On the campaign trail and in office, President Donald Trump has called for the elimination of the Department of Education. Many believed the proposal would face legal challenges because Congress created the Department by law and approves its budget. However, on Tuesday, the Department of Education announced plans to cut nearly 50% of its workforce.
Even entirely eliminating the Department of Education would not considerably reduce the size of the federal government or limit bureaucracy. It’s the smallest federal department by number of employees. The vast majority of its budget gets spent directly on individuals, states, and local schools through college financial aid for low-income families, grants for school improvement, and funding for special education programs for children with disabilities. Moreover, a disproportionate amount of this money goes to states that voted for Trump in the 2024 election.
However, shuttering the Department of Education would fulfill the dreams of a significant part of Trump’s base: Christian conservatives. For roughly a century, conservative Christian groups have claimed that education should include Christian teachings and have increasingly concluded that American public schools are unsuited—and even antagonistic—to that task. And while Trump often takes unprecedented actions, this is not one of them. His latest actions are simply the latest move in an anti-Department of Education crusade a century in the making.
In 1926, J. Gresham Machen was the leading fundamentalist theologian in the U.S. His defense of biblical inerrancy against the modernism of mainstream Bible scholars had laid the intellectual foundation for the future of evangelical Protestantism. But on Feb. 25, 1926, Machen was not preaching to the choir. Instead, he was testifying before a joint session of the Senate and House Committees on Education against a bill to create a cabinet-level federal Department of Education.
Read More: Can Trump Dismantle the…
