Secretaries of Dismantlement

We are busily engaged in watching the parade of candidates for senior Trump Administration positions, as they troop in and out of Trump Tower for meetings with the transition team.  Carefully and diligently (OK, the Secretary of Defense announcement last night was a bit different), the names of appointees are being announced to the public and "vetted" by the news media.

It is interesting that, with the possible exception of Tom Price, the Georgia congressman who is the choice to be Secretary of Health and Human Services, we are not discussing specific priorities of the agencies whose incipient leaders are now known.  Price, of course, having written bills to repeal and replace Obamacare and provide something that may actually have a chance of working, is quite obviously going to start by ridding the nation of that ugly piece of rammed-through legislation.

So here is one for you.

Donald Trump has already announced his secretary nomination for the Department of Education.  That would be Betsy DeVos, who has been a passionate advocate for "school choice" throughout her life.  Mrs. DeVos would obviously be expected to take affirmative steps to promote the right of parents to send their children to a school with a good chance of actually educating them, and to support the "charter school" concept, which also helps provide those alternatives.

I believe that one of Mrs. DeVos's first priorities, however, should be one that would save the American taxpayer billions of dollars, and all by itself promote many of the reforms that she advocates for.

Yes, you guessed it.  Betsy DeVos, upcoming Secretary of Education, should immediately, and with the proper legislative support of Congress, begin to oversee the dismantling of the entire Department of Education.

The Department of Education is not, of course, a great, historic institution but is rather, along with the Department of Energy, a Carter-era (1979) relic of the usurpation by the Federal government of power that was given by the Constitution to the states.  So there is no long history of its existence, and no specific tradition that rationalizes its assumedly unconstitutional existence.

We have heard Mr. Trump discussing a "penny rule", essentially an edict he may issue to all of the Cabinet departments and lesser agencies to cut one cent per dollar out of their budget, as a means to approach a balanced budget and start paying down the $20 trillion we currently owe close friends like, you know, China.

For Education, this would be about a 75-cent rule, since at least three-quarters of the effort of "DoED" employees is plainly unconstitutional, as it constitutes oversight of education, a duty not explicitly granted to the Federal government in the Constitution and thus reserved for the States in its Tenth Amendment.

Now, I will grant you that some functions are arguably tolerable, such as the Federal student loan program.  I'm not crazy about the taxpayer being forced to lend money to kids who often do not pay it back (I would advocate for such college debts, by the way, lent by the taxpayer, when defaulted, to be exempt from discharge under Federal bankruptcy statutes, by the way -- borrow from the taxpayer and you have to pay it back).  But I can probably be argued into this being livable, under a small agency with a modest staff.

Most important, I believe, is that the very existence of a DoED is a threat to the sovereignty of the corresponding state departments overseeing education.  The Founders had schools in the 1700s; it certainly was a conscious decision not to include schools in the powers assigned to the Federal government and, thus, to reserve them so that local governments and the states could decide how to educate their citizens.  The Department's own website concedes this: "[It] is important to point out that education in America is primarily a State and local responsibility, and ED's budget is only a small part of both total national education spending and the overall Federal budget ..."

Small part, yes.  "Small", no.

Years back, I was VP of Operations for a company that provided the staff to support the information technology infrastructure at DoED.  Our role was primarily to be the help desk for the employees and manage their servers.  The whole Department was only about 20 years old then, and even that "young", it had already settled into a mundane, humdrum grind so characteristic of Federal offices.

The proposed budget for Education is a shade under $70 billion for FY 2017, meaning that probably $50 billion could go away and not be missed.  Against a $4.1 trillion budget for the entire Federal government, cutting DoED down to a sub-Cabinet agency or two -- and I'm betting that it doesn't take $20 billion to run the staff of a student loan program -- losing $50 billion out of that budget takes care of that "penny rule" all by its lonesome, before the other Departments have done anything at all, and before all that rental space can be subleased out to commercial tenants for even more bang for the P&L.

And. of course, in this administration, there will be plenty of "shovel-ready" jobs for all those Federal employees needing new jobs.  Although it should be noted that their talents will surely be in demand by the states who are now granted the right to run their own schools without imposition from Mama Washington.

How about it, Mrs. DeVos?  First priority?

Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
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