Tour de DOGE Rolls On: Elon Musk Looks to Gut the One Department Conservatives Hate Most of All

That sound you hear is conservatives rejoicing and leftists wailing as Elon Musk, having left Democrat slush fund USAID a shell of what it used to be, heads to the next stop on his Tour de DOGE: the Department of Education.

Conservatives have long wanted the federal government to butt out of their children's education, preferring to have parents, not Big Brother, be the primary educators and decision-makers. President Donald Trump, despite only having been in office for two weeks, has already taken steps to weaken the left's stranglehold on public education by prioritizing school choice and beginning to eradicate the harmful, anti-American rhetoric that has crept into classrooms in recent years.

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On January 29, 2025, the president signed an Executive Order (EO), Ending the Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling, in which he directs his administration to "enforce the law to ensure that recipients of Federal funds providing K-12 education comply with all applicable laws prohibiting discrimination in various contexts and protecting parental rights, including Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Title VI), 42 U.S.C. 2000d et seq.; Title IX, 20 U.S.C. 1681 et seq.; FERPA, 20 U.S.C. 1232g; and the PPRA, 20 U.S.C. 1232h."

He followed that up with the Expanding Educational Freedom and Opportunity for Families EO on January 30, which includes these priorities:

• It directs the Department of Education to issue guidance on how the States can use federal funding formulas to support their K-12 scholarship programs.
• It directs the Secretary of Education to prioritize school choice programs in the Department’s discretionary grant programs.

And it gets even better. A report surfaced Monday afternoon that Musk, A/K/A The Slasher, was dusting off the remains of USAID and setting the Department of Education squarely in his sights. 

Trump administration officials are weighing executive actions to dismantle the Education Department as part of the campaign by billionaire Elon Musk and his allies to shrink federal agencies and slash the size of the government workforce. 

The officials have discussed an executive order that would shut down all functions of the agency that aren’t written explicitly into statute or move certain functions to other departments, according to people familiar with the matter. The order would call for developing a legislative proposal to abolish the department, the people said. Trump’s advisers are still debating the specifics of the order and the timing, the people said.  

The Department of Education was created by Jimmy Carter as a payoff to teachers' unions for endorsing his presidential run. In the decades that followed, unelected bureaucrats were put in charge of educating American children, culminating in the calamitous federal response to COVID-19 that saw school-aged kids fall dangerously below grade level in reading and losing ground in math. Not to mention the radical gender and identity nonsense that has become the priority for many so-called educators that run the nation's public schools, courtesy of those same teachers' unions. 

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It turns out that President Trump isn't the only Republican looking to gut the Department of Education. Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY), no ally of the president's, reintroduced a one-sentence bill in the House of Representatives last week that would terminate the department effective December 31, 2026.

There's a similar Senate bill floating out there, so it would seem that there is a healthy appetite within the Republican Party to drastically reform public education in the United States and do away with the department that has contributed to the educational decline in our children. This would be a huge win for parents and kids, and would cement Donald Trump and his fellow Republicans as the ultimate champions of American families.