Former President Donald Trump expressed his intention to eliminate the Department of Education and shift control to the states if he is reelected during an X Spaces interview with Elon Musk on Monday.
The 45th president highlighted the declining U.S. education scores in comparison to other developed nations, despite the fact that the United States spends more per student than any other country in the world.
“I want to close the Department of Education — move education back to the states…” Trump told Musk, Tesla CEO and X/Twitter owner.
“But if you moved education back to the 50 [states], you’ll have some that won’t do well…But they’ll actually be forced to do better because it’ll be a pretty bad situation,” he said. “But if you think about it, you’ll have some of these states — I’ll bet you’d have 30, 35 states [where education] will be much better. And you know what? It’ll cost less than half what it is in Washington. And these people don’t care about the students in these far away states. It would be unbelievable.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 13, 2024
Musk told Trump he was “making a good point” and seemed to agree that implementing such a policy would allow Americans greater flexibility in choosing where to live and where they could access better opportunities.
“Yeah. I think you’re making a good point in that if…each individual state has to compete against other states, then people will naturally move to states where it’s better,” Musk said, with Trump replying, “thats right.”
Trump has previously advocated for ending or significantly reducing the Department of Education. In 2016, he stated that the department “can be largely eliminated.” Betsy DeVos, who served as U.S. Secretary of Education during Trump’s administration, has also supported the idea of abolishing the Department of Education.
Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) commended Trump’s support for ending the Department of Education in a post on X on Tuesday and reiterated his push to pass his one-sentence bill, HR899, which aims to terminate the department.
“I have reintroduced this bill each Congress, and I have taken care that it is always designated as HR 899. Many people like that my bill is only one sentence long. No beating around the bush. Perhaps my colleagues can take time to read it!” Massie said in part.
🧵 Last night Trump endorsed the idea of eliminating the Department of Education!
On February 7th, 2017, the US Senate confirmed Betsy DeVos as Trump’s Secretary of Education.
Purposefully, on that same day, I introduced HR 899, a bill to terminate the Department of Education. pic.twitter.com/57x3jeWkkS
— Thomas Massie (@RepThomasMassie) August 13, 2024
In another X post, the lawmaker wrote “In closing, [the] creation of the U.S. Department of Education was a failed re-election ploy of Jimmy Carter, but now we are stuck with what amounts to a national school board composed of 4,000 bureaucrats. Let’s empower teachers and parents by passing HR 899 to End the Dept of Ed.!”
Today, for the 1st time since the Department of Education was established, the House of Representatives will vote on whether it should be able to tell parents, teachers, and school boards what, and how, children should learn. pic.twitter.com/QkX4LrgzbP
— Thomas Massie (@RepThomasMassie) March 24, 2023
