DOGE Should Audit These Education Department Programs Next

The U.S. Department of Education is one of the most hated agencies in the government, consistently catching the ire of conservatives and education advocates who want it abolished for its wasteful spending and deep state control over education policies.

Last week, President Donald Trump said he would like to see the Department of Education “closed immediately,” calling it a “con job.” He noted that America spends more money per student than almost every other country while delivering poor academic outcomes.

Auditors from the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) have already slashed hundreds of millions in waste. Secretary-designate Linda McMahon, who had her Senate confirmation hearing last Thursday, should be prepared to help eradicate a decades-long slush fund of waste, fraud, and abuse woven deep into the bureaucracy.

That will enable Trump and McMahon to redirect education funds to states and localities while significantly diminishing the footprint of the agency itself — though, total abolition, as McMahon acknowledged Thursday, will take an act of Congress and 60 votes in the Senate that do not likely exist.

“DOGE [has] a lot to chew on at the Department of Education, which has spent billions of taxpayer dollars on funding progressive ideology and indoctrination,” Bob Eitel, president and co-founder of the Defense of Freedom Institute, told The Federalist. “Overall administrative bloat is a major problem that costs taxpayers billions and does nothing to help students. We are confident that the Trump administration will make quick work of undoing wasteful spending.”

Eitel should know — he was senior counselor to Education Secretary Betsy DeVos throughout most of Trump’s first term and served as deputy general counsel in the department during the Bush administration.

In recent days, DOGE has announced substantial cuts at the Department of Education. Just over the weekend, DOGE revealed the department eliminated 70 diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) training grants totaling $373 million. One of the trainings funded by the department reportedly told teachers to “engage in ongoing learning and self-reflection to confront their own biases and racism, and develop asset-based anti-racist mindsets.”

Cuts like this are “a perfect example of how the left has leveraged a federal bureaucracy as a way station to fund progressive pet projects,” Eitel told The Federalist. “Every dollar spent on corrosive DEI training is a dollar that should have been sent to students or returned to the taxpayers

On Thursday, the Department of Education announced it made over $350 million in cuts, targeting Regional Educational Laboratories (REL) and Equity Assistance Centers.

“Equity Assistance Grants” are “some of the worst offenders,” Eitel said. They are an “Obama-era invention designed to infuse DEI into schools.”

The agency “terminated 10 contracts totaling $336 million with [REL]” after “review of the contracts uncovered wasteful and ideologically driven spending not in the interest of students and taxpayers,” the announcement said. “For example, the Regional Educational Laboratory Midwest has been advising schools in Ohio to undertake ‘equity audits’ and equity conversations,” the release added.

The department also ended grants to four Equity Assistance Centers to the tune of $33 million, “which supported divisive training in DEI, Critical Race Theory, and gender identity for state and local education agencies as well as school boards.”

However, with such cuts in mind, there are still numerous ways in which left-wing ideologies are laundered through the Education Department, and the Trump administration needs to find all of them. For example, Title VI Higher Education grants, Eitel said, “have been used on profoundly un-American initiatives.”

Title VI of the Higher Education Act (HEA) was originally intended to fund foreign language and area study at universities to equip students for national security work. However, Title VI HEA grants have essentially been used to sow ethnic discord on college campuses.

In December 2023, representatives from DFI, along with various other education advocates, wrote a letter to Biden Education Secretary Miguel Cardona that pointed to numerous instances where schools received Title VI HEA grant funding for National Resource Centers (NRC), only to spend them on anti-American propaganda.

“A substantial, growing body of evidence demonstrates that these NRC and related grants, far from fostering the U.S. national security and economic interests that led to their passage 65 years ago, are actually undermining these interests in furtherance of critical theory (i.e., viewing every subject through the lens of the oppressor and the oppressed),” the letter said. This “indoctrinates students in higher education and K–12 teachers with a warped worldview that America and its allies, like Israel, are fundamentally irredeemable oppressors on the world stage.”

The letter highlighted materials like “Kindergarten Global Citizenship” and “Starting and Sustaining Critical Race Literacy in the Classroom” from a Title VI-funded center at the University of Texas-Austin.

The letter also highlights how a Title VI grant-funded joint endeavor between Duke and the University of North Carolina produced a conference on “Love and Desire in Modern Iran,” as well as academic papers like Amihri Hatun: Performance, Gender-Bending and Subversion in the Early Modern Ottoman Intellectual History. At least for those endeavors, the Office for Postsecondary Education (OPE) found them to be an improper use of federal tax dollars, but only directed the program to “revise” and justify its “list of activities.”

According to the letter, OPE reviewed the activities of Duke and UNC’s joint “Middle East Studies” program after investigating an “anti-Semitic” rapper performance at the program’s 2019 “Conflict over Gaza” conference and the “subsequent discovery of swastikas drawn on campus and anti-Semitic flyers in a UNC library.”

DFI also told The Federalist the Federal Student Aid program is overstaffed and ripe for cost-cutting, suggesting high-level (and highly paid) officials are “brought on and then never leave, resulting in administrative bloat at higher costs than necessary.”

DOGE should also look into the Borrower Defense to Repayment (BDR) program, which is meant to help borrowers seek restitution if they were defrauded by their schools. Might the Biden administration, which notoriously attempted to hand student debt over to taxpayers, have been less than diligent in confirming students’ stories before helping them out on the taxpayer’s dime?

Another area DOGE can audit for cuts is competitive grants. The Department of Education “spends about half of its man-hours on just 5% of its budget in the form of competitive grants,” Eitel said, suggesting these grants “ought to be done away with and instead block granted to the states.”

Block grants, which allow the federal government to provide education funding to states in one lump sum with few regulatory strings attached, are another longtime education goal of Republicans. These grants give states and localities the ability to tailor education dollars to their own needs, as opposed to being dictated by federal bureaucrats.

As McMahon said in Thursday’s hearing, “[President Trump] pledged to make American education the best in the world, return education to the states where it belongs, and free American students from the education bureaucracy through school choice.”

Becoming the “best in the world” will require DOGE and McMahon to take a microscope to each and every office and program within the department, expose how it has been abused, and redirect its funding toward the benefit of American students.

Breccan F. Thies is an elections correspondent for The Federalist. He previously covered education and culture issues for the Washington Examiner and Breitbart News. He holds a degree from the University of Virginia and is a 2022 Claremont Institute Publius Fellow. You can follow him on X: @BreccanFThies.