The directive to reorient the department’s statutory mission came from President Biden on his very first day in office.
The ED’s radical progressive agenda is a prime example of why significant changes are needed.
T he election postmortems are in full swing. While commentators can blame Harris’s electoral misfortunes on her unwillingness to answer simple questions or on being repeatedly outflanked by Donald Trump, there is something missing from the explanation: The radical progressive policies implemented under the Biden-Harris administration, particularly by the Department of Education (ED), are equally responsible for Harris’s defeat.
The woke agenda prevalent in the department’s political leadership has been undeniable — and unbearable. From attempting to cancel billions of dollars in student-loan debt to redefining sex to include gender identity, the ED’s progressive policies under Secretary Miguel Cardona have known few, if any, limits. And don’t forget Cardona’s support for the racially discriminatory admissions policies at Harvard and the University of North Carolina, or downgrading the department’s enforcement of its requirements for universities to disclose foreign gifts.
The directive to reorient the department’s statutory mission came from President Biden on his very first day in office when he issued an executive order mandating that all federal agencies advance “equity.” Reading like a who’s who of perpetually disaffected Democratic constituencies, the designated beneficiaries of the new agenda were to be identified by race, gender identity, sexual identity, disabilities, and geography.
In response, Cardona released an ambitious “Agency Equity Plan” to address “long-standing disparities” among particular racial, ethnic, sexual, and gender-identity groups through new policies to address “students’ holistic needs.”
The department’s “Equity Plan” forced state and local recipients of certain federal resources to “use funding to meet students’ social, emotional, mental health, academic, and other needs” — an all-encompassing mandate. The plan further required state and local educational agencies to initiate “diverse and inclusive planning processes” that would mirror the department’s newfound racial, ethnic, and gender-identity blueprint.
The department alleged that “insufficient vendor diversity” had been found in its contracting and procurement practices, and therefore it directed personnel to steer contracts and some funding to organizations in alignment with the new agenda (thereby disfavoring other recipients who are perceived as privileged by progressives). The department also established “equity-based guidelines” and recreated the peer-review process, critical to the department’s funding decisions, to include “peers” who could be relied upon to implement the department’s new identity-based funding policies.
In 2021 the ED proposed using its mandatory “Civil Rights Data Collection” to ask students, all the way from preschool to grade twelve, if they’re male, female, or “nonbinary” — far exceeding the Department’s statutory authority to collect only that data “necessary to ensure” compliance with federal civil-rights laws. And those who voiced concerns about school conduct and educational material were targeted: The department played a role in Attorney General Merrick Garland’s October, 2021 directive to federal law enforcement to investigate parents who were piping up a bit too much at school-board meetings.
The transformation of Title IX is another story.
On the 50th anniversary of the passage of Title IX — enacted explicitly to ensure the equal opportunities for women and girls — the department issued over 1,000 pages of proposed regulations to redefine sex to include gender identity, reduce the due-process rights of accused students and faculty, and force schools to facilitate access to programs (including sports) and facilities with respect to a student’s self-proclaimed “gender identity.”
The final Title IX regulations took effect in August this year, but immediately faced significant legal challenges from more than 20 states. In a major blow to the department, the Supreme Court refused to stay lower court injunctions, thereby barring enforcement of the new extraordinary requirements.
Since 2021, twisting long-accepted congressional intent into nearly unrecognizable guidelines through bureaucratic rule-making has become the norm. Fortunately, implementing some of the department’s worst policies has been slowed or blocked by highly capable state attorneys general.
President-elect Trump has said that he will return control of America’s K–12 schools to the states, as well as respect parental rights and school choice. The ED’s radical progressive agenda is a prime example of why significant changes are needed — and undoubtedly played an important role in the outcome of the election.
President Trump will also have a powerful new tool at his disposal to rein in the administrative state. We now live in a post-Chevron era, where federal courts may no longer presume that agency rule-making is within the agency’s statutory authority. That provides the incoming administration with an immediate opportunity to curtail extra-statutory rule-making by bureaucrats who’ve conflated their roles and authority with that of Congress.
Ronald Reagan described a government program as the nearest thing to eternal life we can witness in this life. As president, Trump will have the incredible opportunity to quickly end the DOE’s radical social engineering and return power to states, school boards, parents, and teachers.