By Seth Boyes,
I’ve never been able to drum up much interest in the lists of proposed cabinet members each president makes following an election. Perhaps that kind of news just feels too similar to sports enthusiasts jabbering over NFL draft picks — I’ve never been much of a sports fan.
But last week’s announcement of who the incoming Trump Administration means to put in charge of the proposed Department of Government Efficiency snagged my ear. If you haven’t heard, former presidential candidate and millionaire businessman Vivek Ramaswamy is expected to be at the helm alongside billionaire businessman Elon Musk (yes, there are going to be two people in charge of the Department of Government Efficiency — insert your own joke).
The idea of Musk finding a gateway into government isn’t that surprising given how the last few years have gone, and most folks can probably take more than an educated guess as to his priorities given what he says via the little blue bird he molded into a megaphone.
But it was Ramaswamy’s name that caught my attention. I’d imagine a lot of folks have become a bit foggy on what his specific campaign platforms were, since he dropped out of the race almost a year ago. Fortunately, I had spiral notepad to refresh myself on some particulars, but I didn’t need to go digging through my files to remember one of his proposals.
He planned on eliminating the Department of Education — as the son and grandson of public educators, that really raised an eyebrow (in fact, I think it raised both).
Specifically, Ramaswamy’s idea was to use the billions of dollars in former DOE funding to foster school choice. He also called teachers unions “the number one shackle on public schools,” and he claimed eliminating them would increase competition between public and private schools which he argued would result in “true choice” for families.
He also said he’d consider shuttering other three-letter government agencies like the FBI, IRS, ATF and CDC — all in the interest of weeding out bureaucratic influence in the U.S government, of course (and let’s remember he’s now poised to become an non-elected official with the ability to hold sway over government entities) — but nixing the DOE was the one that really baffled me.
You see, I thought that public education exists because we as a country agreed everyone should have equal access to education, regardless of what demographics they may or may not fall into. And it was my understanding that part of the Department of Education’s job is to make sure the education the public is receiving meets acceptable standards — local entities would have set those educational benchmarks under Ramaswamy’s plan.
That may sound good on the surface. Calls for limited federal government often do. But let’s not forget that preserving individual states’ rights was a talking point among those who resisted the ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, and some states were actually successful in putting new laws on the books to skirt the law and avoid providing education to students equally under the law.
Now, to be clear, even though I’m a public school graduate through and through, I realize there are plenty of private schools in Iowa and elsewhere in the country that provide quality education, even if they aren’t subject to the same requirements as their public counterparts. Both can exist in the same sphere, because they were created for similar yet distinct purposes.
I think we all too often equate our system of government with a for-profit business, when it’s not meant to be. I mean, I’m not any more thrilled about $35 trillion in federal debt than anyone else is, and yes, things should be done to cut down on unnecessary spending — U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley’s beef with the Pentagon over the purchase of $14,000 toilet seats in 2018 comes to mind (Grassley just might be my favorite sitting Republican — even if you disagree with him, he’s generally got years of experience to back up what he’s saying).
Again, I could be wrong, but I was pretty sure the return on public services — like education — wasn’t meant to be a monetary one. Rather it comes in the form of a population who is well-prepared to contribute to society when they become adults.
And in some ways, I understand the impulse to hack and slash at what often seems like an overly bloated government. But too often, we want to apply broad solutions to relatively specific issues within our government. For example, not that long ago, Sen. Grassley felt the Obama Administration’s approach to the Waters of the United States rule was worded so broadly that it could have conceivably been interpreted to apply to a pothole in a farm’s driveway that just happened to collect a bit of rainwater overnight (there I go citing Grassley again).
And I think the idea of eliminating entire departments which oversee things like public education seems alarmingly broad — and frankly heavy-handed — especially when that idea was proposed by someone who is now in line to head up a department that might be given the authority to do exactly that.
I’d say we need to take a breath and slow things down, but unfortunately, if the proposed Department of Government Efficiency ends up being structured the way some expect it to be, you and I won’t have any say in the matter (so much for limited federal government, I guess). It makes me think of when Grassley called the Senate a “cooling saucer” for heated legislation from the U.S. House, saying each provision in a bill needed to be thought through thoroughly (alright, that’s the third time I’ve cited Chuck Grassley in this column, so I guess he really must be one of my favorite legislators). And I’m hoping more folks in D.C. will be able to somehow cool any hot-headed ideas that may come their way over the next few years.
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