Posts tagged Department of Education
Congress guarantees furloughed feds’ back pay despite continued White House maneuvering
February 3, 2026 // The Office of Personnel Management removed citations of the 2019 Federal Employee Fair Treatment Act from its shutdown guidance last month, as the Trump administration continues to insist that the law guaranteeing all federal employees back pay after a shutdown doesn’t.
Birch Run teachers union president decries state testing
January 25, 2026 // Test scores from M-STEP, Michigan’s assessment of public school students, paint an unfavorable picture of Urbanowski-Nowak’s district. More than two-thirds (68%) of third graders at Birch Run Area Schools were not proficient on the English Language Arts exam in 2024-25. Two-thirds (66%) of the district’s third-grade students were not proficient in math in 2024-25. Research by the group Tennesseans for Quality Early Education concludes that proficiency in reading and math by the end of third grade is one of the strongest predictors of future academic achievement and career success.
Commentary: The Hyperventilating Over the DOE Restructuring Is Ongoing
December 16, 2025 // Perhaps no one fully comprehends the DOE’s uselessness and waste more than former Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos. She contends that it shuffles money around, imposes unnecessary requirements and political agendas through its grants, and then shirks responsibility for evaluating whether any of what it does actually adds value. “Here’s how it works: Congress appropriates funding for education; last year, it totaled nearly $80 billion. The department’s bureaucrats take in those billions, add strings and red tape, peel off a percentage to pay for themselves, and then send it down to state education agencies.”
Editorial: Union Strategy: Hatred And Warfare On Trump
December 11, 2025 // EON/BAMN issued an accompanying statement with some NBIs explaining the coming war. Getting a bit somber, the adherents say the “fundamental role” of the NEA “guarantees” what it terms as “an historic struggle over the principles that our nation is founded on” with the Trump administration. So there you have it. This union is so big, it’s going to war against the nation’s sitting government.
Teachers Union Anti-Trump Lawfare Cases Have Little Connection to K-12 Public School Education
December 4, 2025 // The AFT began as exclusively a teachers union but has six separate divisions that also represent other public school employees, such as teacher aides, custodians, and bus drivers, as well as health care workers and higher education faculty. The union’s website says it also represents public employees, including federal and state employees. “The AFT’s lawsuit spree against the Trump administration reveals what we’ve long known: these organizations have strayed far from their mission of representing teachers,” Aaron Withe, president of the Teacher Freedom Alliance, a conservative education group, told The Daily Signal. “This is exactly why so many teachers are choosing to opt out—they want representation focused on their profession, not a political action committee.”
OMB delays firing federal workers to comply with court order
October 18, 2025 // The unions and other opponents of the reductions say the firings are a significant departure from the norm in a shutdown and are not the type of work agencies can undertake during a shutdown. Previous shutdowns, including during President Donald Trump’s first term, did not result in any reductions in force. In all other shutdowns, federal workers who are classified as “excepted” employees remained on the job while all others were furloughed, and all received back pay after the government reopened.
The Federal Workforce Will Be a Little Smaller After the Government Shutdown Ends
October 16, 2025 // While further reductions in the size of the federal workforce are certainly welcome, the layoffs will have to become significantly more aggressive to more than scratch the federal Leviathan. While smaller than its peak at 3.4 million workers in 1990 and then again in 2010, the federal government still employed 2.9 million people, not counting military personnel, as of August 2025. That's almost 3 million people living off the taxes collected by the federal government (or, increasingly, the money it borrows) rather than productively creating goods and services for willing consumers. And those nearly 3 million people aren't all just sitting around. Too many of them get up to mischief by exercising the power of the government to interfere in people's lives and to enforce intrusive rules and laws. Just see my comment above about the public health establishment and the pandemic. Fewer federal employees mean not so many mischief-makers to cause trouble, along with some cost savings.
Trump administration ‘co-opted the voices’ of Education employees in shutdown blame game, union lawsuit alleges
October 7, 2025 // Furloughed Education Department employees reported that their out-of-office email messages were modified to emphasize that Senate Democrats voted against a GOP government funding measure.
Commentary: Trump gave the Labor Department more control over career-technical education. Will students benefit?
October 6, 2025 // In May, Trump officials signed an interagency agreement that maintains the Education Department’s oversight authority for career-technical education, but hands over the day-to-day operations to the Labor Department. That includes distributing over $1 billion to states in Perkins funding, which pays for CTE programs in K-12 schools and community colleges, making compliance monitoring visits, and helping states and schools with technical questions. High-ranking Democrats in Congress have said this transfer of funds and responsibilities is illegal, and the proposal should have gone to Congress. Others in the career and technical education field say the Education and Labor Departments already work closely together and this move isn’t necessary to improve collaboration.
Protect Worker Freedom to Best Help Black Women, All Workers
August 21, 2025 // The removal of DEI positions and programming under the second Trump Administration is also credited with having a disparate impact on Black women. This argument might sound reasonable to regular people, but data doesn’t prove it. Black women are overrepresented in federal jobs compared to private sector employment. They comprise 6.6% of the civilian workforce but 12.1% of the federal workforce, the largest differential among racial demographics.