Rep. Harriet Hageman Says There Are ‘Whole Variety of Ways’ to Cut the Department of Education

When it comes to cutting the Department of Education, President Trump has an ally in conservative Republican Rep. Harriet Hageman of Wyoming.

Hageman was recently interviewed by Breitbart News and asked how Trump can achieve his goal of closing the agency down.

Hageman suggested that Republicans have options on this.

From Breitbart:

Exclusive — Rep. Harriet Hageman: ‘We Should Not Have a Federal Department of Education’

When asked by host Mike Slater how Congress can cut spending in reconciliation, Hageman, who defeated former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY), said there is a “whole variety of ways.”

“And one of it is to cut entire programs, as well as just simply reduce what we are outlaying for these various agencies,” she explained.

“I mean, we have got to be looking [at] the way that we’re doing this is through the specific committees. So we need to look at, what is it that… the Education Committee to the cut. Well, I would cut out the federal Department of Education,” she said. “That can save us hundreds of billions.”…

“Education is a state issue. We should not have a federal Department of Education. We can do block grants to the states, which is what we did prior to 1980, when the Department of Education came into existence. But the federal Department of Education, since it came into existence in 1980, our test scores have continuously slid,” she said.

You can listen to the interview below:

Hageman recently wrote this for The Hill:

US student report card proves we must abolish the Department of Education

My 101-year-old mother taught first through eighth grade in one-room schoolhouses in Montana, later moving to Wyoming to teach. She did not have today’s technologies available, but she successfully gave the children under her tutelage an excellent education that served them well throughout their lives.

Many of them became highly successful in business, agriculture and academia. And she was not alone, with thousands of teachers in both urban and rural settings being highly skilled at educating our students to excel and building this great nation in the process…

I often encounter people who are shocked to learn that the Department of Education is relatively young, created by President Jimmy Carter with the stroke of a pen in 1979. The department has since become an out-of-control behemoth, staffed by individuals who pushing an educational philosophy directly at war with the foundations of our country and our Constitution. It is thus legitimate to question whether it should exist at all.

In 2024, the department boasted 4,400 employees and a budget of $238 billion. In the post-pandemic world, Congress allotted an additional $190 billion to elementary and secondary schools to help them recover any learning losses. Those funds have obviously been wasted, as proven by the disastrous NAEP test scores just released. That money, in other words, hasn’t been effectively used to educate our young — it has disappeared into the maw of the Department of Education with no accountability for failure.

People on the left didn’t seem to take Trump seriously when he was talking about these cuts on the campaign trail. They’re taking him seriously now.

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