Feb. 12 (UPI) — President Donald Trump would like the U.S. Department of Education closed right away, he told reporters while in the Oval Office on Wednesday.
Trump last week suggested he might use an executive order to close the Education Department but acknowledged he would need members of Congress and teachers’ unions to support the proposed closure, CNN reported.
Trump called the Education Department a “big con job” and said he would “like it to be closed immediately,” the New York Post reported.
Despite the United States spending more on education per pupil than any other nation, the U.S. education only ranks 40th in the world, he said.
Instead of having a federal department overseeing national public education programs, Trump said it would be better to “send it back to Iowa, to Idaho, Colorado” and all other states to handle it at the state and local levels.
Trump has proposed transferring many of the Education Department’s oversight to other federal agencies and only leaving those responsibilities that are written in law with the DOE.
President Jimmy Carter in 1979 signed enabling legislation that created the Education Department in 1980, and Trump said it would take another act of Congress to eliminate it.
Meanwhile, Trump said he intends to use the Department of Government Efficiency and Education Secretary nominee Linda McMahon to do as much as possible to return control of the nation’s public education system to respective states.
During a campaign rally in September, Trump said he would “drain the government education swamp and stop the abuse of your taxpayer dollars to indoctrinate America’s youth with all sorts of things that you don’t want to have our youth hearing.”
He said the Education Department in Washington, D.C., is too far removed from school districts throughout the nation to determine beneficial and effective education policies.
He also has accused the DOE of filling the national curriculum with radical ideology.
The suggestion to immediately close the DOE comes as Trump faces significant resistance from Democratic Party lawmakers, non-governmental organizations, unions and others as he seeks to reign in spending at the U.S. Agency for International Development.
Trump and others have accused USAID officials of engaging in fraud and wasting taxpayer dollars on costly programs overseas that most taxpayers do not support.
Trump also has ordered federal agencies to end diversity, equity and inclusion offices and programs that he says don’t work and only promote anti-U.S. and anti-capitalism ideology at the expense of government efficiency.
