The Removal

Attorney General Pam Bondi personally removed newly installed large framed photos of former President Joe Biden, former Vice President Harris, and former Attorney General Garland from a wall in the Justice Department yesterday. 

The photos were placed on the wall three weeks after President Trump took office.

This illustrates what could be called "The Removal" of parts of our bloated, corrupt, out-of-control government by the new Trump administration.

And the removal of the scourge of the past four years.

Each time the Trump people expose corruption, mismanagement, and evil deeds in one of our government agencies, the bureaucrats of the Left and their media allies shriek and claim it will destroy our country---our democracy, if that corrupt agency is removed.

The Department of Education is now under scrutiny and hopefully will soon be gone.

Here's why it should be "removed."

Be informed, not misled.

The removal of the images comes after President Donald Trump’s political opponents tried to imprison him, bankrupt him, assassinate him, remove him from the ballot, and make him politically irrelevant by introducing a partisan committee to investigate January 6.

Nevertheless, the Republican won the 2024 election in a landslide victory in the greatest comeback in American political history.

Holdover employees from Biden’s DOJ installed the images of the Democrats just three weeks after Trump took office, but Bondi, recently confirmed as Trump’s attorney general, ripped them from the wall.

“Attorney General @PamBondi went into the DOJ in DC today and noticed that on the walls in one wing they still have big framed photos of Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and Merrick Garland,” the New York Post’s Miranda Devine recounted on X. “This is ‘ridiculous’ three weeks into Donald Trump’s presidency.”

The Department of Education must also be taken off the wall.

The Department of Education was established under President Jimmy Carter in 1979 with the stated goal of helping American schoolchildren become high achievers and compete with the rest of the world. This has not happened, as student scores have remained stagnant, if not floundering. While some blame could be tied to COVID, students were slowly sinking long before the pandemic lockdowns.

This is especially tragic when one considers that many of our students aren’t proficient in basic skills, which makes the rest of their school experience that much harder. For example, the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress results just came out, and among fourth graders, seven out of 10 weren’t proficient in reading. This means 70% are reading below grade level. Moreover, 60% are struggling to comprehend basic math.

Clearly, the DOE is not performing its duty.

In a recent op-ed in The Free Press, former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos explains why she believes the department should be quashed. DeVos acknowledges that this measure may seem extreme. After all, most people think that abolishing the DOE means public schooling is at stake. This is not the case at all.

DeVos says, "Since its creation in 1979, the Department of Education has sent well more than $1 trillion to schools with the express purpose of closing the gaps between the highest and lowest performers. Today, those gaps are as wide as they have ever been, and by many measures, even wider."

She says, "Last week, the latest Nation’s Report Card came out, giving us a clear assessment of where student achievement stands. The report, published by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), tells us that in reading and math, most students were even further behind than they were in 2022. Which was worse than where they were in 2019. Which was worse than 2013."

Continuing, she said, "How bad is it? Seven in 10 American fourth graders are not proficient readers, meaning they struggle with reading grade-level literature and comprehending informational texts. Forty percent graded out at 'below basic,' meaning they struggle with basic comprehension. In math, the picture is similar: six in 10 fourth graders are behind in math."

Then she said this:

I can understand how that idea, which President Donald Trump is committed to advancing, might sound a bit radical. But having spent four years on the inside as secretary of education, struggling to get the department’s bureaucracy to make even the smallest changes to put the needs of students first, I can say conclusively that American students will be better off without.

Nothing could be more important to our success as a nation than having well-educated citizens. But don’t be fooled by the name: the Department of Education has almost nothing to do with actually educating anyone.

The Department of Education does not run a single school. It does not employ any teachers in a single classroom. It doesn’t set academic standards or curriculum. It isn’t even the primary funder of education — quite the opposite. In most states, the federal government represents less than 10 percent of K–12 public education funding.

So what does it do? 

It shuffles money around, adds unnecessary requirements and political agendas via its grants, and then passes the buck when it comes time to assess if any of that adds value.

DeVos calls the DOE a middleman that only supports the desires of the teachers' union and other bureaucrats.

Here’s how it works:

"Congress appropriates funding for education; last year, it totaled nearly $80 billion. The department’s bureaucrats take in those billions, add strings and red tape, peel off a percentage to pay for themselves, and then send it down to state education agencies. Many of them do a version of the same and then send it to our schools. The schools must then pay first for administrators to manage all the requirements that have been added along the way. After all that, the money makes it to the classroom to help a student learn — maybe."

"In other words, the Department of Education is functionally a middleman. And like most middlemen, it doesn’t add value. It merely adds cost and complexity."

The only certain benefactor of the DOE’s existence is its patron saint: the teachers' unions.

And just what do the teachers' unions do? They lobby for left-wing causes and hold up the workings of the public schools for political gain.

The DOE is merely a monetary funnel for the Leftists in government. Nor is it limited to K-12. DeVoss also pins the blame on DOE federal subsidies for making the higher education price tag so astronomical and universities so left-leaning. Federal money always comes with strings.

DeVos, "President Trump has made it clear that he wants to return education to the states. Consequently, many states are preparing for that possibility."

The idea is that if taxpayer money follows the student, that student then has the ability to go wherever he or she wants rather than being forced into poorly run schools. This will create competition and hopefully drive innovation in our approach to education.

Trump’s goal is for Education Secretary Linda McMahon “to put herself out of a job.”

God's goal is for parents, not the government, to educate their children.

Be Informed. Be Discerning. Be Vigilant. Be Engaged. Be Prayerful.