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Trump v. Big Government: The Department of Education Won’t Die Easy
Candidate Trump is blunt.
Here is but one headline from, yes, CNN.
“Trump wants to close the Department of Education, joining calls by GOP rivals”
CNN reports:
Former President Donald Trump said Wednesday he wants to close the Department of Education and have state governments “run the education of our children,” pushing for a long-held Republican goal that has been endorsed by several other 2024 GOP candidates.
We’re going to end education coming out of Washington, DC. 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 said in a new campaign video.
Cue the liberal freakout.
The hard political fact of history is that over time the Left has developed a pattern of governing that repeatedly grows big government. (READ MORE: The Spectacle Ep. 122: Biden v. Trump: How Can Trump Lose?)
The game works this way.
My longstanding example is that a Congressman wakes up in the morning to discover his child has a runny nose. The Congressman goes to his office and has his staff write a bill establishing the U.S. Department of Children With Runny Noses. It passes and is signed into law by the president. Up goes a spanking new ten-story office building to house the new Department, filled by hundreds of new, unionized federal bureaucrats all paid six-figure salaries. And the move is on to find the next problem to build bureaucracy around.
At the beginning of the newly formed United States government, in July of 1789, the Founding Fathers created the obvious: A government department to deal with the new nation’s foreign affairs known as the Department of Foreign Affairs. By September the name had been changed to the Department of State.
Next up was a department to deal with economic and monetary policy. That would be the Department of the Treasury, its first secretary is still considered the department’s greatest — Alexander Hamilton. His statue still stands in front of the Treasury Department.
With that, the pattern was launched.
Who would enforce the nation’s laws? The Department of Justice, of course.
And the military? This was the tail end of the 18th century and the dawning of the 19th. The nation was bordered by — at that point — one ocean. That meant there was a need for a Department of the Navy. (Eventually, it became the War Department and, much later, the Department of Defense.)
Americans also needed to get their mail. Presto: The U.S. Postal Department run by a Postmaster General. (READ MORE: The Most Disastrous Debate Performance in U.S. History)
And on went the pattern. All that land on a huge continent? An Interior Department. Lots of farms and farmers? The Agriculture Department. Business and laborers? The Department of Commerce and Labor, which was split into two departments in 1913.
All of which set the pattern for Democrat President Jimmy Carter to give a nod to all those teacher union supporters in 1979 with a spanking new Department of Education, absorbing various education responsibilities already existing inside the government.
Today, sectors of American society ranging from Health to Housing, Transportation, Energy, and, post 9/11, Homeland Security are all crowded into Washington D.C. and the surrounding area.
The practical effect of all this creation is to make the District of Columbia a concrete jungle of mammoth office buildings housing tens of thousands of decidedly well-paid federal employees. All of them are unionized and serious backers of the Democrat President of the moment. (READ MORE: That Debate Might Be the End of the Road for … Barack Obama)
To get to former President Trump’s decidedly obvious point? Every county in every state in the Union runs its own education system. Focus on County X, and one discovers a local school board, a local teachers union, and a local PTA. All collectively educating local kids without the need of some federal bureaucrat telling them what to do.
The ear-splitting shriek that will be heard if Trump is elected and proceeds to try and dismantle the U.S. Department of Education will be coming from the collection of well-fed DC bureaucrats for whom this will be seen as a life or death struggle. They will be, of course, terrified that other bureaucracies will be targeted for extinction as well.
In other words, a major, major battle looms in the next Trump era, if it arrives, between those who want to cut the growth of the federal government and those who are determined to not only keep it that way but grow it bigger still. ( Just a reminder: A promise to abolish the Carter-era Department was made by Carter’s successor — President Ronald Reagan. Reagan was not successful.)
Trump’s promise to abolish the Department of Education is a battle cry for a battle royal focused on the central argument of just how big — and how expensive — the federal government of the United States needs to be.
Buckle in.
The post Trump v. Big Government: The Department of Education Won’t Die Easy appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.
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