Your correspondent has written several times about our opposition to the idea of "dismantling" the Department of Education. First, because it's not possible under current legal and political realities. Secondly, because it would mean forsaking an opportunity to use the Federal government to make education all over America more rigorous and more patriotic.

"Woke" nonsense is only the tip of the iceberg. Children in American public schools are taught, to paraphrase Commonplace editor Helen Andrews, that "America was a dystopian hellhole until the arrival of civil rights and feminism in the 1960s." As important as school choice is, the majority of American children are being educated in public K-12 schools and will remain so for the foreseeable future. Children in blue and purple states deserve a good education too—and even in many red states, education bureaucracies are captured by liberal bureaucrats. Using the power of the Department of Education to make a curriculum similar to the one proposed by the 1776 Commission mandatory across the nation seems like a brain-dead obvious idea.

And then there is the issue of standards. We have learned from NCLB: "testing" and "teacher accountability" are no magic wands. But there are low-hanging fruits, such as teacher-directed instruction, phonics, traditional math curricula, and other tried-and-true methods, which would help. Again, we should have no illusions: schools do very little to raise intelligence across the board; we won't magically turn America into Lake Wobegon; but we could prevent a lot of active harm from being done.

Anyway, President Trump very clearly feels very differently. Hence yesterday's bizarre ceremony in the Oval Office involving children sitting at desks, nine Republican governors, and conservative activists, featuring the signing of an EO to "dismantle the Department of Education." Which is of course not possible to do. ("If Ed has been dismantled, why is Linda McMahon still in the cabinet?," a wonk texted us earlier.)

But what did happen?

The executive order, titled "Saving Education by Empowering Parents, States, and Communities," directs Secretary of Education Linda McMahon to "take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education and return education authority to the States." This directive instructs McMahon to begin dismantling the department to the maximum extent permitted by law while ensuring the "effective and uninterrupted delivery of services, programs, and benefits on which Americans rely." White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt later acknowledged that the goal was to make the Department of Education "much smaller than it is today" rather than eliminating it outright.

According to White House statements and the executive order itself, the following core services will be maintained: Federal student loan administration and Pell Grants for college students; Title I funding for schools in low-income areas; Resources and funding for students with disabilities under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA); Civil rights enforcement in educational settings.

So it looks like what's going to go is various DEI offices and grants for woke studies, and a general (presumably DOGE-led) reduction in workforce. These are all good things. But it's not "dismantling Ed." And it's a missed opportunity.

Policy News You Need To Know

#Medicaid — Semafor has an item today about the skepticism of West Virginia Republicans regarding Medicaid cuts. It is indeed the case that many deep-red states have a lot of Medicaid beneficiaries. SEE ALSO: Our analysis of the political consequences of Medicaid cuts

#Immigration — Erratum. Over the past couple of days, social media (and legacy media) was shaken up over allegations of immigration enforcement operations that seemed outlandish even to restrictionists like your correspondent. And we covered them. And it looks like we shouldn't have. The first was over the case of a Venezuelan soccer player who sought asylum in the US. Here's DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin: "Jerce Reyes Barrios was not only in the United States illegally, but he has tattoos that are consistent with those indicating TdA gang membership. His own social media indicates he is a member of the vicious TdA gang. That all said, DHS intelligence assessments go beyond a single tattoo and we are confident in our findings." At the time we noted that the immigration advocates who made the claim about Barrios are notorious for lying. We should have listened to ourselves! The other case was of a French researcher who was rejected allegedly for social media posts critical of the Trump Administration. McLaughlin again: "The French researcher in question was in possession of confidential information on his electronic device from Los Alamos National Laboratory— in violation of a non-disclosure agreement—something he admitted to taking without permission and attempted to conceal. Any claim that his removal was based on political beliefs is blatantly false." In connection to this, the great Mark Krikorian of CIS also tweeted: "A French media outlet was going to interview us about this, but dropped it; here's what they told us: 'Sources inside French diplomacy have brought us new sensitive information on the case and the person who has been arrested.'" Our bad for believing (and relaying) alarmist news about Trump Administration actions. We should have known better and we apologize.

#Ed — Brookings has released a series titled "Why we have and need a US Department of Education." Even if one is skeptical of a Federal role in education, if only to abide by the principle of Chesterton's Fence, one should look at what Ed is actually doing.

#Budget — Everyone is looking for savings to pass the tax reform promised by President Trump. An obvious big fat pot of money to look at is the IRA's tax expenditures, which are projected to cost $1.16 trillion over the next ten years, are of dubious value, and are not aligned with the goals of the current Administration. In a new item, Tax Foundation analysts Alex Muresianu and Peter Van Ness sketch out several scenarios "between a scalpel and a sledgehammer" for reducing (or eliminating) IRA credits.

#Crypto #Reg — CEI's John Berlau has a good overview of recent Trump Administration regulatory actions on crypto.

#Reg #DOGE — We have all been hearing a lot about "improper payments" in the wake of DOGE. GAO estimates that the US government has made $2.8 trillion in improper payments over the past 20 years. However, not all "improper payments" are waste or fraud. As AAF health care policy analyst John Walker reminds us, "While some improper payments are caused by deliberate fraud or abuse, improper payments are primarily a result of missing or insufficient documentation or administrative errors." Improper payments persist because Medicaid and Medicare have what's known as a "treatment forward" policy: the policy is to pay medical providers first and ask questions later. This is a very helpful overview of the issue.

#Antitrust — This morning, AAF's Douglas Holtz-Eakin looks at the FTC and antitrust policy. He notes that the future direction of the agency is unclear, probably (he doesn't say this, this is our gloss) because it's staffed by a combination of traditional Republicans and "new right" kids who think antitrust is good. He also notes that under the new regimes, independent agencies have to have their major rules reviewed by OIRA, reducing their independence. "So, at this point, one has little information about what the FTC is going to do. But it looks like it may involve a different cast of characters and ways of doing business." Indeed.

#LGBT — Very good point and argument from Heritage's Sarah Parshall Perry, on the President's EO on transgender issues: transgender status is not an immutable characteristic, unlike race or sex, which means transgender "rights" are not protected under the Equal Protection Clause.

#Chyna — When it comes to Chinese science and technology, two words come up repeatedly: "copy" and "fraud." And for good reason! But increasingly it looks like China is capable of producing real tech innovations, such as, for exemple, in biotech. As The Economist writes, Chinese firms "are at the forefront of cheaper, faster drug discovery." And we know it's real because Western drug companies are spending large amounts of money licensing those drugs.

Friday Essays

The Spring 2025 issue of National Affairs is out! Each issue of the best public affairs quarterly magazine in America is an event. We obviously recommend reading all of it. Of particular interest may be the following: Manhattan Institute's Chris Pope sketching out a plan for "a targeted welfare state"; Robert P. Beschel, Jr. on the crucial and timely issue of how Republicans should approach civil service reform; an intriguing proposal by Jennifer Dresden and Beau Tremitiere for what they call "strategic fusion," which essentially (as we understand it) involves allowing candidates to run on several party lines (as is sometimes done in local elections) so that the electorate can express a preference for a particular ideology without risking the "spoiler effect" of voting third party; and this meditation by Christopher J. Scalia on Robert Frost's poem "Mending Wall" and what it means for the defense of tradition.

You may remember that last year a Rwandan immigrant to Britain, 17 year old Axel Rudakubana, stabbed several young girls attending a Taylor Swift concert. Now (apparently with some funding from the British government) Netflix has produced a miniseries, Adolescence, loosely based on the awful event. Except that they have cast the perpetrator as a young white male, and the show constructs a narrative where "incel culture," "the redpill," "Andrew Tate" and similar right-coded online trends are responsible for the murder. The show is apparently a "phenomenon" and there is a movement afoot, apparently blessed by Britain's Labour government, to have the show shown in schools. It's hard to know what to say at this point. Whatever you want to call it—cultural elites, "the Cathedral"—clearly see white males, as a group, as a threat, and feel the need to deploy propaganda to portray them, as a group, as intrinsically evil and dangerous. Anyway, here's Ben Sixsmith at The Critic on this…momentous…cultural event.

Edward Luttwak is one of our most inestimable strategic thinkers; the list of outstanding books he has authored is too long to complete here ("Coup d'Etat: A Practical Guide," "The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire," "The Grand Strategy of the Byzantine Empire" (our personal favorite), "The Logic of Strategy"…) and he is of course well-known for his larger-than-life biography and persona. Anyway: here, he has written a very good essay at UnHerd on the very real and very abundant economic spillover effects of increased investment in military technology, drawing from examples from the Cold War and contemporary Israel.

Chief Justice John Roberts, we are often told, is an institutionalist. The chief aim of his tenure, he believes, is to safeguard the credibility of the Supreme Court as an institution. The obvious problem with that approach is that if you reach decisions for what are essentially political reasons—trying to portray yourself as "bipartisan" for example—you end up compromizing your credibility as an apolitical institution. Here's a very good essay by Ben Weingarten at The Federalist making this case.

You may not know who Thane Ruthenis is. We did not. An AI usefully described him to us as "a prominent figure in the fields of artificial intelligence, rationality, and effective altruism. He is known for his contributions to AI alignment research and his insightful commentary on the progress and implications of large language models (LLMs)." Which is why this essay on his "predictions regarding AI progress," which was sent to us by the smartest AI expert we know, is worth your attention. Ruthenis believes that current LLM technology will plateau with diminishing returns rather than achieving so-called AGI. He argues that while LLMs will integrate into the economy as useful tools by the 2030s, truly transformative AI will require a currently-unknown and fundamentally different approach or architecture.

"On this day 221 years ago, March 21 of 1804, the Code civil des Français (the French civil code, often called the Code Napoléon) was promulgated," writes the editors of The New Digest, the online law review founded by Harvard Professor Adrian Vermeule. The Code Napoléon is of course a monument in the history of law and has been tremendously influential on law on numerous continents since then. Which is why we are happy to point you towards this essay in The New Digest by Professor Stéphane Sérafin on the Code, its history and also, perhaps, its relevance to current debates in American law.

We did not know this: in Hungary, Latin remained in every day use until well into the 19th century. How did "Europe's last Latin Kingdom" keep the flame alive for so long? Fascinating article by Luka Ivan Jukic at Engelsberg Ideas.