The Case for Abolishing the Department of Education, Truth About Trump's Tariff Plan: AM Update 4/21

Good morning, everyone. I'm Megan Kelly.
It's Monday, April 21st, 2025, and this is your AM update. Since 1980, we have data on this.
Per student spending has increased by about 108% after adjusting for inflation. Have the outcomes gotten 108% better? No, they obviously haven't.
President Trump says it's time to pull the plug on the Department of Education. What does the future of American schooling look like if Washington isn't calling the shots? The U.S.
is in the best negotiating position by far. Critics call it chaos.
Supporters call it correction inside Trump's high stakes tariff strategy and why the U.S. might just hold all the cards.
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Let Tax Network USA help before the IRS makes the next move. And I'm going to close the Department of Education and move education back to the states.
I will shut down the Federal Department of Education and we will move everything back to the states. One other thing I'll be doing very early in the administration is closing up the Department of Education in Washington, D.C.
After years of pandemic-era remote learning exposing widespread educational failures, FBI scrutiny of outspoken parents at school board meetings, and growing concerns over the politicization of classroom content on race and gender, then-GOP candidate Donald Trump surged to victory in 2024, campaigning on a promise to overhaul the public education system and restore parental rights. In March, President Trump taking the most significant step yet toward fulfilling that promise.
In a few moments, I will sign an executive order to begin eliminating the federal Department of Education once and for all. I told Linda, Linda, I hope you do a great job and put yourself out of a job.
I want her to put herself out of a job. The order directing Secretary of Education Linda McMahon to, quote, take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education and return authority over education to the states and local communities.
Critics decrying the move, accusing the administration of dismantling public education and abandoning federal support for vulnerable students. They're going to go after food programs for poor kids.
They're going to take lunch, breakfast and lunch away from poor kids. Folks who might have a child with a disability are wondering, is this going to impact my family? Is this going to make things even harder? You can lie to parents about a lot of things, but if you start taking away opportunities from their children, you better watch out.
We spoke with school choice advocate and executive director of the Educational Freedom Institute, Corey DeAngelis, who says the Department of Education has failed in its mission and it is beyond time to shut it down. Yeah, we should get rid of the Department of Education altogether.
Since 1980, we have data on this. Her student spending has increased by about 108 percent after adjusting for inflation.
Have the outcomes gotten 108% better? No, they obviously haven't. It was created with the explicit purpose of closing achievement gaps and improving student outcomes.
It hasn't done either of those things. The proof is in the pudding.
We have 45 years of data now, and it's time to return education back to the states where it belongs. The DOE operates on an $82 billion budget, funding Pell Grants, Title I aid for low-income schools, special ed under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, Title IX enforcement, and federal student loans.
The National Education Association, one of the country's largest unions, criticizing the administration's decision to shutter the department in a statement, quote, the DOE is a critical champion in enforcing federal statutes prohibiting discrimination and ensuring every student has access to an education that will help them reach their full potential. Dismantling it means defunding programs that feed, educate, and protect our most vulnerable and underserved students and leaving many families fearful and anxious and communities reeling.
Mr. DeAngelo says that argument doesn't hold up, saying the department is failing the very students it's supposed to protect.
Students with special needs are getting the short end of the stick when it comes to education in our country. And it's because they're stuck in a one size fits all system.
And the. And the Department of Education, even though they include red tape and regulations around these ideas, doesn't mean that it's actually producing better outcomes for those kids.
And then any useful programs, like special needs initiatives, would move under other departments. Student loans have been announced to be moved under the Small Business Administration.
Department of Justice would handle civil rights issues.

Head Start, if you like the pre-K programs,

those move under the Department of Health and Human Services as well.

President Trump's executive orders redirect federal money to the states,

where local officials will have greater control over how it's spent.

President of the American Federation of Teachers, Randy Weingarten, another huge union,

claiming states will funnel the money into private school voucher programs

And I think that's block grant it. So we'll give it to a state education department.
So and then let the state education department decide what to do. So we know, for example, what Texas would do.
They'll use it for vouchers. Mr.
DeAngelis responding to that argument. And you have people like Randy Weingarten crying about this.
And it's not because she's concerned about the kids. She's concerned about her own gravy train coming to an end.
She sees that she can lobby one institution, the department, better than lobbying a lot of different institutions. And so she feels like she can wield more influence in Washington, D.C.
than in individual states. When people can vote with their feet, the schools improve in response to competition.
We've seen this time and time again. Most recently in Florida, they went all in on school choice.
And a couple decades ago, before they had school choice, they were at the bottom of the pack on the nation's report card. Now you fast forward to today, Florida is number one on education, according to U.S.
News and World Report. And it's not a money issue.
Money doesn't solve problems, especially when the system is broken. Florida spends 27 percent less than the national average per student in the public schools.
And they're knocking it out of the park because they have competition. Fully abolishing the DOE would require an act of Congress, an uphill battle with a slim Republican majority in the Senate and a 60-vote threshold to overcome the filibuster.
But Mr. DeAngelis says Democrats' stance on education could cost them seats and predicts Republicans will keep chipping away.
They unanimously voted against this protecting girls sports, which is an 80-20 issue. You got to think they're going to lose some seats over this issue in the midterms.
Maybe after 2026, Trump and the Republicans will have a better chance at fully eradicating the department. But what I am hopeful about is you only need 51 votes in the budget reconciliation process.
So there are things Republicans can do to give this department death by a thousand cuts, including reducing or changing mandatory spending patterns. And Trump's already started this process with his executive order, and Linda has fired at the department.
They, oh, we're halfway there, if we could only get 100% of the way there. But it does require an act of Congress because it was created by an act of Congress.
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Decades before entering the political arena, billionaire businessman Donald Trump sounding the alarm on what he called unfair global trade practices. I'd make our allies, forgetting about the enemies, the enemies you can't talk to so easily, I'd make our allies pay their fair share.
We're a debtor nation. Something's going to happen over the next number of years with this country, because you can't keep going on losing $200 billion, and yet we let Japan come in and dump everything right into our markets.
It's not free trade. If you ever go to Japan right now and try to sell something, forget about it, just forget about it.
It's almost impossible. They don't have laws against it.
They just make it impossible. They come over here, they sell their cars, their VCRs, they knock the hell out of our companies.
And hey, I have tremendous respect for the Japanese people. I mean, you can respect somebody that's beating the hell out of you, but they are beating the hell out of this country.
That was back in 1988. Under the second Trump administration, the White House seeking to rebalance global trade practices with President Trump's Liberation Day tariff plan.
Markets seesawed on the news, plunging at the announcement, then soaring to record highs after the White House declared a 90-day renegotiation window. Supporters calling it a high-stakes 4D chess move, critics saying President Trump is risking a global trade war and gambling with the economy.
The end of another turbulent and volatile day in the financial markets, the sole cause of that volatility, Donald J. Trump.
Markets are tumbling as investors are really digesting worse than expected tariffs. This is a bigger shock to the economy than any trade policy in any country's history.
If this economy does go into a recession, which is looking more and more likely, maybe that will force the president to course correct. We spoke with Steve Eisman, former senior portfolio manager at Neuberger Berman, who correctly predicted the 2008 financial collapse.
Mr. Eisman says the U.S.
is well poised to succeed in trade negotiations. I think people need to realize that in terms of the negotiation position that the United States has versus other countries in terms of changing the terms of trade, the U.S.
is in the best negotiating position by far. And here's where facts and details matter.
The percentage of U.S. GDP that comes from exports is only 11%.
That's about the lowest percentage in the world of any significant country. If we go country by country, China officially is at 20%.
That's if you Google it, but that's really not accurate because China ships so much to countries like Vietnam and Cambodia that skirt U.S. tariffs.
It's probably at least 30%. Europe, every major country in Europe is over 30%, with the exception of Germany, which is over 40%.
Canada and Mexico are probably in the worst negotiating positions possible. 35% of their GDP, respectively, comes from exports.
But of that 35 points, 25 points is from just exporting stuff to the U.S. So if, look, if there's a trade war, everybody's going to be hurt.
There's no question about that. But the U.S.
will be hurt the least because we are, of all developed countries, the most insular economy of any country in the developed world. President Trump betting on this strong position to force America's trading

partners back to the table, reshaping trade policy away from the free trade optimism of the 1990s.

President Bill Clinton in 1993 celebrating the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA,

and opening the doors to globalization.

We have made a decision now that will permit us to create an economic order in the world that will promote more growth, more equality, better preservation of the environment, and a greater possibility of world peace. we are on the verge of a global economic expansion that is sparked by the fact that

the united states at this critical moment decided that we would compete, not retreat. It will create the world's largest trade zone and create 200,000 jobs in this country by 1995 alone.
Mr. Eisman says Mr.
Clinton was right about GDP growth, but dead wrong about it would mean for American workers. So with respect to GDP, the U.S.
over the last 25 years has become a more and more dynamic economy. I would argue that it's probably the more dynamic than it's ever been maybe in our history or certainly for a very, very long time.
That's all to the good. What Clinton did helped usher in a bull market that has lasted with fits and starts for 25 some odd years now, maybe longer.
And all that's to the good. And people have made a lot of money in the stock market, partially because of what he did.
But if you travel the country in the South, the Midwest, which used to be the industrial heartland of the United States, you come across communities where people didn't just lose their jobs. Their communities got obliterated, obliterated.
And we, as a country, did nothing for these people. We basically told them, good luck to you, go learn how to code.
And they did learn how to code. So I think part of the motivation for President Trump is to write what really was a serious wrong.
Vice President J.D. Vance rising to national prominence after writing Hillbilly Elegy, a memoir of growing up in a town hollowed out by free trade and globalization.
At the time, Mr. Vance praised for offering a candid account of NAFTA's failures and for helping explain the political rise of Donald Trump, who campaigned in 2016 on a promise to restore dignity to the nation's forgotten men and women.
Many of those same critics now attacking President Trump for demanding a new trade deal with Mexico and Canada. Mr.
Eisman argues the backlash stems less from policy disagreements and more from deeply entrenched economic dogma.

And I think they get literally borderline hysterical about it because we all went to college and we had drummed into our heads at Econ 101, which everybody took, even if you're not an economist, you took. And one of the things you learned was that free trade is good, tariffs are bad, trade wars are terrible.
It's something that is so ingrained in your head, you don't even realize anymore that it's there. And here comes President Trump telling everybody, look, the paradigm worked for some people and really badly hurt other people.
We need to change the terms of trade. And people find that extremely jarring.
But I think there's a lot of merit to what he's arguing. I mean, if you look around, we have the freest markets in the world.
And everybody else is playing a version of mercantilism. And what I mean by that is they want to basically improve their economies by exporting a lot to the United States.
And to do that, we must maintain a deficit forever. And basically, President Trump is saying, enough.
And for Americans anxious about what comes next, I've been offering a word of reassurance. I tend not to panic.
I can say with a fair degree of confidence that the U.S. financial system is quite safe.
I couldn't have made that statement 17 years ago at all, but I think I can make that statement today. So if, again, God forbid there's a trade war, there certainly could be a recession.
There could be a global recession. But you're not going to have another great financial crisis.
And that'll do it for your AM Update. I'm Megan Kelly.
Join me back here for The Megan Kelly Show, live on SiriusXM Triumph Channel 111 at noon east, on youtube.com slash megankelly, and on all podcast platforms. As a business owner, you wear a lot of hats.
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