate change and social justice.
Even less explicable is the $2.8 million sent to Chinese firms since 2017.
One such grant, to the real estate firm Dalian Jiahe, was “to help local educational agencies improve teaching and learning in high-poverty schools . . . to meet challenging state academic achievement standards.”
Why would our federal government pay companies in China, an adversarial nation, to consult on improving outcomes for American students? It seems more likely they’d be interested in indoctrination or surveillance.
McMahon’s team has already begun hacking away at this damaging underbrush.
For example, they’ve cut $350 million in funding to Regional Educational Laboratories, which were encouraging secondary schools to undertake “equity audits,” and to Equity Assistance Centers, which advised state and local agencies and school boards on concepts like critical race theory and gender identity.
Buoying all this waste, our analysis found, was the department’s inexplicably expanding budget.
From 2000 to 2024, the Education Department’s employee headcount actually decreased by 13.9%.
But annual spending? It rose by an astonishing 749% over the same period.
That’s a lot of underbrush, much of it designed to address political problems conceived in Washington, not practical ones confronted in Peoria or East St. Louis.
The Trump administration needs to work with Congress to make its reforms durable — and it should gird for a hard fight.
Progressives understand the debate over the Education Department is a proxy battle in the larger war over the future of Big Government and the administrative state.
Over a century ago Herbert Croly, the progressive political theorist who mentored President Woodrow Wilson, dreamed of government departments powerful enough to correct and guide “unregenerate citizens” who are “morally and intellectually inadequate to a serious and consistent conception of their responsibilities.”
Today, McMahon has an opportunity not just to devolve one department, but to shape 21st century federalism — and end the Age of the Bureaus for good.
John Hart is the CEO of Open the Books.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
