Sen. Lisa Murkowski has, once again, broken with her Republican colleagues – this time to help Democrats maintain the colossal bureaucratic size and scope of the increasingly controversial U.S. Department of Education.
On July 30, Murkowski and her fellow left-leaning Republican Senator Susan Collins voted with Democrats in the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee to pass legislation aimed at stopping President Trump from downsizing the $250 billion federal department that employs more than 4,000 federal workers.
The 13-9 vote aims to block the Education Department from offloading special education and other key offices to alternative federal agencies.
Trump’s goal is to use the Interagency Agreements (IAAs) as an administrative workaround to shrink and effectively dismantle the Department of Education without requiring immediate congressional approval to abolish it entirely.
Democrats, teachers’ unions and entrenched educational bureaucrats see the move as a threat to their control over government-funded education.
This is part of Trump’s ongoing effort to eliminate or drastically reduce the 47-year-old federal department in order to advance his goal of fostering greater local control over education to the states, while reducing D.C. entanglement in classrooms.
Last year, Trump issued an executive order for Education Secretary Linda McMahon to pursue all legal steps to reduce the department “to the maximum extent appropriate and permitted by law,” while also ensuring that key programs and benefits continue.
Elimination of the department in its entirety would require an act of Congress.
In the meantime, Trump wants other departments to take over career and technical education, special education, civil rights enforcement, Indian education programs, student loan portfolios and other areas.
Democrats, teachers’ unions and entrenched educational bureaucrats see the move as a threat to their control over government-funded education.
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In voting against Trump’s initiatives, Murkowski claimed she was defending “the children.”
“We cannot lose sight of the fact that at the end of the day, we’re talking about children,” she said. “Whether it’s children with special needs, whether it’s children in our elementary schools, whether it’s our Native students: (we need to be) making sure that we don’t lose that focus.”
Proponents of shrinking the education department point to the fact that the agency has presided over the decades-long collapse of education in America. Roughly 32 million to 35 million K-12 students are now unable to read or perform math at grade level. According to national education metrics, approximately 65% to 70% of students are failing reading, while 60% to 78% are failing in math.
Despite the recent vote, the legislation still needs to pass the full Senate, where it is expected to be hotly debated.
