Fear

 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