(DCNF)—President Donald Trump on Wednesday didn’t fall for NBC News White House reporter Kelly O’Donnell’s attempt to guilt trip him for firing nearly half of the federal employees at the Department of Education(ED.
ED eliminated 1,315 of its 4,133 employees on Tuesday as part of the Trump administration’s effort to cut wasteful and fraudulent spending conducted by the federal government. O’Donnell, during Trump’s Oval Office meeting with Irish Prime Minister Micheal Martin, suggested that Trump should take responsibility for stripping several “civil servants” of their jobs, prompting the president to remind her that they are keeping the best employees who conduct their jobs efficiently.
“Would you describe for us, is this meeting your vision by cutting about half the workforce and what responsibility do you feel for the civil servants who have now lost their jobs? Many of them worked at the Department of Education during your first term,” O’Donnell said.
“I do, I feel very badly, but many of them don’t work at all. Many of them never showed up to work, unfortunately, and that’s not good,” Trump said. “And when we cut, you know, we go and that’s what I had a number of meetings with a number of people over the past couple of months, when we cut, we want to cut, but we want to cut the people who aren’t working or not doing a good job. We’re keeping the best people and [Education Secretary] Linda McMahon is a real professional, a very sophisticated businessperson and she cut a large number, but she kept the best people and we’ll see how it all works out.”
The president stated that the education system in the U.S. is falling behind on a national scale and thus should be handled by the states.
“We have a dream, and you know what the dream is? We’re gonna move the Department of Education, we’re gonna move education into the states. So that the states, instead of the bureaucrats working in Washington, so that the states can run education,” Trump said. “And, you have Norway, you have Denmark, you have Sweden, you have various countries that do very well. You also have China which does very well in education, and that’s a very big tribute to China, I must say … So we can’t blame size, anymore. Normally you would blame size, [the U.S.] is too big, how can you [fix education].”
“But China does it, so we think when you move it back to Iowa and Indiana and all the states that run so well … those will be as good as Denmark, those will be as good as Norway, as good as any,” the president continued.
A senior ED official told the Daily Caller News foundation that the cut will allow the department to begin the process of allowing more education oversight at the state level.
Federal, state and local governments spend roughly $857.2 billion on K-12 public education annually, while the federal government spent a record $190 billion in aid to schools since the COVID-19 pandemic without seeing a major uptick in students’ academic performances. The Nation’s Report Card found in January that one-third of eighth graders failed to reach the the National Assessment of Educational Progress’s (NAEP) reading assessment benchmark in 2024, the largest percentage ever recorded, while 40% of fourth grade students tested below the NAEP’s reading proficiency.
Since the pandemic, students fell behind in math by over half-a-year and also struggled in reading and science, an analysis by The New York Times found in March. School closure rates and results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress found that students in remote learning settings were worse off on their test scores than those who were granted in-person learning.
Trump previously expressed plans to shut down ED entirely and return the issue of education back to the states, leading enraged Democrat members of Congress attempting to enter the Ed building on Feb. 7.
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