Penna Dexter
President Trump has signed an executive order directing U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon to dismantle the Department of Education. The order recognizes the fact that the administration cannot shut down the department on its own. Congress must be involved.
However, there is much the secretary can do to begin the process of closing the agency. She is quickly proceeding to slash the Department of Education’s staff by half, eliminating 1,950 positions. She has ended some of the department’s smaller programs, including its research arm. She has scaled back the Office for Civil Rights.
The Department of Education carries $1.6 billion in student debt on its books. The Wall Street Journal’s Kim Strassel figures that this would make it the nation’s fifth largest bank. The program has become an entitlement and is ripe for reform. President Trump has suggested it be managed by the Small Business Administration or the Treasury or Commerce Department.
Secretary McMahon points out that test scores have been falling since the department was formed in 1979. She frames the task of shutting down the department as her “final mission.”
In a column, The Journal’s Kim Strassel says, “never has a department been more deceptively titled.“  The reality is, “Our federal education bureaucracy takes no part in the daily, hard-fought grind of teaching.”
“The department’s only job,” she continues, “is to act as the keeper of the education treats.” The agency hands out about $80 billion per year to get school districts to comply with its directives, one of the most recent of which was Former President Biden’s transgender requirements.
Until Congress sees fit to close the Department of Education, reform-minded governors should be tapped for expertise. Funding should be in the form of block grants to states and school districts, removing the conditions on how these funds are spent. Better yet, authority over how children are educated should fall to parents through school choice. 

Kerby Anderson
Elon Musk is in the news again, but his comments this time are about the military. Recently he posted that “America needs a large quantity of long-range drones.” He argued that “Anything manned will die very fast in a drone war.” In a previous post, he shared a video of Chinese drones, with the caption, “Meanwhile, some idiots are still building manned fighter jets like the F-35.”
This is a quick way to get criticized by certain members of Congress and companies that make up the military industrial complex. But there are military strategists who believe we need to change strategies. An essay in The New York Times explores the idea of “Reimagining the American War Machine.”
The war between Russia and Ukraine illustrates why the current administration wants to change the type of weapons the Pentagon buys. “In Ukraine, drones of all types — from cheap quadcopters and radio-controlled boats to long-range attack drones — have radically altered battle in the war with Russia.” And it is worth mentioning the speed of innovation. “The Ukrainian military reportedly introduces drones with new capabilities every few weeks. As the Russians adapt, the Ukrainians respond in turn.”
We are entering into a new age of autonomous warfare. However, as I mentioned in a previous commentary about “killer robots,” we must not allow AI, robots, and drones to fight battles with little or no human oversight.
Modern warfare is changing, and the Trump administration is ready to scrap a 20th century warfare mindset and swap it for a 21st century military. Elon Musk may be the one criticized for his comments about the military, but there are others in the administration convinced we need to be better prepared for the future.

Kerby Anderson
Many stories are surfacing about waste, fraud, and abuse, but there is one story that is being mentioned by numerous commentators. The Department of Justice has been investigating the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund. This was created when Congress passed President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act.
The Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund was a $27 billion program within the Environmental Protection Agency and was lauded as a “first-of-its-kind” program to address the climate crisis while revitalizing marginalized communities. Although it was supposed to help people in communities that were “historically left behind,” very little of the money went to those communities. Instead, the money went to the bank accounts of environmental nonprofits with boards and staff that included Democratic donors and people with connections to the Obama and Biden administrations.
Bari Weiss described a Free Press investigation that concluded that most ($20 billion) of the funds allocated were “rushed out the door to eight nonprofit groups after Biden lost the election—but before President Donald Trump took office.” On my radio program I recently talked about how a former EPA official admitted (in a secretly recorded video) it was like they were “tossing gold bars off the Titanic.”
Katie Pavlich quotes the Washington Free Beacon story that DOGE discovered that $2 billion of those funds went to a “non-profit linked to perennial Georgia Democratic candidate Stacey Abrams.” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessett concluded: “We all think there’s waste. There is abuse. I think there may be real fraud here.”
Perhaps you can now understand why there has been such a rabid response to the DOGE investigation.