Staff Reports
For too long Washington has siphoned off taxpayer dollars into an oversized, ideologically driven machine while classrooms across America go wanting for basics. Erika Donalds, an outspoken education reformer and America First Policy Institute leader, has been blunt: eliminating the Department of Education’s chokehold will free up real money for schools and return power to parents and teachers who actually care about children’s futures.
President Trump has already taken the bold step of directing the executive branch to facilitate a wind-down of the Department of Education and push authority back to the states where it belongs. This is the kind of decisive action Americans voted for—shrinking the swamp and restoring accountability to local communities instead of allowing unelected bureaucrats to dictate curricula and priorities.
Erika Donalds has explained the practical side of the plan: many functions now handled in Washington are financial or administrative and can be transferred to other agencies like Treasury, while harmful, politically driven programs can be eliminated. That common-sense triage means more dollars reach classrooms instead of funding more paper-pushing, social-engineering mandates out of D.C.
Senator Mike Rounds’ Returning Education to Our States Act lays out a realistic path, promising to redirect funding as block grants and claiming savings by cutting redundant bureaucracy—savings that can be spent hiring teachers and raising pay rather than bloating offices in the capital. Conservatives who live by fiscal responsibility should welcome any plan that preserves funding but ends Washington’s one-size-fits-all mandates.
Officials leading the effort have insisted protections for vulnerable students—IDEA and Title I—would be preserved even as control shifts to states, and that eliminating red tape will allow local leaders to target dollars where they’ll actually improve classrooms. If states are trusted with roads and policing, they can certainly manage education dollars better than distant federal wonks whose priorities are too often driven by ideology, not literacy.
Of course, the usual chorus of critics predict chaos and disruption, worried less about students and more about preserving a bureaucratic fiefdom that rewards political allies. Their warnings ring hollow next to the reality: communities and parents want strong reading, math, and civic education, not federal mandates or woke curricula pushed from the top.
This is our moment to stand with reformers like Erika Donalds and common-sense conservatives who believe in accountability, parental rights, and fiscal prudence. Shrinking an institution that has become a vehicle for federal overreach isn’t radical—it’s patriotic, putting America’s children first and returning control over education to the people who actually know their communities and care for their kids.
