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President Donald Trump made good on another massive campaign promise on Thursday by signing an executive order that will begin the process of eliminating the federal Department of Education in a bid to move public education in America back into the hands of the sovereign states.
The president held a special signing ceremony at the White House, where he was joined by the press, advocates of common sense education, conservative governors, and a room filled with schoolchildren who stand to benefit from the president’s action.
“Today, we take a very historic action that was 45 years in the making: in a few moments I will sign an executive order to begin eliminating the federal Department of Education once and for all,” the president said.
This decision from President Trump makes good on his long-awaited campaign promise to take education back to the states and remove it from the hands of federal bureaucrats in Washington.
“Everybody knows it’s right,” he remarked. “…The Democrats know it’s right and I hope they’re going to be voting for it because ultimately it’s going to come before them.”
He praised U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon and said, humorously, that he hoped she would be “our last Secretary of Education.”
Trump pointed out that the United States currently spends “more money on education” and per pupil than any other country “yet we rank near the bottom of the list in terms of success.”
He decried high levels of reading and math illiteracy in America, despite the department’s creation under the direction of the late President Jimmy Carter in 1979. “Despite these breathtaking failures, the department’s discretionary budget has exploded by 600 percent,” he said.
Trump announced that by offering federal employees “two generous buyout options” his administration had effectively reduced the bureaucratic workforce by a whopping 50 percent.
Trump also explained that while the DOE would be dismantled, integral functions like Pell grants, Title I funding, and resources for children with special disabilities and special needs would remain fully intact.
“We want to return our students to the states,” he said.
The president continued, “But we’re going to be returning education very simply back to the states where it belongs and this is a very popular thing to do but much more importantly it’s a common sense thing to do and it’s going to WORK.”
Trump further vowed to “love and cherish our teachers along with the children” and said this positive overhaul of education would be “an amazing thing to watch.”
Ultimately, he emphasized the importance of shrinking the federal bureaucracy for the sake of “our most cherished group of people – and that’s our children!”
