Education and the Second Trump Administration, 471 Days In

So it's been a l- it's been a long time, uh, since we last spoke.

The Trump administration has continued its efforts to dismantle the Department of Education, I think most notably through 10 interagency agreements it signed with five different cabinet agencies.

[chuckles] Let's start with the basics.

Rick, what's an interagency agreement?

It's a, it's actually a good question.

It's something that most of us had barely given any thought to.

Uh, it's a routine thing in Washington.

It says that one cabinet agency's gotta handle something, there's somebody else who's got skill or personnel to do it, so it's just basically a piece of paper which says, "We're gonna delegate this over to you." It's done routinely, but it's never been done like the Trump administration is using it.

Usually, it's just a prosaic arrangement.

Uh, because Trump issued that, um, executive order to shut down the department and there's no statutory authority to shut down the department, Secretary McMahon is trying to use IAs as the next best thing and to send big chunks of the department elsewhere.

So that's what's going on.

And look, I, I, I don't pay attention to this that carefully, but I think the Trump administration is willing to push the limits of tools that are already existing in the government.

Andy, uh, uh, the courts have knocked him back on a number of other issues.

Are these interagency agreements, the, the way they're doing it, are, are they legal?

Well, that's gonna be up to the courts, and like a lot of things with the administration, I mean, there's two things to bear in mind.

One, um, you know, they had four years between, uh, uh, 2021 and 2025 to plan, and they learned a lot about these various federal laws.

So as Rick says, they're using these things that are in the law, but they're using them in a maximalist manner, and we've seen that on a...

That's, that's a bunch of stuff across government, and so that's the, um, uh, that's kinda what's happening.

Will a court say, "Okay, you can do this because you do have these interagency agreements," or will a court say, "You know what? You all said the quiet part out loud 'cause you've been talking about dismantling the Department of Education," and so forth? And it's like this on a bunch of stuff, where Trump has sorta said, "Here's the intent of it," even though they're trying to do something different, like, in, in the strictures of the law, and, and that's caught up with them in some other court cases, and it, and it could here.

So we will, we will see.