To help us understand the implications of President Trump's order to dismantle the Education Department,

we get two perspectives tonight. Let's first turn to Rick Hess. He's a senior fellow and

director of Education Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute. Thanks for being with us.

And you wrote in a column recently that you think in principle downsizing the education department makes sense.

Let's start there. Why do you think an overhaul is called for?

Sure. There's a lot of confusion about what the department is. The best description is that it's a megabank with a small policy shop attached.

The biggest thing the department does is manage about a trillion and a half dollar portfolio in student loans. That's a disproportionate

share of the workforce. In K-12, the two big programs are Title I for school serving children

of poverty and IDEA for children with special needs.

Combined, those two programs are about $35 billion a year, which is about $0.3 on the dollar

of what we spend in K-12 education.

So look, we've got a lot of adults who aren't educators, creating a lot of paperwork, costing a lot of money

and salary and benefits in ways that frequently frustrate the ability of schools or colleges

to serve kids. I think you can dramatically downsize that department, shrink the workforce,

reduce the red tape in ways that are good for learning

and good for America schools and colleges.

What about the way it's being dismantled?

The mass firings, the lack of transparency, any concerns on that front?

Yeah.

I mean, I think there's reasonable concerns about if you are entrusted with a public agency and you are going to either ask it to do something it's never done, like under President Biden, the student loan forgiveness, or what we are seeing here, firing roughly half the workforce, announcing you're going to try to fundamentally limit its activities.

It's entirely fair to ask questions about how's this going to work, explain the legal authority

for the specific actions. And most importantly, in this case, if you are cutting the department in half in terms of staffing,

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