I'm seeing something that fascinates me, it's the claim that if the Department of Education is disbanded that "support" for autistic students will automatically disappear.
The reality is that those who want to get rid of the Department of Education (which has presided over worse outcomes in virtually every metric), realize that there are legitimate programs that legitimately should be funded at the federal level. What they really want to get rid of the the bureaucracy of the dept and then allow local entities to use federal grant money to fund the programs that their students benefit from the most. The problem is the rigid, top down, one size fits all approach when unelected bureaucrats impose mandates on every school district despite their differences.
The FY 2024 budget request for the DOE is $79.1 billion dollars. Shockingly there doesn't seem to be an easily accessible number to determine the overhead. But, since most businesses shoot for 35% overhead let's use that. So we have almost $28 billion that doesn't go to students anyway, which doesn't include salaries/cost of employment. 22.5% of revenue for salaries etc is the middle of the normal range (15-30%), so let's use that to add an additional $18 billion. I'd bet that virtually every position at the federal DOE duplicates a position at a state DOE, which leads to the conclusion that much of what the federal DOE does is redundant anyway.
So, theoretically we could save $46 billion and still leave the same amount going out the the states. We could even increase the amount going out to the states to $50 billion and save almost $30 billion.
In short, no one is suggesting that funding for autism programs be eliminated. This is just one more scare tactic by the DFL because their other scare tactics failed to get Harris elected.
FYI, I'm not definitively suggesting that the DOE be completely eliminated. What I am suggesting is that every governmental function should be examined for effectiveness and those that are not effective be significantly restructured or eliminated. It's more about using OPM effectively and efficiently than about an increasing number of redundant highly paid federal bureaucrats getting raises every year
2 comments:
The DOE was invented by Carter to satisfy the Teachers' Unions. It is a worthless office. States can do their own thing w/o federal intervention and requirement that are worthless.
Glenn,
As I noted, there may be some value in having a small DOE tasked with certain limited functions. I see some benefit to having some sort of broad national standards for education, buy not much other reason to have much federal involvement in education at all. Yet it seems reasonable to me that the money spent on overhead at the DOE can and should be directed to debt reduction or to states and local school districts. That's assuming that there is value in any federal spending on education.
The DOE is low hanging fruit because US education outcomes have gotten significantly worse since it's inception, with no reason to think that improvement is on the horizon under the current model. It's probably the single most worthless cabinet level department and the one that should be eliminated first.
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