PBS News Hour White House correspondent Laura Barron-Lopez joined the Wednesday edition of CNN’s Inside Politics to freak out about President Donald Trump’s plans to close, or at least downsize, the Department of Education. As Barron-Lopez tells it, Trump is trying to privatize public education, and shuttering the department will start a domino effect that will lead states to do the same and hurt “poor and people of color” the most.
Against the backdrop of the department cutting roughly half its staff, host Dana Bash declared, “I mean, we should know that already, no matter who is president, the way that education funding works is that the vast majority and policy, but both, is done at a local, state and local level.”
Barron-Lopez replied, without evidence, that eliminating the Department of Education is the first step in a plan to ultimately eliminate public education altogether:
Yeah, that's right. I think some 900 billion is spent across the states and local level on public education, though the government, I think, spends about 100 billion or so in public education. And so, you know, to me, you see this pattern occurring, whether it's the Education Department, Social Security Administration, or other agencies, an attempt to privatize these functions, which is to essentially say, we want to turn to private corporations to do the work of public education, which means that public education could take a huge blow.
Perhaps knowing that was not an honest depiction of the administration’s view or how federalism works, Barron-Lopez then pivoted to trying to explain that will be the result, intentional or otherwise, “And yes, the vast majority of that is decided by state and local governments, but they see the federal government doing that. Then state governments are going to follow suit and feel emboldened to create a more privatized system of education versus public education. And who ultimately suffers from that: poor and people of color.”
Earlier in the segment, Bash played a clip of Education Secretary Linda McMahon on Fox where she claimed that Title I and IDEA will not be affected by the cuts. In the event Congress authorizes the closure of the department, those programs and other Congressionally authorized spending, such as student loans and civil rights enforcement, can be moved to other departments. The Department of Education did not exist until 1979; getting rid of it won’t be the end of the world.
Here is a transcript for the March 12 show:
CNN Inside Politics with Dana Bash
3/12/2025
12:22 PM ET
DANA BASH: I mean, we should know that already, no matter who is president, the way that education funding works is that the vast majority and policy, but both, is done at a local, state and local level.
LAURA BARRON-LOPEZ: Yeah, that's right. I think some 900 billion is spent across the states and local level on public education, though the government, I think, spends about 100 billion or so in public education. And so, you know, to me, you see this pattern occurring, whether it's the Education Department, Social Security Administration, or other agencies, an attempt to privatize these functions, which is to essentially say, we want to turn to private corporations to do the work of public education, which means that public education could take a huge blow.
And yes, the vast majority of that is decided by state and local governments, but they see the federal government doing that. Then state governments are going to follow suit and feel emboldened to create a more privatized system of education versus public education. And who ultimately suffers from that: poor and people of color.
