U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon vowed Tuesday on Fox News to end the “bureaucratic bloat” within the Education Department to fulfill President Donald Trump’s mandate.
Since Trump’s first campaign trail in 2015, the president has sought to cut federal spending to the U.S. Department of Education, criticizing “Common Core.” On “The Ingraham Angle,” the newly confirmed secretary was asked by Fox host Laura Ingraham if recent cuts to staff are the first step in a “total shutdown” of the department.
“Yes, actually it is because that was the president’s mandate, this directive to me, clearly is to shut down the Department of Education, which we know we’ll have to work with Congress to get that accomplished,” McMahon said. “But what we did today was to take the first step of eliminating what I think is bureaucratic bloat.
“That’s not to say that a lot of the folks — it’s a humanitarian thing to a lot of the folks that are there. They’re out of a job. But we wanted to make sure that we kept all of the right people, the good people, to make sure that the outward facing programs, the grants, the appropriations that come from Congress, all of that are being met. None of that’s going to fall through the cracks,” McMahon added.
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The Daily Caller News Foundation confirmed Tuesday that, of the 4,133 department employees, 1,315 were informed of their elimination. Prior to the cuts, 259 employees had been let go in February as part of the deferred resignation program, with 313 accepting voluntary separation incentive payments and 63 probationary employees also terminated.
With the department announcing Tuesday that the buildings were closed for security reasons, McMahon said employees had received a notification “to take their laptops and their phones home with them,” not wanting those permanently let go to show up at the office on Wednesday. McMahon said that remaining Education employees would return to the office Thursday, with the department arranging a time for the released employees to come back and retrieve any personal belongings.
Ingraham said the cuts to the department have received pushback from Democrats. She played a clip of the president of the American Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten, saying that people are upset and adding that the Trump administration is “just taking opportunity away from kids that don’t have it.”
“Clearly, we’re not taking away education. The president never said that. He’s taking the bureaucracy out of education so that more money flows to the states. Better education is closest to the kids with parents, with local superintendents, with local school boards. I think we’ll see our scores go up with our students when we can educate them with parental input as well,” McMahon said.
(Featured Image Media Credit: Screenshot/Fox News/”The Ingraham Angle”)
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