by Frank Holmes, reporter
President-elect Donald Trump has said he will dedicate his second term to bringing down “retribution” — and there’s a new sign he’s already off to a running start.
He’s taken aim squarely at one of the pillars of the Democratic coalition, which inflicted real harm on every American child for months or years.
Teachers’ unions like the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) have supported every Democratic candidate across the ballot, top to bottom, in virtually every race for decades.
Both groups endorsed Trump’s Democratic rivals, Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris.
The NEA put its money where its mouth is: The National Education Association PAC raised nearly $27 million for the 2024 election, according to data provided by the campaign finance website OpenSecrets.org. In fact, NEA PAC ranked 11th in the list of top 20 political action committees that donate to the Democratic Party.
“Educators know that Kamala Harris and Tim Walz are tireless champions for students and educators,” said NEA President Becky Pringle. “NEA members are knocking on doors, making phone calls, and talking to their communities about voting for Harris and Walz, along with pro-public education candidates up and down the ballot.”
Trump and Senate Republicans have unveiled a plan to fight back.
He promised months that that “very early in the administration” he would begin “closing up the Department of Education in Washington, D.C., and sending all education” policy “back to the states.”
“We want them to run the education of our children, because they’ll do a much better job of it. You can’t do worse,” said President Trump months ago in an education-themed campaign video. “We spend more money per pupil, by three times, than any other nation. And yet we’re absolutely at the bottom.”
“We’re going to end education coming out of Washington, D.C. We’re going to close it up—all those buildings all over the place—and people that in many cases hate our children. We’re going to send it all back to the states.”
Trump wants to clear-cut the DOE of all the Woke extremists using the classroom to push their private political agendas on a captive audience. “Personnel is policy,” he said, “At the end of the day, if we have pink-haired Communists teaching our kids, we have a major problem.”
Donald Trump just announced he will be "ending the Department of Education in Washington DC and sending it back to the states!" Was unconstitutional when Jimmy Carter established it in 1979, should have never happened
GO TRUMP GO!! pic.twitter.com/IzJGWe3Umf— Winston (@19Goldstein84) November 11, 2024
Now, he’s asked Tesla/X founder Elon Musk and billionaire Republican presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy to head up his Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE—and DOGE is dogpiling on the Department of Education.
“We expect certain agencies to be deleted outright,” Ramaswamy told Fox News recently. As a 2024 presidential candidate, Ramaswamy also endorsed closing down the DOE, as well as the FBI.
The DC establishment is SHAKING at the fact that Donald Trump is coming…
Vivek: ‘We are about to delete entire Government Agencies.’
— Graham Allen (@GrahamAllen_1) November 17, 2024
The Left has sneered at Trump’s promise—every single one—and said the president can’t close the DOE; Congress has to act to close the department down.
Enter Congress.
Senator Mike Rounds, R-S.D., has introduced the Returning Education to Our States Act, which would close the Department of Education forever.
“The federal Department of Education has never educated a single student, and it’s long past time to end this bureaucratic Department that causes more harm than good,” Sen. Rounds told the media when he introduced the bill last Thursday.
Not all of the DOE’s functions will disappear: Educating Native American Indian tribes will be transferred to the Department of the Interior. Block grants to help states pay for education will come through the Department of the Treasury…but without red tape and regulation that tells teachers what to say in their classroom.
Sen. Mike Rounds from South Dakota introduces a bill to eliminate the U.S. Department of Education.
Good! pic.twitter.com/54eKllZEBL
— Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) November 22, 2024
It’s about time Trump got revenge—for his sake but, more importantly, for the American people.
The teachers’ unions bucked for national shutdowns and lobbied its friends in the Biden administration to extend them as long as possible.
Meanwhile, children’s depression rates skyrocketed and their mental health deteriorated.
The Biden administration’s National Institute of Mental Health ran a study that found “adolescents assessed after the pandemic shutdowns reported more symptoms of anxiety and depression and greater internalizing problems. Their brains showed thinning of the cortex, which helps execute mental processes like planning and self-control, and reduced volume in the hippocampus and amygdala, which are involved in accessing memories and regulating responses to fear and stress, respectively.”
Teachers unions have their beachhead in the federal government through the Department of Education. Trump is going to close it down—a promise made by almost every Republican presidential candidate since Ronald Reagan.
Trump is bringing retribution—on behalf of American voters, and their children—and bringing excellence back to American classrooms.