Hello and welcome to the Reason Roundtable, the podcast of Free Minds, Free Markets, and Free Takes.

I'm your host, Peter Souterman.

Let's talk about the Department of Edgmication.

Last week, President Donald Trump announced plans to cut the agency's staffing in half.

That's the Department of Education,

not education. The agency has long been a rhetorical target for the right. It's created in 1979

under Jimmy Carter, and by 1980, the GOP platform favored abolishing it. But we've never seen

an effort quite like this before to really dismantle it. So is this the end for the Department

of Education?

And is that a good thing? I want to go around the table and ask, what is your most succinct take

on the Department of Education? Your headline, your kind of main argument. In the length of a

tweet, let's start with Nick. It's a good idea to cut the Department of Education, but more

important to cut the funding

or to scrutinize federal funding of education at all levels because we spent a lot of money

on education before the DOE existed.

Catherine?

Good riddance to bad rubbish.

Very succinct, very short. I like it. Matt Welch. What do you have to say about the Department of Edgimication? It is the poster child for one of the worst and counter foundational trends in modern governance. and that is having Washington issue, one-size-fits-all

dictats on policy issues that should rightly be handled at the state and local level.

Okay. I think all of these are good. Mine is actually an actual headline from CNN in January of this year.

U.S. children fall further behind in reading, make little improvement in math on national exam.

For years and years, the story on education policy has been the same.

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