Department of Useless

Plus: Big-city kid exodus, a Hollywood cancellation, and more...

Dismantling or reorganizing? The Department of Education "has signed interagency agreements to outsource six offices to other agencies, including those that administer $28 billion in grants to K-12 schools and $3.1 billion for programs that help students finish college," reports The Washington Post. It's a step toward dismantling the department, which was created in 1979, by combining offices from a few different federal agencies. (The dismantling is, in a sense, a callback to the creation.)

Right when he first took office, President Donald Trump signed an executive order calling for the department to be totally axed. Education Secretary Linda McMahon would need to work with Congress to get this through, but it seems unlikely to pass the Senate, so this appears to be the approach they're taking instead.

Earlier in the fall, McMahon "took a first step and moved career and technical education programs, including adult education and family literacy initiatives, to the Labor Department," reports the Post. Now, Labor will also get "the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education, including 27 K-12 grant programs, and the Office of Postsecondary Education, which administers 14 programs to help students enroll in and complete college." The Indian education program will move to the Interior Department and foreign-language education will be moved to the State Department.

It's not like shuffling departments around necessarily makes them better or more efficient. But there is at least some clarity from the upper echelons on the relative uselessness of a lot of DOE functions. "The U.S. Department of Education is mostly a pass-through for funds that are best managed by the states," wrote the secretary herself.

"Our nation just experienced the longest government shutdown in its history," she continued. "The 43-day shutdown, which came smack in the middle of the fall semester, showed every family how unnecessary the federal education bureaucracy is to their children's education. Students kept going to class. Teachers continued to get paid. There were no disruptions in sports seasons or bus routes."

"Today, American reading and math scores are near historical lows," reads Trump's rather scathing executive order calling for the department's dismantling. "This year's National Assessment of Educational Progress showed that 70 percent of 8th graders were below proficient in reading, and 72 percent were below proficient in math. The Federal education bureaucracy is not working."

"While the Department of Education does not educate anyone, it maintains a public relations office that includes over 80 staffers at a cost of more than $10 million per year," reads the executive order. In other words: What exactly does it do? And why are we allocating money to this expansive bureaucracy that doesn't actually seem to target the proper objectives and improve outcomes?

The current strategy appears to be rather piecemeal. Let's hope the administration can prioritize more aggressive dismantling, and get congressional cooperation to actually shutter the fairly pointless department once and for all.

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Scenes from New York: 

Look at the decline in population for young children (under age 5) in major cities from 2005 to 2024
This is catastrophic

Austin +98%
Orlando +89%
Raleigh +87%
Charlotte +81%
Dallas +81%

Chicago -31%
Boston -33%
New York - 34%
LA -36%
San Francisco -38% https://t.co/iOHL4SnAu0 pic.twitter.com/FxeWf16QUs

— Bobby Fijan (@bobbyfijan) November 18, 2025

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QUICK HITS

• "Twice a day, my immediate neighborhood is consumed by the school car pickup line problem, which has become more and more common in this country, and for the dumbest reasons you can think of," writes Freddie de Boer. "You see, elementary schools have been plotted and designed with the assumption that a significant portion of the kids are going to arrive by bus or walk." But buses are no longer the way parents seek to get children to school, seemingly due to fears about school bus safety. This is irrational, writes de Boer, since "students are nearly eight times more likely to die in a passenger car than in a school bus per mile driven." Indeed, "whether we're replacing walking or the bus with driving, the real point is that cars are just remarkably unsafe.…when your kid is riding in your car, it's the single most dangerous scenario they regularly enter into. 'I want my kid to be safe so I'm going to be putting them in the car a couple extra times a day' is the height of irrationality."
• "Home Depot Inc. cut its full-year earnings guidance, warning that some unsteady consumers are hitting the pause button on big-ticket home purchases," reports Bloomberg. "The world's largest home-improvement retailer said it expects adjusted earnings per share to decline 5% from a year ago, lower than its previous forecast."
• Inside the Hollywood cancellation of Dasha Nekrasova.
• Suisun City is a dilapidated town of 30,000 near the Bay Area. Its "latest bid for renewal: a proposal to annex 22,873 acres of agricultural land owned by a company called California Forever, a development play backed by a group of Silicon Valley billionaires," reports The New York Times. "California Forever's hope is to build a new, up-from-the-ground city on yellow hills dotted with sheep and wind turbines. The point of the Suisun annexation is for each side to help the other solve a problem. California Forever's problem is that it wants to build on unincorporated land in Solano County, which has a law forbidding the building of much of anything outside established cities. Suisun's problem is that it is broke."
• President Donald Trump told an ABC reporter that his network's license should be revoked after the reporter asked him a probing question about his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein.