Briefing Room — March 10th

This week on the Briefing Room we discuss the fate of the Department of Education, Killing DEI at UVA, Vance’s College Endowment Tax and why cuts at Defense could help build families worth defending.

Plans to dismantle the Department of Education have been put on hold, according to reports. The goal of eliminating the DoE has been a conservative Holy Grail since the rise of the Reagan-era “new right.”

According to some reports, pushback by a variety of stakeholders stayed President Trump’s hand, including not only teachers and teachers’ unions, but activists and parents concerned about programs for low-income students, such as school lunch programs. There are also likely to be lawsuits contending that the Department cannot be dismantled by means of an Executive Order, but would require an act of Congress.

I, for one, hope that this pause is seen not as a setback, but as an opportunity by members of the administration. While the longstanding ambition of Reagan-era conservatives has been to “return education to the states and localities,” such an outcome would doom students in many “blue states” and districts to educations that would remain captured by the priorities of progressive liberals and leftist teachers’ unions. Merely dismantling the DoE would consign a massive number of our fellow citizens would to lessons on why they should despise and deplore their nation, why the very idea of nation is rearguard, how the essence of their society is one of exclusion and hatred, and why they should regard their own history as one solely of countless injustices by the foulest evildoer…