WASHINGTON, District of Columbia — Former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos reiterated her call to eliminate the Department of Education while calling out entrenched federal bureaucrats, the “vast majority” of whom, she said, are “actually working against you.”
“I think anyone who is serious about getting after the size and scale of the federal government has got to make this a very top tier issue going into the next cycle,” she said of plans circulating in conservative circles of firing potentially thousands of federal employees in a new Republican administration.
“I just think about the experience in the Department of Education and how formidable the bureaucracy is and how how difficult it is to advance policy in an environment where the vast majority of the individuals are actually working against you,” DeVos continued. “But that goes to the heart of the argument against the Department of Education, which again, I will reiterate, I think the department was created on a political payoff and we’ve seen the implications of that play out in the decades since then.”
The “political payoff” to which she referred was a deal made during the 1976 presidential election between then-candidate Jimmy Carter and the teachers’ unions. In exchange for an endorsement — the teachers’ unions’ first-ever endorsement of a presidential candidate — Carter was to pay for their services by creating the department.
Democratic presidential hopeful Jimmy Carter shakes hands with Thomas Gleason, left, president of the International Longshoreman’s Union, during a meeting with labor leaders at a New York hotel, July 1976. (AP Photo)
This was the way the unions were able to consolidate power, DeVos told the roundtable of reporters at the Young America’s Foundation’s 44th annual National Conservative Student Conference.
“It’s the alphabet soup of groups that are all part of the system and that are systemically geared toward protecting and growing their interests,” she said. “The fact that they give 99.7% of their political — their reported political contributions — to Democrat officeholders or candidates, to those who promised to do their bidding when they get into office.”
The Trump-appointed former secretary maintains, however, that “there’s a very practical way of scaling back and ultimately eliminating that department, starting with what we proposed, which was block-granting all of the budget for the department back to the states.”
She also said that eliminating the Department of Education should “certainly” be part of the Republican Party platform.
“I think there’s every argument to say we have to stop doing what we’ve been doing and do something completely different,” she said. “And that, I would argue, is a return to states setting the policy, supporting the policies, and most importantly to supporting parents with the finances for their kids’ educations and letting them make those decisions for their children’s education.”
Breccan F. Thies is a reporter for Breitbart News. You can follow him on Twitter @BreccanFThies.