In their failed bid to keep the White House, Democrats fixated outsize attention on Project 2025, a conservative blueprint for an incoming Republican administration.
Progressives painted the document as scary and something to fight. And while President-elect Donald Trump disavowed any direct ties to the project, he is advocating for some of its ideas.
Chief among them is eliminating the U.S. Department of Education, an idea Trump mentioned frequently on the campaign trail.
It's not a new concept, however. In conservative and libertarian circles, it’s been discussed for years, and for good reasons.
After all, in the decades since the creation of a federal education department in 1979, taxpayers have spent hundreds of billions of dollars and not gotten much in return.
The department consumes roughly $80 billion a year, and that number keeps going up even as test scores have gone down (especially after schools remained closed during the COVID-19 pandemic).
The department employs more than 4,000 people, and this bureaucracy has saddled states with lots of red tape. All the oversight, however, hasn’t translated into better results for kids – which was the whole point of escalated federal involvement.
A better idea? Send more of the funding directly to the states, where school boards and parents can have more say in their children’s education.
No one has been more of a proponent of this idea than former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos. DeVos, who oversaw the department........