by WorldTribune Staff, March 24, 2025 Real World News
As expected, the Left went into meltdown mode when President Donald Trump announced he was beginning the process of winding down the Department of Education.
“I’m so mad, I’m spitting mad about this, because it’s hurting the people who can’t vote, children don’t vote!” Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said on MSNBC.
“Donald Trump has officially declared war on America’s students,” California Democrat Rep. John Garamendi posted on X.
Trump aims to “demolish the nation’s public education system,” said Kelley Robinson, president of the Human Rights Campaign.
Tyler O’Neil is senior editor at The Daily Signal, noted in a March 21 op-ed: “These people know, of course, that eliminating the Department of Education doesn’t actually mean ‘declaring war on America’s students’ or demolishing the ‘public education system.’ (Even school choice, which may weaken public schools by allowing tax dollars to follow students to home schooling and other options, will only introduce competition for public schools, not destroy them.)”
Among the moves Trump made was to direct the Small Business Administration to start handling student loans and the Department of Health and Human Services to handle special needs and nutrition programs.
“This sort of restructuring hardly represents the death knell of public education,” O’Neil noted.
“It does, however, represent a serious threat to the big national teachers unions, and those teachers unions are part of the Left’s funding apparatus.”
In 2024, the U.S.’s two largest teachers unions gave millions to Democrats and leftist groups.
The National Education Association gave $3.2 million to Democrats and $29.2 million to liberal groups, according to Open Secrets. The American Federation of Teachers gave $2.8 million to Democrats and $4.4 million to liberal groups.
As he exposes in his book “The Woketopus: The Dark Money Cabal Manipulating the Federal Government”, O’Neil notes that these unions “also help to bankroll the leftist groups that staffed and advised the Biden Administration, using the federal bureaucracy to force woke ideology on the American people.”
Joe Biden notoriously hosted Weingarten and NEA President Rebecca Pringle at the White House on his first full day in office.
“This access may be the central thing the teachers unions and their allies fear losing,” O’Neil wrote.
Jonathan Butcher, an education research fellow at The Heritage Foundation, noted that the dissolution of the Department of Education won’t deeply impact the American school system—where states and local governments make the most important decisions—but it will deprive the unions of their access to a central decision-making authority.
“Teacher unions benefit from access to a central place where they can advocate for programs that benefit them,” Butcher told The Daily Signal. He mentioned Title II spending, which funds teacher training and recruitment. “Any increase in federal Title II spending allows them to promote the idea that they need to hire more staff, which potentially gives them more members.”
“Having access to a central office from which they can lobby for large sums is more cost-effective to them than 50 different states,” he explained. However, having a central office may become a two-edged sword.
“Teacher unions’ power base is in the states—their members are in states and local chapters,” Butcher noted. “Surveys of state and local chapters find that they don’t always approve of what the national office is doing.”
The outrage over Trump’s move may have more to do with the top bureaucracy at these unions losing their access to power than it has to do with education policy.
Without a Department of Education, “there’s less reason for the next Democrat president to invite Randi Weingarten and Rebecca Pringle to the White House for a photo-op, and that hurts the promotion that unions do,” Butcher said.
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Behind the media-generated hysteria about the DOE: Centralized union power added by Editor Two on March 24, 2025
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