Another Promise Kept: Abolishing the Department of Education

Hey everybody, President Trump is abolishing the Department of Education breaking news.

We explain what it means as we go deep into the history of the Department of Education and its ramifications. Dr.
Pastrito from America's greatest college, Hillsdale College, also joins us to explain the progressive era and the nationwide injunction crisis. You guys can support Hillsdale College and learn from their incredible online courses at charlieforhillsdale.com.

That's C-H-A-R-L-I-E for Hillsdale.com.

Charlie for... Hillsdale College and learn from their incredible online courses at charlieforhillsdale.com.

That's C-H-A-R-L-I-E for Hillsdale.com, charlieforhillsdale.com. Email me as always,

freedom at charliekirk.com. Buckle up, everybody.
Here we go.

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Today, momentarily, imminently, right around the corner, President Donald Trump will be signing an executive order, a major executive order, to keep one of his campaign promises,

one that we care about deeply here on the Charlie Kirk Show, which is the abolishment,

the abolition, the elimination of the Department of Education.

The Department of Education was created in the 1970s under President Jimmy Carter,

who separated from what it was previously called the Department of

Health, Education, and Welfare. Now, I think that is worthy of a little bit of a pause.
That means we were able to send a man to the moon, win two world wars, become an industrial superpower, a world superpower, balance our budget, build the world's greatest middle class, have a well-read, well-grounded citizenry without a federal Department of Education. We were able to become the envy of the planet without a centralized bureaucracy called the Department of Education.
How were we able to do that? Well, for most of America, education happened between parent and child, pastor and child, community and child. For most of American history, it was local, local, local, because education is the most personal of all the things.
It happens in the soul of an individual. Education is very hard to put 2,000 miles away in a bleak, downtrodden building.
Basically a glorified cabinet file. Our founding framers and our founding fathers were classically educated.

They studied the great books.

They understood the big ideas of human nature.

They could tell you what was good or evil. classically educated.
They studied the great books. They understood the big ideas of human

nature. They could tell you what was good or evil, holy or profane, right or wrong,

the difference between a citizen and a serf. Now when I go to college campuses,

they can't tell me what a woman is. They can't tell me what a man is.

We went from an education system that would explore eternal truth one that would challenge children to go after what is beautiful and what is good and instead we gravitated away towards an administrative state model of education the germans which have a tendency to introduce the worst ideas imaginable, introduced this idea of historicism, coupled with historicism, which is an idea that history has an endpoint, and we must keep on growing the state to get us closer to that endpoint. It is Hegelian in nature, was this idea of the administrative approach to education.
This was largely authored by people such as John Dewey, Woodrow Wilson. They wanted the centralization of education, that no longer should parents be in charge of education, no longer should churches or synagogues or communities, but we need to prepare students to become good worker bees.
Now, every time I hear a Republican politician say, well, we want our education system to create the best workers of the future, I cringe. That is not what education is about.
Education is about creating good citizens. Education is about creating people that are capable of answering life's deeper questions.
You see, if you create good citizens, they can do any job that you throw in front of them. Instead, we entered into the hyper-specialization of American education.
You're going to sit in single file lines. No longer would we have dialogue or discussion in the classical form of education.
You will be taught science, technology, engineering, and math. You will keep your mouth shut.
You will do what you are told is hyper authoritarian. And over the last hundred years, we have seen the downfall of American education and Jimmy Carter accelerated that trend.
Away from the proven model that led us to a superpower and closer towards a Marxist version of how to educate our kids. Since the creation of the Department of Education, spending on education has gone way up, while American education performance has actually gone down often dramatically.
For decades, Republicans have promised rhetorically to get rid of the Department of Education. Reagan said he would.
In fact, that'd be fun to get a clip of that. Congressmen have talked about doing it, but nothing has happened.
People assumed that Trump would be the same way, that he would talk about abolishing it, but it wouldn't happen. Oh, it's just a bunch of rhetoric.
It's just a bunch of talk. It's just a bunch of jibber jabber.
But President Trump is the promise keeper president. He is the promise keeper president.
So today he is signing an executive order, ordering education secretary Linda McMahon to do everything possible to make herself the last education secretary. Now, of course, there are some obvious caveats.
The department was created by Congress, so it probably can't be completely abolished without Congress. But we can do as much as possible to make the department's demise a mere matter of paperwork.
Trump has already laid off or furloughed thousands of the department staff. He can relocate the programs we can't get rid of.
There's no reason we need a special cabinet department to run Pell Grants. We had them before we had an education department.
We can apply the same principle to federal student loans and have the Treasury Department run them. Scott Bessett would do a much better job running anything to do with financial transactions than the Department of Education.
Does the Department of Education need its own civil rights office? Why not just have it at the Department of Justice? And while we're at it, let's have a go after real discrimination that occurs in our schools against white, Asian, and Jewish students. Not just going after fake hate crimes that happen on college campuses.
Now, getting rid of the Department of Education also won't cut the budget quite as much as it might seem. The department has a massive colossal budget of $250 billion.
Most of that is stuff that we can't get rid of for now. Pell grants, student loans, and important stuff like special education funding that we should, of course, keep.
It's Title I funding for schools. But the principle here is incredibly important.
We are getting rid of a department that never should have existed in the first place. Getting rid of this department would be a major step forward towards the localization and the restoration of the Parents' Party movement.
This was a pledge that President Trump made to the parents' party,

that no longer are bureaucrats going to say that they are in charge of our kids.

What President Trump is saying declaratively today is that it is your kids, not the state's kids.

It is not some government bureaucrat.

Here is Ronald Reagan making a promise. I'm going to get rid of the Department of Education.
Ronald Reagan said, play cut 243. The budget plan I submit to you on February 8th will realize major savings by dismantling the departments of energy and education and by eliminating ineffective subsidies for business.
Yeah, none of that happened. In fact, the Department of Education grew and added more headcount.
It strengthened, it deepened, and it did more damage. Ronald Reagan failed in that regard.
And that was when it was early. That was before it was this beast that it is today.
I had the opportunity to walk the halls of the Department of Education. Linda McMahon is doing a phenomenal job a couple weeks ago.
That is a sad, depressing, Stalinistic Soviet building. You walk, and it is a massive building, massive.
And you got to wonder, what are these people doing all day long? What? And to myself as i walked the halls of the department education and i stared at five or six bureaucratic worker bees that wouldn't even look up from their work to look at who was coming by just kind of just monotonous i said what does that person right there at that computer screen, what business does that human being have

over my daughter in Arizona? The answer is none. Zero.
They don't know her. They don't know anything.

So it's time to retire them. End it.
No mas afuera. Delete it.
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The world is turning to gold. Shouldn't you be looking into doing that too? This is from the great Dr.
Larry Arnn from America's greatest college, Hillsdale College, which, by the way, do you know Hillsdale receives no federal money? Do you know that almost all of your local alma maters receive federal student loans? Hillsdale does not. It's one of the reasons why they're America's greatest college.
According to Dr. Larry Arnn, there are 23 million civilian employees of the government, state, of the government, state, federal, and local.
11 million of them work in education. 11 million of them.
Almost half. But did you know out of 11 million, 6.7 million of them are not teachers or teachers assistants? Over half.
So you have 11 million people in education. 11 million people that work in education in this country.
And 4.3 million of them are teachers. So 4.3 million are teachers.
And the remainder, 6.7 million, are principals, assistant principals, deans, paper workers, administrators. This is the problem with education, most fundamentally,

is that we have become a bloated, overweight country, both metaphorically and literally,

by the way, but that's a whole separate topic for a different time. And our institutions have

found themselves to be a little bit lethargic, getting a little bit slow, a little bit slug, and not caring about the delivering of the education for our kids. You can walk into any local high school.
The high school I went to was falling victim to this. I saw it happening at Wheeling High School when I was sophomore, junior, senior.
I saw this trend really accelerate towards the end part of my high school years, which was all of the extra money that District 214 was receiving, where I grew up, District 214, very well-funded, incredible, unbelievable amounts of money going to schools. Teachers were earning $100,000, $120,000, $130,000 a year.
That's when I was going to school. And it's a lot more now.
I mean, the pay increases are through the roof. Huge pensions.
It was very common to have a PE teacher where I went to school earn $145,000 a year. Very common.

And I started to see this trend where the more money

that Wheeling High School would receive,

it wasn't going towards teachers

or teachers' assistants.

It was going towards a part of the building

that I rarely visited. A part of the building that I rarely visited.

A part of the building that I wasn't really even sure who all these people were. And it was right in the administrative bloat.
And they would be adding on new offices and they'd be adding on new areas. And we were wondering, who are all these people? I think I saw my guidance counselor like twice throughout my four years.
And boy, these guidance counselors would make a ton of money. And some of them were nice, wonderful people.
It's not an indictment of them, but their role is largely unnecessary and would cost the taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars and then pensions for the rest of their rest of

their life. Our nation's report card is a failure.
We cannot meet basic standards. Only 61% of fourth graders are proficient in math.
There was a story recently that I thought was a parody.

A young lady graduated with honors. There was a story recently that I thought was a parody.

A young lady graduated with honors and she can't read or write.

The school gave her honors distinction and she cannot read or write.

It's a true story.

You can go through over 20 schools in downtown Baltimore

and you cannot find a single student in fifth

grade that can read. Not a single student.
Yet these teachers keep on getting paid. And the administrators, they keep on getting paid.
And the administrators are there allegedly to try to keep standards up for the kids. And a whole different topic for a different time is how public sector teacher unions have done more damage to America than Vladimir Putin ever will.

How public sector teacher unions like the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, they operate as a cartel.

Very similar to the Sinaloa drug cartel.

Very similar. They are harming our kids.
They are poisoning them with bad ideas. Public sector teacher unions run by Randy Whitegarten, who might as well be Education El Chapo, has sent tens of millions of kids' lives backwards.
And they are an arm of the Democrat Party. Eliminating the Department of Education is a death blow against the education cartel that has been harming our country.
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That is YReFi.com, Y-R-E-F-Y.com. Our next guest, who is the professor of politics, the dean of the Van Andel Graduate School of Statesmanship, and the Charles and Lucia Shipley chair in American Constitution at Hillsdale College, Dr.
Ronald J. Pastrito.
Doctor, welcome to the program. Thanks for that welcome, Charlie.
It's good to see you. Absolutely.
And I am a student of yours, both in person and remotely through the Hillsdale online courses at the Claremont Institute. I loved your course on the Federalist Papers.
So there's lots to discuss here. I would love to get your historical take on injunctions.
When did they come about? How should we think, from a constitutional perspective, the very rapid use of nationwide district court injunctions? Well, there's a little bit of recent history on this, actually. And to be honest, I think Republicans have to look in the mirror a little bit because back when we got the Obama administration came into office and was not able to get its program through the Congress, they decided to go very aggressive with administrative power.
And the Republicans at that time, instead of using the powers constitutionally that Congress has, instead of fighting the Obama administration itself, especially through the budget process, the power of the purse, instead the Republicans ran from that and decided to go crying to the courts. And so they took the Obama administration to the courts.
Now that's been a practice in both Republican and Democratic administrations since then. It's certainly been ramped up massively now that we have the second Trump presidency.
But it's really a practice that that unfortunately, probably even Republicans have relied upon too much instead of using the Article one powers that they do have. And so the it seems as if the growth of this is very disturbing and is compromising Article two specified powers.
Does does a district court judge have any jurisdiction over foreign policy decisions made by a president? No, he does not. And the federal courts have been, including the Supreme Court historically, have been very, very reluctant to involve themselves in any kind of question that might involve foreign policy or what one might say are even some of the core discretionary powers of the executive under Article 2.
And so that's why some of the requests taken by some of these district court, ordering the turning around of airplanes or instructing the Department of State to disperse funds, even while they're just taking a pause, you know, the $2 billion funding order that we had recently reviewed by the courts. These things are typically way out of bounds for federal courts.
And I have to say, I do think that a good amount of this will ultimately end up being reversed at the Supreme Court level or at the higher court level. But the question is, how long is that going to take and how much trouble and harm to our country is going to be done while we wait for the Supreme Court to get into the ring?

We heard Chief Justice Roberts come out just recently and make the case that, hey, the impeachment isn't appropriate kind of language to use.

The appellate process is the way in which we handle potentially rogue district court judges. And in one sense, he's right about that.
But if his own court is going to be so reluctant to police the lower courts, then he really is almost setting the situation up for this kind of rhetoric. And the other thing that I haven't heard mentioned very much is, of course, there's a layer of courts in between the district court level and the Supreme Court level.
And these are the courts of appeal. And where most of these cases are being brought, and they're being brought here for obvious reason.
They're being brought in the District of Columbia. And the appeals court in the District of Columbia, the federal appeals court, is the one that was notoriously stacked with Democrats by Harry Reid.
And so it's not as if once these district court decisions get up to the appellate court level, there's not likely to be a terribly sympathetic hearing there either. And so these are really matters that should be in front of the Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court should be policing this. You saw four justices in the case on the USAID funding get really quite angry.
Justice Alito was quite angry at the court for not intervening in that case sooner. So it'll be a matter of when the Supreme Court wants to get involved.
So the lower court judges are making these decisions, they seem to have a little bit of an arrogance where they know they're going to probably get slapped down and get an angry judgment, but they don't really care. That's what's so disappointing is the naked

partisanship here is deep down. I think these district court judges know they're acting improperly,

but they justify it because Trump is so bad and we have to do what we possibly can

to stop him. Is there any recourse that can be delivered against these rogue decisions? Well, I think ultimately the most likely recourse is there being overturned by a higher court and especially by the Supreme Court.
That's the most likely. Now, we have heard talk of impeachment, and I'm certainly not opposed to impeachment for judges who knowingly betray their judicial duty.
The problem is it's simply not a realistic remedy. Impeachment requires a supermajority vote in the Senate that is simply never going to happen.
And so it's just, to my mind, not a very practical remedy.

And, you know, the leftists know this. They know how to judge shop.
Quite frankly, the Republican lawyers, when President Obama and President Biden were in office, they knew how to judge shop as well. It's very easy to do at the district court level.
There are 90 some odd district courts, and you only need to win in one of them, right? That's the great problem with a lot of these universal injunctions is you can go district court to district court to district court and lose, lose, lose. And then if you find just one district court judge who's willing to enjoin the government, then that's it.
They only have to go for one out of 94, essentially. And it's that's not it's not hard to do.
It's like it's like getting an indictment, you know, a prosecutor getting an indictment. You can indict a ham sandwich and and getting an injunction in district court, especially in D.C.
If you can't do that and you're a Democratic attorney, you should consider a new line of work. And that's that's so disappointing for the Republic and bad for the country.
So another big case happening right now is that Trump has fired two members of the FTC, which Democrats are claiming is illegal. Can you explain the case of Humphreys executor to our listeners? You bet.
And in one sense, it is illegal under existing Supreme Court precedent, under the Humphreys executor precedent from 1935 that you just named. And of course, the Trump administration knows that.
And one has to guess that the very reason that they have decided to go after these officers from the FTC is they know that that will put the question squarely before the Supreme Court of the United States. The case of Humphreys' executor was about the question of whether or not Congress could create an agency like the FTC, but protect it from presidential control.
And the way in which principally it is protected from presidential control is by the president not being allowed to remove the commissioners whenever he likes. And that was challenged in the 1930s.
FDR tried to remove Mr. Humphreys, who was a pre-New Deal commissioner.
And the court came in and said, no, Congress can, when it wants to create independence for these agencies, it can carve out a special zone of protection from presidential control. And of course, the obvious problem with that is, well, where are they if they're not in the executive branch? The president has the executive power,

according to our constitution. And so if they're not controlled by the elected executive, then by whom are they controlled? And so for years, constitutionalists have really wanted to get the court to look anew at the Humphreys' executive precedent.
And the good news is, it's pretty clear if you follow the jurisprudence over the last several years, the court is pretty sympathetic with the so-called unitary understanding of the executive that I'm describing, that the president has this power under Article II. You can't limit his removal of executive branch officials this way.
Humphrey's executor, I've said many times, perhaps other than Dred Scott, is probably the worst decision in the history of the Supreme Court in terms of its historical ignorance and constitutional incompetence. So I think there's going to be a sympathetic audience, quite frankly, at the Supreme Court.
They've gone just up to the edge in thinking about repealing Humphreys in the past. And the Trump administration, they clearly know that.
And so they are trying to tee this up as best they can, where even the more incrementalist justices on the court are they're going to have a hard time evading the issue, I think. I want everyone to check out your latest book, America Transformed, The Rise and Legacy of American Progressivism.
Hey, everybody. Charlie Kirk here.
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charliekirk.com preborn banner. Dr.
Pastrito continues with us from the great Hillsdale

College, author of America Transformed. Doctor, tell us about your book.
Well, the book chronicles

how we got to the place that we currently are. So people might wonder, you know, we were we were talking about the the FTC and the Humphreys executive decision.
People might wonder, well, why is it that Congress would have wanted to kind of wall off an agency and protect it and apparently make it unaccountable. And the story of how that happened and what an incredible departure that is from the original Republican vision of our founders really goes through the progressive era, the original progressive era, back to the likes of Woodrow Wilson especially, and also folks like Teddy Roosevelt.
And so what I try to do in the book is to say, all right, all of these developments today, these rogue agencies, the fact that you have hundreds of thousands of people governing us, and they go on doing it regardless of election. Elections come and go, and the administrative state just sort of chugs on.
Well, that didn't just happen. It wasn't just in the last five years or 10 years.
It's been a project underway in this country for 100 years. It goes back even into the end of the 19th century.
And so the book basically traces the very different arguments about the purpose of government, the great critique of the Constitution, the progressive argument that, hey, the time of the founding has passed and we've got to get some new ideas here, traces that into what they did then to institutions in the 1930s and how the law changed and how we ended up here, you and I today talking about, you know, why can't the president go ahead? He's elected after all by the majority of the country. Why can't he go ahead and control other people in the executive branch? How did how did we get here? And so the short version is the book tries to tell that story.
Over the last hundred years, power seems to have concentrated in the unelected bureaucracy and the unelected judiciary, both of which seem to be the protectorate of progressivism and the growth of the state. What would you say is the philosophical foundation for progressivism that led towards what we now see today? Where did this come from? What did Wilson, what did Dewey, what did these people believe? Well, what they did, Charlie, was they imported a philosophy of government that was a real novelty to America.
American government, as you know very well, was founded on the principles of the Declaration of Independence. The point of government is to secure the God-given rights that individuals have.
And government by consent of the governed is the only legitimate form of government. Well, what the progressives argued was that that was perhaps an appropriate way of thinking for the late 18th century, but that we had now been presented with a whole new host of problems, economic problems, social problems.
The old principles were inadequate for the crisis that they faced when they came on the scene in the latter part of the 19th century. And so the dominant philosophy, to get at your question, the dominant philosophy was that of the German state.
Woodrow Wilson, for example, wrote very admiringly of the bureaucratic system of government in Bismarck's Prussia and wondered how we might bring that kind of government by expertise, not government by consent, but government by expertise. Consent gets in the way, right? Ordinary consent gets in the way.
People have different opinions and they want their interests to be respected. Much better, the progressives argued, if we could

just bring in a kind of scientific elite. And, you know, often when I, when I've been doing this for longer than I want to admit, and often when I used to bring it up, people's eyes would kind of glaze over, you know, talking about the Germans and bureaucracy and state theory and so on.
until we got COVID, Yep. Until we got told, until we got told basically that, hey, elected people should get out of the way.
We need the experts. We need to do whatever, you know, Tony Fauci and his minions tell us.
And all of a sudden it became very real for people. And so that was a kind of renewed appreciation of what happens when you see too much of government by consent.
Wonderful summary. We are out of time.
Thank you, Dr. Pastrita.
Everyone check out the book America Transformed and also take the free online courses, the Constitution 201 by Dr. Pastrita at Charlie for Hillsdale dot com.
Charlie for Hillsdale dot com. Doctor, thanks so much.
Thanks for having me on, Charlie. Good to see you.
Thanks so much for listening, everybody. Email us, as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.

Thanks so much for listening, and God bless.