Trump Administration Dismantling Department of Education

Floor Speech

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Ms. BONAMICI. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to condemn in the strongest possible terms the illegal and unconstitutional dismantling of the Department of Education by the Trump administration.

Congress created the Department of Education. Only an act of Congress could eliminate it. The administration knows this, so they are trying to circumvent the separation of powers by chipping away at the Department until it is gone. What a sad and terrible message that sends to the country and the world.

The administration's latest attack on the Department of Education is with six interagency agreements that will move critical programs and services out of the Department of Education to other agencies without the needed expertise, funding, or staff.

The programs this administration illegally reassigned to other departments include Title I, which provides funding for schools with high populations of low-income students; the McKinney-Vento grant program for youth experiencing homelessness; grant programs for English learners, rural schools, literary initiatives; and more.

Programs like TRIO and GEAR UP help underserved students access and succeed in higher education, and they moved those, too. They moved programs that support HBCUs and other minority-serving institutions.

These are statutory responsibilities that Congress directed the Department of Education to fulfill. Instead of fulfilling those legal responsibilities, Secretary McMahon decided to follow the Project 2025 playbook by outsourcing the work as part of the Trump agenda to abolish the Department of Education.

These actions will make it more difficult for local schools to get the funding they need. Now, they will have to navigate multiple Federal agencies instead of one. It is inefficient, unnecessary, and unpopular.

Poll after poll shows that the majority of parents support the Department of Education, and that is especially true with parents of students with disabilities. These parents know what is at stake if schools lose the Federal resources they rely on to educate every student, no matter their background or ability.

Unfortunately, the Trump administration has endangered these resources by intentionally burying them behind additional layers of red tape and bureaucracy.

There is a lot we could be doing to improve public education. To prepare future students, they need a well-rounded education that inspires critical thinking, confidence, communication, creativity, and a love of learning. Students need arts and music education, hands-on project-based lessons that teach teamwork, and a wide range of career and technical education classes. We must invest in, not cut, educational research, and we need to promote, rather than politicize, family, parental, and community engagement.

To fully learn and thrive, students need to have enough food to eat, and they deserve the best physical infrastructure in which to learn. They need access to behavioral healthcare, and they need to be safe and feel safe.

Unfortunately, right now, many students across the country are terrified to go to school because ICE is in their community. In Oregon, ICE agents are stalking school parking lots and school routes and detaining parents in front of their children. In one instance, ICE agents surrounded two high school students at a coffee shop and pointed rifles at them. This is beyond unacceptable.

Students as young as 9 years old know these actions are wrong. A fourth grade student gave me a handwritten letter, saying she is worried that ICE will take her friends away and that her friends will go home and their parents won't be there because they got deported. How is a student supposed to focus on learning if they are afraid that armed, masked agents are going to take their family and friends? These are children.

Unfortunately, House Republicans are taking their cues from Donald Trump, Stephen Miller, and others who do not grasp the damage they are causing to children as they try to close the Department of Education and slash education funding, food assistance, and health insurance but somehow manage to find and give $170 billion to the Department of Homeland Security to carry out an inhumane mass deportation agenda. It is tragic, and it is pathetic.

This administration has declared war on public education, but we are not backing down. We will not stop fighting against the dismantling of the Department of Education and the weaponization of immigration enforcement.

House Democrats understand how much better our country would be if we had a mass education plan instead of a mass deportation plan.

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