The Department of Education never should have been created in the first place. The main reason it exists is because Jimmy Carter and the Democrats running Congress wanted to placate the nation’s largest teachers union, the National Education Association, by creating the department back in 1979.

Prior to Carter signing the Department of Education Organization Act Statement, the federal concern for public education fell under the Department of Health, where it had been for two hundred years.

When Carter signed the law, he gave a statement that now, in light of decades of history, is overflowing with irony:

Primary responsibility for education should rest with those States, localities, and private institutions that have made our Nation’s educational system the best in the world, but the Federal Government has for too long failed to play its own supporting role in education as effectively as it could. Instead of assisting school officials at the local level, it has too often added to their burden. Instead of setting a strong administrative model, the Federal structure has contributed to bureaucratic buck passing. Instead of simulating needed debate of educational issues, the Federal Government has confused its role of junior partner in American education with that of silent partner.

It’s funny, but those are precisely the problems today’s Department of Education has not only failed to remedy but exacerbated.

As noted above, the real reason for Carter’s creation of the Department of Education was in deference to the political promises he had made to the NEA. It comes as no surprise that, historically, the NEA just happens to be one of the Democrat Party’s largest union supporters.

Trump aims to eradicate this corrupt system. Beyond this depraved network, what can the Department of Education point to in order to justify its existence? Has America’s education system gotten better in the last 45 years? Are American students better off today than they were back in 1979? We certainly learned during COVID shutdowns that, on the one hand, schools were teaching awful stuff, and, on the other hand, failing miserably to actually educate our children.

If anything, the Department of Education has been used by Democrats to push a leftist cultural and political ideology in America’s schools. The last four years of the Biden administration have demonstrated this reality.

Joe Biden used the Department of Education to pursue his constitutionally dubious student loan cancellation efforts. He transferred loan debt onto the backs of American taxpayers who had either paid off their college loans or had never taken out any in the first place.

After the previous administration’s horrendous failures, Trump is looking to fulfill his campaign promise to eliminate the Department of Education. Of course, Congress must take action to do so.

Therefore, Trump plans to direct his secretary of education to dismantle as much of the department as possible, looking to end all functions that don’t fall within the explicit text of the law. Then, Trump will call on Congress to eliminate the department, which may be a difficult task to see accomplished given the fact that a majority of Americans have a favorable view of the Education Department. Not every Republican would be on board with elimination, and Democrats will fight to the bitter end to save it, too.

However, this is where DOGE may help in a big way to expose the waste and corruption within the Education Department, as it has done with USAID.

This sort of Washington upheaval is why Americans elected Trump, and it’s why a majority of Americans are happy with what they have seen Trump doing so far.