On Wednesday, the Trump regime fired nearly a third of the employees at the U.S. Department of Education.

There is a lot to say about this, so stick with us (or skip down to take action).

First, a few basic facts:

• The United States of America is the richest country on Earth.

• We are the third largest country by population.

• And the fourth largest by land mass.

It takes A LOT of people to run a country this big, with so many residents and so many resources.

But Donald Trump — along with his presidential stand-in Elon Musk, his assorted MAGA sycophants throughout the Republican Party, and generation after generation of so-called conservative politicians and pundits — can’t stop whining about “bureaucracy” and “government spending.”

In their telling, every dollar spent running this country is a dollar wasted.

Now, there *is* waste in the federal government. And we’re not just talking about Senator Ted Cruz’s taxpayer-funded $174,000 annual salary. For example, perhaps the Pentagon could get by with, say, $700 billion instead of almost a trillion (or at least pass an audit, which it has never done).

The Department of Education, on the other hand, was already the smallest Cabinet-level agency in the entire federal government.

• Before Trump took office for the second time, the Department of Education had just 4,133 employees.

• With yesterday’s mass firing of 1,315 workers — along with 635 others the Trump regime had already terminated or induced/bullied into leaving — the department is down to only 2,183 employees.

• There are something like 74 million students in America’s public and private schools, from pre-K through college.

• That comes out to just one worker at the Department of Education for every 34,000 students in this country.

Here are a few of the supposedly “wasteful” things the Department of Education does (and the perils in store for our nation’s children and our country’s future as Trump decimates the agency):

• Administer the federal student loan program. (If you or anyone you care about has — or was hoping to get — a student loan, watch out.)

• Provide benefits to more than 25 million low-income children. (Smaller class sizes, extra math instruction, preschool programs, and more are now at risk.)

• Prohibit discrimination in our nation’s schools. (This is the one that really gets Trump and MAGA riled up.)

Trump, Musk, and their lackeys also want you to think the Department of Education is some massively expensive part of the federal government. In reality, it accounts for only about 4% — just four pennies out of every dollar — of overall federal spending. The department’s money is overwhelmingly allocated to educational programs and student loans. It is not wasted.

The outrage should be that the federal government isn’t spending far more to ensure our nation’s ongoing vitality by giving each new generation of Americans the best educational outcomes we possibly can.

Donald Trump — by word and by action — has made clear his intention to eliminate the Department of Education altogether. Aside from how stupid and catastrophic that would be, it is also patently unconstitutional. Only Congress can create or eliminate federal agencies.

Tell Congress:

Donald Trump’s attempt to eliminate the Department of Education is stupid, disastrous, and unconstitutional. And he can’t get away with it unless Congress lets him. Protect our children. Protect our future. Protect the Department of Education.

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- Robert Weissman & Lisa Gilbert, Co-Presidents of Public Citizen
 
 
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