Well, well, well. The great federal education empire went dark for 43 straight days — and guess what? The sky didn’t fall. Kids still went to school, teachers still handed out homework, and the lunch lady still served up whatever passes for chicken nuggets these days. It was almost like… the Department of Education doesn’t actually do anything useful. Shocking, I know.
Education Secretary Linda McMahon, who’s been having way too much fun poking the bloated federal bureaucracy with a sharp stick, came right out and said what everyone with a functioning brain already suspected: the federal government has been pretending it’s essential to education, when in reality, it’s about as useful as a screen door on a submarine.
During the record-breaking 43-day government shutdown — courtesy of the Democrats throwing a tantrum and refusing to pass a budget without their usual pork and climate hysteria money — 90% of the Education Department’s staff were furloughed. That’s nine-zero percent. Almost the entire workforce vanished, and what happened? Absolutely nothing. Schools kept running. Bells rang. Kids learned (well, to the extent they normally do). The education system didn’t even blink.
McMahon, never one to miss a golden opportunity to point out the obvious, laid it out: “If 90% of an agency supposedly governing education can disappear for weeks without disrupting education, do we really need it at all?” Spoiler alert: we don’t.
Of course, this is all part of President Trump’s larger plan to finally put the federal government on a diet. Remember when he said in 2024 that he’d take a chainsaw to the bureaucracy? A lot of people thought he was bluffing. They must be new here. Trump doesn’t bluff — he tweets, signs executive orders, and fires people on live TV. McMahon is just helping him check one more item off the list: gutting the Department of Education and turning the lights out for good.
Back in March, McMahon already laid off half the department’s workforce. Half. And the world kept spinning. Then Trump announced he’d be shutting the whole thing down with an executive order. The Education Department’s workforce programs? Already handed off to the Department of Labor. It’s like a yard sale for federal busywork.
Now, predictably, the usual suspects are shrieking from the rooftops. The teachers’ unions are clutching their pearls, the left-wing pundits are foaming at the mouth, and somewhere in D.C., a think tank intern is weeping into their unpaid internship. According to them, without the federal government micromanaging every school district from 3,000 miles away, children will apparently forget how to read, write, and identify their pronouns.
But here’s the truth they don’t want to admit: the Department of Education has been a glorified money-laundering operation for decades. Taxpayers send billions to Washington, bureaucrats take their cut, then send the leftovers back to the states — but only if they follow the latest federal fads and social experiments. Common Core, gender curriculum, DEI madness — that’s the kind of brilliance we’ve been funding.
And what did we get in return? Test scores in the gutter, kids who can’t do basic math, and a generation more concerned with activism than academics. So yeah, maybe trimming the fat isn’t just a good idea — maybe it’s the only way to save American education from itself.
McMahon’s message is clear: let the states handle education. Let parents, teachers, and local communities decide what’s best for their kids. Not some pencil-pusher in a D.C. office who hasn’t set foot in a classroom since the Carter administration.
So while Democrats were busy throwing a 43-day fit over losing their grip on the federal purse strings, McMahon and Trump used the moment to prove what conservatives have been saying for years — the Department of Education is a monument to federal excess, and it’s long past time to bulldoze it.
You want education reform? Start by getting Washington out of the classroom. Turns out, we didn’t need them in the first place.