Trump Admin Makes Another Big Move To Get Rid

President Trump returned to office last January with a pledge to shrink the federal bureaucracy, and one of his biggest targets was the Department of Education. And frankly, it’s hard to think of a more justified target. There is no constitutional authority whatsoever for the federal government to be involved in education. None. For most of our nation’s history — all the way up until 1980 — America managed perfectly well without a federal education department. Many would argue we were doing better before Washington inserted itself into local classrooms.

Schools have always been a local responsibility — run by cities, counties, boroughs, and the parents and communities that actually know the students they serve. That’s how it should be. Education should be close to the families, not buried under layers of federal red tape and ideological mandates crafted by bureaucrats who have never met the children whose futures they’re tinkering with.

Now the Trump administration is moving further down the path toward dismantling the Department of Education. On Tuesday, officials announced that the department is signing agreements to transfer several of its responsibilities to other federal agencies — a major step toward shutting the department down entirely:

The Trump administration announced Tuesday that the Department of Education signed a series of interagency agreements to shift power from a handful of its offices and programs to other federal agencies as it works to dismantle the federal department for good.

“The Trump Administration is taking bold action to break up the federal education bureaucracy and return education to the states,” Secretary of Education Linda McMahon said in a Tuesday press release. “Cutting through layers of red tape in Washington is one essential piece of our final mission. As we partner with these agencies to improve federal programs, we will continue to gather best practices in each state through our 50-state tour, empower local leaders in K-12 education, restore excellence to higher education, and work with Congress to codify these reforms.”

On this point, I’m reminded of Barry Goldwater’s famous line: “I have little interest in streamlining government or in making it more efficient, for I mean to reduce its size.” That’s exactly the spirit of what’s happening here. The goal isn’t to rearrange the deck chairs at the Department of Education — it’s to shrink it, strip it down, and ultimately get Washington out of the business of micromanaging schools.

If this move helps move that ball forward, all the better. At the very least, it clears out some bureaucratic dead wood and brings us one step closer to restoring local control where it belongs:

The Department of Education announced six interagency agreements (IAAs) Tuesday with the Department of Labor, the Department of Health and Human Services, the State Department and the Department of the Interior to co-manage or take a growing role in managing certain offices and programs, according to a background call with the media.

We at the Department of Ed have engaged with other partner agencies over 200 times through IAAS to procure various services of other partner agencies over the years,” a senior Education Department official said Tuesday during a call with the media. “Even the Biden administration did it to help implement the First Step Act, entering into an IAA with the Department of Justice. And so this is a tool that’s frequently used.”

I think we can safely call this “a good start.”

Now let’s see the Trump administration truly get this ball rolling. Don’t stop with the Department of Education — that’s just the opening act. Congress needs to get serious about defunding and shutting down every federal agency that has zero constitutional grounding. And that list is long: the Departments of Environment, Commerce, Energy, Labor — sprawling bureaucracies that grew simply because Washington never says no to itself.

It’s time to take a page from Argentina’s President Milei. Don’t bring a scalpel to this fight — bring a chainsaw. Cut through the bureaucracy, slash the budgets, and drag this government back to its constitutional borders. Defund it. Starve it. Shut down the imperial behemoth the federal government has become.

If Trump could accomplish that, what a history maker he would be.

Senate Examining Prior DOJ Effort To Shut Down Probe Into Hillary’s Anti Trump Dossier

The Senate Judiciary Committee is examining whether the Justice Department improperly moved to shut down an inquiry into the Clinton campaign’s funding of the Steele dossier.

Committee Chairman Sen. Charles E. Grassley said a whistleblower has alleged that two senior officials involved in the Justice Department’s Arctic Frost investigation of President Trump previously played key roles in blocking an FBI probe into Hillary Clinton and other Democrats, the Washington Times reported on Friday.

Grassley, a Republican from Iowa, released email exchanges from June 2019 between an unidentified FBI agent and Richard Pilger, then an official in the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section, along with J.P. Cooney, who at the time served as a prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia.

The emails show Pilger and Cooney rejecting the agent’s questions regarding what the agent described as the “unambiguous concealment” of payments made by the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign to fund the Steele dossier, compiled by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele.

The DNC and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign hired the research firm Fusion GPS to help produce the dossier, which contained unverified allegations about then-GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump and saddle him with a phony scandal linking him to Russia. The payments were reported as legal expenses, obscuring the political nature of the project.

In a message to a supervisor, the FBI agent said Pilger made obvious threats that the agent said were “intended to have a chilling effect and stop me from asking questions” about the Clinton and DNC funding, the Times reported.

“In my [redacted] years of being an agent, a successful agent with a great reputation, I have never been met with such suspicion or response intended to have me go away,” the FBI agent noted.

Pilger, who served as director of the Justice Department’s Election Crimes Branch, later played a significant role in authorizing the Arctic Frost investigation into former President Trump’s conduct following the 2020 election. That probe, led by then-Special Counsel Jack Smith, resulted in Trump being indicted on election-interference charges.

Cooney served as Smith’s deputy during the investigation, the Times reported.

In a letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel, Sen. Grassley requested additional records and emails related to the FBI’s earlier inquiry into the DNC and Clinton campaign payments to Fusion GPS, which he said appeared to have been halted by Justice Department officials.

“These records show the same partisans who rushed to cover for Clinton rabidly pursued Arctic Frost, which was a runaway train aimed directly at President Trump and the Republican political apparatus,” Grassley wrote.

In a June 21, 2019, email, Pilger criticized an FBI agent for seeking to open an investigation into whether payments had been concealed, accusing the agent of showing “bias” and acting with “a rush to judgment.” A week earlier, on June 14, Cooney had advised the same agent that the issue “is not a good candidate to open for a false reporting case,” noting that Fusion GPS had been retained by the Clinton campaign’s law firm, Perkins Coie, rather than by the campaign itself.

“Although not typically what we think of as legal services, I think we would have an exceedingly difficult time proving it was a willfully false report,” Cooney said in a note to the agent, the Times reported.

The dossier — later discredited as a collection of unverified claims — alleged improper ties between Trump and Russia. The document circulated ahead of the 2016 presidential election and was subsequently cited by the FBI, then led by Director James Comey, to support the opening of a secret investigation into the Trump campaign.

The Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee were not criminally investigated over the underlying payments but instead faced civil penalties after watchdog groups filed complaints with the Federal Election Commission, said the Times.

In 2022, the FEC fined the Clinton campaign $8,000 and the DNC $105,000 for misreporting more than $1 million in payments to the law firm Perkins Coie, which used the funds to hire Fusion GPS.