AFT President Randi Weingarten on Trump Threats to Gut the Department of Education

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Young voters are one of the largest groups turning against Donald Trump. Almost a 70 percent disapproval rating for Donald Trump among young voters.
And maybe it's because Donald Trump is stealing their hopes, dreams, aspirations, future education. I mean, Donald Trump's out there every day attacking education.
This was him recently in the Oval Office saying Linda McMahon, who has recently been confirmed as secretary of education, should use her job to get rid of her job and to gut and destroy and abolish the Department of Education. Here's Trump saying it.
Why nominate Linda McMahon to be the education department secretary if you're going to get rid of the education? Because 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, education department.
So we're ranked number 40 out of 40 schools, right? We're ranked number one in cost per pupil. So we spend more per pupil than any other country in the world.
And we're ranked at the bottom of the list. We're ranked very badly.
And what I want to do is let the states run schools. I believe strongly in school choice.
But in addition to that, I want the states to run schools. And I want Linda to put herself out of a job.
Fact check states already run schools. Donald Trump has no clue what the Department of Education does.
Here was Linda McMahon earlier saying that she does intend to abolish her own department. Let's show you that.
So we've heard that he could be signing this executive order today to abolish the Department of Education. Is that coming today? I don't know.
I don't want to get ahead of the president. I think you'd have to check with the White House.
I think he certainly intends to sign the order. And we've talked about it.

He's made it crystal clear since the time he was running for president that this is his intent. You know, look, and she's talking about the draft executive order to abolish the Department of Education that the Wall Street Journal got their hands on.
There's also just a cruelty element. They're like enjoying taking away billions of dollars of educational resources that help people in lunch programs and things like that.
Like this is MAGA Republican Senator Kennedy saying, you better get used to it. We're going to we're going to be coming for you even harder.
Here, play this clip. To my friends who are upset, I would say with respect, you know, call somebody who cares.

They better get used to this.

It's USAID today. It's going to be Department of Education tomorrow.
And then I think this is catching a lot of voters by surprise. Trump voters, too, who are saying, whoa, I didn't vote for this.
Here's just an example of a Trump voter who said, wait a minute, I'm going to lose

my job now. Here, play this clip.
Trump won the state. In Bell County, 84% voted for Trump,

yet it deeply relies on federal funding. A CNN analysis found the 15 states that most rely on

federal funding for its public schools in 2022 all voted for Trump. And I voted for President Trump.

I mean, you're an educator. You didn't vote for Trump eliminating federal funds.
No, I did not vote for that. I voted for President Trump to make America first again.
Let's bring in the president of the American Federation of Teachers, Randy Weingarten. When you see video clips like that, what goes through your mind? Well, first, let me just say thank you for doing all this and thank you for putting the truth out.
But when I see video clips like this, I want to go, because, you know, what the department, what people did not vote for making their lives worse. They felt, you know, that the country is really divided.
I mean, you guys know that better than anyone. But if you look at the small slice of the electorate that actually made the decision that put Trump over the top in the different states as well as in the popular vote.
You heard overwhelmingly, my life and my family's life has gotten harder. I want to get ahead.
I want the American dream. I don't want to have my income go all for egg prices or for child care or you know the cost

of a home if I can get it or the cost of a car. People want to have a better life.
And what you see over and over again in his first actions, it's not just the cruelty. It's not just the chaos.
It's not just the confusion. it's that all of these actions individually and taken together are going to make it harder for Americans.
It's going to make it harder for rural Americans or poor Americans or working class Americans to get the education their kids deserve. It's going to make it harder to actually get Social Security.
It's going to make it harder

to actually have a good job with decent benefits when, you know, the bottom is being pulled out of both Social Security as well as Medicare and Medicaid. So when you get to education, It's like the epitome of taking away opportunity.

As you said, the states run schools right now. Localities run schools right now.
The federal government, the law that we did in a bipartisan way that we helped shepherd through in the last days of the Obama administration says that the Department of Education can't do curriculum. It can't be the human resource officer of schools.
It basically is there to fill in opportunity gaps and to ensure that a kid who feels schmeiced, a kid who feels like there's an anti-Semitic incident that happened, a kid who is disabled or a kid with disabilities who's not getting the services, they can go to the Department of Education and say, help me. And the funding, and this will be my last point, the funding is for poor kids.

The funding is for kids with disabilities. The funding is for career tech ed pathways.
The funding is for kids who are trying to become English proficient. The funding is for rural kids.
The funding is for kids who are going to college as the first one in their families, the first generation to go to college, and they're trying to make it work and have a little scholarship. That's why you saw that kids are basically saying, I'm having none of this, because they see their futures being snatched.
I teach a law class to undergrads in Southern California, and one of the topics we were discussing was a topic involving Title IX. And I got a question that was very different from questions in any other year that I taught, which is, well, what happens if the Department of Education is abolished? And what's the point of everything you're teaching us about this and any other aspect about what the Department of Education does? So I don't necessarily want to focus this interview on the Title IX aspect, but just generally when we hear them talking about, though, abolishing the Department of Education.
You talked about some of those programs there. What does it mean, not just for blue states, but for red states and all Americans? Like you saw that clip there, the lady from the red state in Kentucky who said, I didn't realize this was going to happen to me.
What's going to happen? So essentially, when they say abolish the, so there's three things. Essentially, when they say abolish the Department of Education, I'm a civics teacher, APGov, Clara Barton High School, Brooklyn, New York.

If you look at the Constitution, it's the Congress who appropriates, it's a Congress that makes laws, the president signs it and executes the law.

Thank you. look at the Constitution, it's the Congress who appropriates, it's a Congress that makes laws, the president signs it and executes the law, but it's really only the Congress that can abolish the Department of Education.
But what the president can do and what they're doing, and you see it in all of the, you know, with the chainsaw that Elon Musk used, you know, over and over again in these last month or so, they can make government basically ineffective, not work by a thousand cuts. And that's what they're doing.
So if you essentially fire the entire staff or 80% of the staff of social security and somebody needs to get their social security card, they're not going to be able to get it in a timely way. If you fire everybody who's doing, you know, hurricane watch, you're not going to have hurricane watch.
If you fire everybody at USAID, the farmers who are basically selling their foodstuffs to USAID because they don't have a market in the United States, they're not going to be able to do that. And the same is true in terms of education.
If you fire everybody or you make it non-feasible for it to work, then none of the laws that are supposed to be affected or effectuated by the department will work. So if Title I is supposed to go to like Truman High School or to, you know, a high school in Staten Island, and they're supposed to be $5 million that goes there, and all of a sudden it doesn't, and they don't have the money, then that means the programs go away.
So that means the reading programs, the computer programs, the after-school programs, all the programs that are funded by Title I, and every school teacher in America understands what that means. They go away.
The same in terms of the programs for kids with disabilities under IDEA. If a school system or a school, because these things go directly to schools, if the funding goes away, a kid doesn't get physical therapy or occupational therapy.
And to your point about red states versus blue states, more of this money goes to red states. So I've said to our folks in red states in particular, go to your school board because states and localities run schools.
Go to your school board. Ask them what's going to happen.
How much money are we going to lose if we don't have Title I, if we don't have IDEA? And how is that money going to be replaced? Is it going to be property taxes raised in Jackson, Mississippi? Is it going to be property taxes raised in Montgomery, Alabama? How are we going to have that funding that helps kids in schools? That's a good call to action also to everybody watching this. Go there.
Go to your school boards and ask them those questions. Two more questions for you.
First, about your Union American Federation of Teachers. What are, are you filing lawsuits? I mean, you issued a powerful response that I saw.
Do you have the lawsuits ready? What happens the moment that executive order drops as it relates to you first? Well, number one, we've been filing lawsuits on a timely basis when we see an action that we think we need to raise ruckus about. And so it's both the court, but it's the court of public opinion.
I mean, the courts are important. You and I are both lawyers.
The courts are really important. The rule of law is really important.
And we have an obligation to actually make sure that democracy, that we don't lose the republic. Sorry for being so, you know, for being so emotional about this.
So the courts are really important because they basically are the umpire. They call balls and strikes.
But it's a court of public opinion as well as a Congress that we have to work with as well. They are the checks and balances of a government run amok, a government not doing what the people want.
So, for example, number one, when we saw that Elon Musk was stealing, appropriating, taking, whatever word you want to use, jeopardizing private information of individuals, whether it was Social Security information, whether it was taxes, or whether it was in the Department of Education, when parents file for financial aid for their kids, when you file for a student loan, all that information goes to the Department of Education. Now it's all in Doge's hands.
Nobody put that information out to give it to the government to weaponize it.

So we filed a lawsuit saying stop, and we got a temporary restraining order against Doge to stop giving them that financial and personal information. That was number one.
Number two, we filed a lawsuit when we saw that February 14th Dear Colleague letter, which essentially said, it's like they have weaponized the words diversity, inclusion, equity, to essentially say you can't teach any of the history of the United States of America if that history is about discrimination. So you can't teach Jim Crow.
You can't teach the effects of the Civil War. Now, how do you not teach that if you are a history teacher about America? And how do you not teach about American exceptionalism in terms of how we change that? So we filed and said, no, how do you put teachers in this situation, history teachers in this situation, that we're going to get in trouble if we actually teach honest history.
So we've been filing based upon the issues and the things that really affect people as opposed to waiting for the big, you know, the big headlines. You know, just finally, you know, I've seen some other union leaders, the lesser than the other ones, go to Mar-a-Lago and try to normalize what Trump's been doing and saying, you know, actually, this is going to be good for labor.
And then Trump right away fires National Labor Relations Board member. Then the Supreme Court reinstated her in this past week.
You know, then they say, hey, look, the labor secretary, she's going to be she's going to be great. Then she testifies and she walks back all of the things that may have showed that she had sympathy for unions before when she refused to endorse them when she was asked questions by Republicans.
So, you know, it's always shocking to me when I see other leaders. I mean, you're a fearless labor leader who represents your unions and the workers, and you're not being fooled by him.
But, you know, I'm not asking you to say negative things about the other people, but how do you deal with that? I mean, you know, that's out there, and how do you deal with that? How do you navigate that? Well, let me say this, and I've been a Democrat all my life, and I've had the honor for 25 years between a local leadership and now a national leadership to, you know, be the elected leader who champions education opportunity and economic opportunity, equal opportunity all, every single day. All of us, we're not monolithic.
We have a responsibility as labor leaders to serve our members and to help them get the best life they can get. And I would argue to help our communities have that as well.
That's our job. And so there's a lot of people we all represent who are allured by and who like Trump's passion.
They think he's authentic and he's a master salesman. We may not believe a word that he's saying, but he's a master salesman.
So our job is to actually really fight for and lift up who are the champions of the working class and how do we actually, and I'll use a teacher, I use something I learned as a school teacher.

It's not, you meet people where they are. And it's frankly not what you say, it's what people hear.
And so a lot of folks, you know, they are fighting for every single day to get better wages,

decent conditions for their members. And they see this strategy that they're using as, you know, a more efficacious one.
And my job is to actually not be oppositional every single day to Donald Trump. I mean, I've said to Linda McMahon, you know, publicly that we could do work together on issues like, you know, career tech ed.
We

shouldn't have college, we shouldn't have high school be only about college prep. High school

should be about opening the aperture to do different kind of pathways. And if she's interested

in that, she should be working with us on that. So I think that the real issue becomes, what is

the value system? And what are the values that we believe in? And if we believe in our democracy, and we believe in voice for people, and we believe in fairness for people, and we believe in opportunity for people, that is what I am driving to. And then you see whose side is Sue on.
I don't think Donald Trump is on the side of workers.

I think that's become more and more obvious every single day.

And I think you're seeing that in the polling that we just saw that you put up in terms of kids. But we have to prove that to people.
People are cynical and that's part of our job. Randy Weingarten, American Federation of Teachers.
Thank you for joining us. Please come back.
Let's bring this together.

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