April 2 (UPI) — A group of House Democrats met with Education Department Secretary Linda McMahon Wednesday to discuss how her agency will function after drastic cuts were made by the Trump administration.
Representatives including Veronica Escobar, D-Texas, and Mark Takano, D- Calif., a senior member of the Education and Workforce Committee spoke with the press after the afternoon meeting.
Takano asked how civil rights would be enforced after the wide dismissals of personnel from the department’s Office of Civil Rights, and he said that on that issue he was “still not clear where that stands.”
Escobar said of the meeting that “the overarching theme,” about how the department will function is that the Trump administration is “cutting the bureaucracy and we’re sending the money to the states.”
Escobar then said, “when you cut the bureaucracy, especially in the way that this administration has done, the consequences are always bad,” and that, “for those of us in red states, that we have governors who may not want to administer the money, or they will use the money in a way that is punitive to districts and communities they don’t like, and reward districts and communities they do like, or who are politically aligned.”
The meeting follows the Department of Education’s reduction in force of almost 50% in March, and President Donald Trump’s executive order in March that began a process to close the Department of Education, despite that only Congress can do so.
Meanwhile, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., launched a “Save Our Schools” movement Wednesday, what she described in an X post as “a campaign to bring people together and push back against Donald Trump’s attacks on public education.”
“States are already ringing the alarm bells that funding for little kids’ school lunches is at risk,” Warren said in an accompanying video, and that “kids with disabilities could lose their classroom aide.”
“We’ve got to fight for an America where it’s not just the kids of billionaires who get a good education, Warren added, “but it’s every kid in every community [who] gets a great education.”
