Last month, Mike Petrilli wrote about the Trump administration’s proposal to shift Department of Education programs to other agencies, mostly the Labor Department. His Substack is designed to elicit responses from friends in education policy, so others weighed in with their own impressions of the president’s decision.
After reading all of this, I came to the conclusion that people just don’t get it, or perhaps they just don’t want to speak up in the current political climate.
Let me start by saying that a few of the administration’s ideas make at least some sense: combining career and technical education and job training programs is completely logical, regardless of their bureaucratic home; and having the State Department take over international education and the Department of the Interior take over Native American programs has some merit. But overall, the proposal is nuts.
One feature of the administration’s decision is the notion that they’re going to “reduce union power” over Education Department programs by shifting them to the Department of Labor. This is absurd on its face. Anyone who truly understands Washington knows that there may not be a cabinet agency more captured by a set of interest groups than the Labor Department is by labor unions. Even under President Trump, the agency is run by a secretary rumored to be hand-picked by labor interests! Only out of touch Washington insiders could possibly think that shifting education programs to the Labor Department dominated by labor union politics and policies will reduce the influence of organized labor. I mean, come on, man! (As a recent former president known for his labor union ties used to say.)
Neither will shifting programs to the Labor Department reduce micromanagement and unnecessary and excessive bureaucratic meddling by educrats. Do administration officials not realize what this agency actually does? Have they heard of OSHA? The wage and hour division? How about issues like mine safety, pensions, or Davis Bacon? Ask some of your colleagues about the apprenticeship program and how nothing can happen there without union sign off.
The Labor Department runs a few small to middling grant programs—quite poorly, I should note, by virtually all accounts across the partisan spectrum in my experience. But what it mostly does is regulate and enforce regulations. This accounts for perhaps 90 percent of its staff’s work (my own estimate). This means that eventually—even if it takes a year or two—agency regulators will get their hooks into education programs, especially if the Democrats win the next presidential election. And when these regulators get going, they will be doing the bidding of the NEA and AFT, who will be whispering in their ears at every turn.
If the administration was really committed to moving these programs to another agency, the Commerce Department would have made much more sense. It’s the place where true partnerships between the government and the business community take place.
Lastly, as an old guy who has been around Washington for more than three decades, I must point out that combining education and labor programs was actually tried before on a smaller scale, in the mid 1990s during the Clinton Administration, by Republicans lawmakers. The effort was led by then Rep. Steve Gunderson, among others, but the Democrats opposed it for many of the same reasons they do now.
But conservative groups were just as responsible as the Democrats for stopping the idea dead in its tracks. The opposition then was led by Phyllis Schlafly, the Family Research Council, the Heritage Foundation, and various others of what we used to call “family groups.” In a nutshell, they opposed it because they believed that moving these programs to Labor would lead to a school-to-work pipeline that would create an unholy alliance between big government and big corporations. In those days, these groups informally referred to this as the Bill Clinton-to-Bill Gates pipeline, and they viciously attacked Republicans who thought about supporting this idea, or even a smaller version that just combined what used to be called “vocational education” with the training programs at the Labor Department.
Boy have things changed. It’s sad to see people putting their heads in the sand about all this, and it’s depressing that this kind of proposal sees the light of day at all, let alone get implemented—even if (and likely when) it will be reversed at some point down the line.
