On Thursday, February 6, 2025, former Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos published an op-ed in The Free Press co-signing Donald Trump’s push to demolish the Department of Education.
“I can understand how that idea, which President Donald Trump is committed to advancing, might sound a bit radical. But having spent four years on the inside as secretary of education, struggling to get the department’s bureaucracy to make even the smallest changes to put the needs of students first, I can say conclusively that American students will be better off without,” DeVos wrote. “Nothing could be more important to our success as a nation than having well-educated citizens. But don’t be fooled by the name: the Department of Education has almost nothing to do with actually educating anyone.”
Also, DeVos uses the op-ed to express for issue with the “bureaucracy” of and “political agendas” she believes are inside the Department of Education. In her words, the department primarily “shuffles money around.”
“So what does it do? It shuffles money around; adds unnecessary requirements and political agendas via its grants; and then passes the buck when it comes time to assess if any of that adds value,” DeVos wrote.
“In other words, the Department of Education is functionally a middleman. And like most middlemen, it doesn’t add value. It merely adds cost and complexity,” she added.
DeVos was the Secretary of Education under Donald Trump from 2017 through 2021. Many raised issues with her lack of prior experience in education because she had never worked as a teacher, school administration or served on any public board of education. Others raised issues with her department’s actions, reversing Obama-era protections for transgender students and threatening to cut funding during the COVID-19 pandemic. Not to mention, she was also sued by attorney generals from nearly two dozen states and the District of Columbia during her time in office.
“What to make of the tenure of U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos depends, like beauty itself, on the eye of the beholder,” Cory Tuner of NPR wrote. “To the president who asked her to run the Department of Education, she was a loyal lieutenant who argued for her department’s irrelevance in a nation where control of schools is a local affair — that is, until she argued the opposite, at the president’s urging, and threatened schools with a loss of federal funding if they refused to reopen mid-pandemic.”
Despite criticism, DeVos’s thoughts about the nation’s education system and the Department of Education have fallen in line with those of the President. Donald Trump is reportedly working on an executive order that would attempt to dismantle the Department of Education by barring it from taking on any responsibilities that are not clearly outlined in any statutes. However, Congress is the political body with the power to formally dismantle the Department of Education.
On Thursday, Democratic Congress members wrote a letter demanding answers from the Trump administration about the department.
“Over the course of two weeks, the Trump Administration issued sweeping executive orders and sought to broadly and illegally freeze federal financial assistance. Federal employees have been targeted, in some cases for simply following the law,” House and Senate Democrats wrote.
“Elon Musk is attempting to shut down the work of entire agencies while gaining access to some of the federal government’s most far reaching and sensitive data systems.”
As the fight over the Department of Education, Trump’s pick to lead the department, Linda McMahon, will appear before Congress next week.
