Members of the House this week began carving up the Department of Education and doling out the spoils — without a single nod to the question: “What happens to kids?”
The House Education and Workforce Committee passed 10 bills yesterday each under the guise of “Less Bureaucracy, Better fill-in-the-blank,” a not-so-subtle realization of a Project 2025 priority: strip a program or set of programs out of the Department of Education and hand it, along with the staff, the money, and the legal authority that came with it, to another federal agency — one where children are not the priority, where children are an afterthought if they are thought of at all.
“If you read past the branding, these bills do absolutely nothing to improve educational and developmental outcomes for children,” First Focus on Children President Bruce Lesley writes. “Instead, Congress is being asked to ratify an administrative restructuring the Executive Branch has already begun — without any meaningful examination of what happens to the children these programs exist to serve.”
Here’s a clue about what happens: Families and school districts would need to interact with numerous different federal agencies with newly hired staff at agencies scattered across the government that lack history, relationships, or knowledge about how to run education and child development programs.