The idea of direct grants to states terrifies Democrats worse than the prospect of an hour in the ring with The Undertaker. Block grants can be canceled or withheld. They can be (broadly) conditioned. Last week, for example, the Trump Team cancelled a $400 million dollar grant to fabulously wealthy and far-left Columbia University. (Columbia, exceedingly generous with your money, did not offer to replace the grant money from its own vast $20 billion endowment.)
Somehow, progressive virtue-signaling never extends to progressives’ own pocketbooks. “Government,” Senator Elizabeth Warren (0.02% Native American) infamously said, “is the stuff we do together.”
Now, progressives are wailing about how dangerous it was to cancel Columbia’s grant, which the Trump Team blamed on the school’s nurturing of violent, anti-American, foreign student activists. But that complaint is a red herring. First of all, Columbia’s grant didn’t come from the Department of Education. Second, federal education dollars always come with all kinds of bizarre ideological strings attached, forcing states and school districts to enforce woke curricula, DEI mandates, transgender books, and federal oversight that often overrides local school control.
But sending lump sums (“block grants”) to the states instead of the DOE’s splintered system will delete Washington’s ability to micromanage school policy. States can set their own priorities—like funding charter and home schools, scrapping DEI bureaucracies, or (in red states) focusing on actual academics, like STEM. Yet the federal government will still keep broad powers to condition the block grants — boundaried by Supreme Court limits on coercive federal funding — to trim ideological overreach.
Not only that, but under the DOE, a shockingly small fraction of federal education dollars actually reaches the states anyway, after the massive agency consumes its generous bureaucratic portion, and after paying for a dizzying array of loony, progressive pet programs only slightly related to primary education.
This should be good news for education activists. But, you know. Hysteria! Another progressive gravy train is pulling into its terminal station.
Ronny tried to kill DOE 8 years! Same lefty GOP stopped him 8 times. 1 of many reasons i didnt vote Dole.
Were DOE history UNIPARTY would have to find another reason to complain.
Voted Ronny 9 times; all good votes!
Nothing the left is better at than pouring money into a total failure.
bloc grants to the states is a less onerous waste of our money but a waste nonetheless.