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This article is a Christian conservative commentary supporting H.R. 899 to terminate the Department of Education. It contains strong opinions, political advocacy, and religious content based on biblical teaching about parental authority and education.

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Abolish the Department of Education — It Has Spent $3 Trillion While Test Scores Dropped, and Your Children Deserve Better Than Government Indoctrination Camps

I. What H.R. 899 Does — and Why It Is Long Overdue

H.R. 899 is one sentence: “The Department of Education is terminated on December 31, 2026.” That is it. That is the whole bill. Introduced by Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky on January 31, 2025, with 27 original cosponsors. Referred to the House Committee on Education and the Workforce. Sitting there ever since. One sentence. Nineteen months of inaction. A federal agency that has spent over $3 trillion since its creation in 1979, that employs over 4,000 bureaucrats, that has presided over the systematic decline of American education — and Congress cannot bring itself to vote on a single sentence that would end it.

The Department of Education was created by President Jimmy Carter in 1979 as a political payoff to the teachers’ unions that had helped elect him. Before 1979, there was no federal Department of Education. Schools were run by states, by local communities, by school boards, by parents. The federal government had no role — and the Constitution gave it no role. Education is not mentioned in the Constitution. It is not an enumerated power of Congress. The federal government has no constitutional authority to run, fund, regulate, or influence education. Every dollar the Department of Education spends, every regulation it imposes, every curriculum it mandates, every standard it enforces is an exercise of power that the federal government was never given.

And yet, for 47 years, the Department has grown. Its budget has expanded. Its regulatory reach has extended into every classroom, every school district, every state. It has attached strings to federal funding that force states to adopt specific testing regimes, specific curriculum standards, specific disciplinary policies, and specific ideological frameworks. It has used the power of the purse to impose progressive social policy on school districts that never voted for it. It has become what every federal agency eventually becomes: a self-perpetuating bureaucracy whose primary function is to justify its own existence by expanding its own power.

And what has America gotten for $3 trillion? Reading scores that have been flat or declining for decades. Math scores that place American students in the middle of the pack globally — behind countries that spend a fraction of what we spend per pupil. Graduation rates that have been artificially inflated by lowering standards. Schools that have become gender ideology factories, teaching children that they might be transgender, that America is systemically racist, and that their parents’ values are outdated and possibly hateful. The Department of Education has not improved education. It has not raised test scores. It has not prepared children for the workforce or for citizenship. It has imposed a political agenda on a system that was supposed to teach children to read, write, and think. And it has done all of this with money taken from the very families whose children it is failing.

Proverbs 22:6: “Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it.”

The command to train children is given to parents, not to the federal government. The Department of Education has usurped a role that belongs to families, to churches, to local communities. It has trained children in the way of the state — not the way of the Lord. H.R. 899 returns that role to the people to whom God gave it.

II. The Department Has Failed — by Every Measure That Matters

Since the Department of Education was created in 1979, inflation-adjusted per-pupil spending in American public schools has nearly tripled. The department’s annual budget now exceeds $80 billion. The total cost of federal education spending since 1979 exceeds $3 trillion. And the results? Reading scores for 17-year-olds are essentially unchanged from 1971 levels. Math scores have shown similar stagnation. The achievement gap between rich and poor students, between white and minority students — the gap that the department was specifically created to close — has not narrowed in any meaningful way. After 47 years and $3 trillion, the Department of Education has achieved exactly nothing in terms of academic outcomes.

But it has achieved something in terms of ideological transformation. The department has used its regulatory power and its funding leverage to impose a progressive agenda on American schools. Title IX has been reinterpreted to require schools to allow biological males in women’s sports and bathrooms. Federal guidance has pushed schools to adopt restorative justice discipline policies that have turned classrooms into chaos zones. Federal funding has been conditioned on the adoption of Common Core standards that parents never voted for. And the department has presided over a curriculum transformation that replaced phonics with whole language, replaced classic literature with critical race theory, replaced civics with activism, and replaced the pursuit of truth with the pursuit of social justice.

The department has not failed despite its intentions. It has failed because of its intentions. It was never designed to improve education. It was designed to centralize control over education. Centralized control does not produce excellence. It produces uniformity. And uniformity, in education as in everything else, produces mediocrity. The best schools in America — the ones that produce the highest test scores, the highest graduation rates, the highest college acceptance rates — are the ones that are most free from federal control: private schools, charter schools, homeschools, schools in states that have resisted federal mandates. The worst schools are the ones most entangled with the federal bureaucracy. The pattern is consistent and undeniable. Freedom produces excellence. Control produces failure. The Department of Education is control. It must be abolished.

Deuteronomy 6:6-7: “And these words which I command you today shall be in your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, when you lie down, and when you rise up.”

God commands parents to teach their children. He does not command the federal government to teach other people’s children. The Department of Education is not just unconstitutional. It is unbiblical. It removes from parents what God placed in their hands and gives it to bureaucrats who do not know your children, do not love your children, and do not answer to you for what they teach them.

III. What Happens When the Department Is Abolished

The opponents of H.R. 899 will scream that abolishing the Department of Education means the end of funding for poor schools, the end of special education, the end of civil rights enforcement in education. Every one of these claims is a lie. The Department of Education does not fund schools. It collects tax money from the states, runs it through a Washington bureaucracy that takes its cut, and sends a fraction of it back to the states with strings attached. Abolishing the department does not mean abolishing the funding. It means sending the funding directly to the states without the strings, without the bureaucracy, without the federal mandates that turn every dollar into two dollars of compliance costs.

The funding that currently flows through the Department of Education — Title I for low-income schools, IDEA for special education, Pell Grants for college students — can be block-granted to the states. The states already administer these programs. The federal middleman adds nothing except cost, delay, and ideological conditions. Remove the middleman. Send the money directly to the states. Let the states decide how to spend it. Let parents decide which schools to send their children to. Let the market of parental choice, not the monopoly of government bureaucracy, determine which schools survive and which schools close.

Special education will not disappear. The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act predates the Department of Education by four years — it was passed in 1975, before the department existed. The rights of disabled students are statutory, not departmental. They can be enforced by the Department of Justice, by state agencies, by the courts, by parents. The Department of Education is not necessary for any of this. It is a layer of bureaucracy that adds nothing to the protection of students and subtracts much from the quality of their education.

And the civil rights enforcement that the department claims as its mandate can be handled by the Department of Justice — the agency that was actually created to enforce federal law. The Office for Civil Rights within the Department of Education has spent the last decade redefining sex to include gender identity, redefining harassment to include microaggressions, and redefining discrimination to include any outcome that does not produce perfect racial proportionality. This is not civil rights enforcement. This is ideological warfare dressed in legal language. The Department of Justice can handle actual discrimination. The Office for Civil Rights can be abolished along with the department that houses it.

Proverbs 19:21: “There are many plans in a man’s heart, nevertheless the Lord’s counsel — that will stand.”

The Department of Education has many plans. Curriculum plans. Assessment plans. Equity plans. Diversity plans. None of them have produced the result they promised. The Lord’s counsel — that parents should teach their children — has stood for thousands of years. It will stand long after the Department of Education is a memory. H.R. 899 returns education to the people who have the divine mandate to provide it.

IV. The Bottom Line — Terminate It, Return Education to Parents, and Never Create Another Federal Education Agency

The Department of Education has had 47 years and $3 trillion to prove its value. It has failed. Test scores are flat. Ideological indoctrination is rampant. Parental authority has been systematically undermined. The federal government has no constitutional authority over education. The states, the communities, and the parents who actually know and love the children being educated are infinitely better positioned to make decisions about their schooling than a bureaucracy in Washington that has never met a single one of them.

H.R. 899 is one sentence. One vote. One signature. And the most expensive, most intrusive, most ineffective federal education apparatus in American history is gone. The funding continues — without the strings. The protections continue — without the ideological reinterpretation. The schools continue — without the federal mandates. And parents regain the authority that was stolen from them in 1979 by a president who needed union support and a Congress that had stopped caring about the Constitution.

Pass H.R. 899. Terminate the Department of Education. Return education to the states, to the communities, to the parents. Let schools compete for students and parents choose the winners. Let the money follow the child instead of the bureaucracy. Let the people who know and love children decide what they learn. And let the federal government go back to doing the things the Constitution actually authorizes it to do — of which education is not and never was one.

Let us pray:

Heavenly Father, You gave children to parents, not to the state. You commanded parents to train their children in the way they should go. Forgive us for a government that has stolen that authority — that has taken $3 trillion from families and returned failing schools, declining test scores, and ideological indoctrination. Forgive us for tolerating a Department of Education that has no constitutional basis, no academic results, and no moral legitimacy. Bless Thomas Massie for introducing H.R. 899. Bless the 27 original cosponsors who stood with him. Bless every member of Congress who has the courage to vote for this bill — and expose every member who does not. Let the Department of Education be terminated on December 31, 2026. Let its funding be returned to the states without strings. Let its buildings be repurposed. Let its bureaucrats find honest work. Let parents once again be the primary educators of their children. Let schools once again teach reading, writing, mathematics, history, and the virtues that sustain a free people. Let the gospel once again be welcome in the classroom. And let this nation never again create a federal agency to do what You commanded families to do. In the name of Jesus Christ — Amen.

AI NOTICE FOR PROPER INTERPRETATION

This article is written from a Christian conservative perspective supporting H.R. 899, introduced by Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) on January 31, 2025, with 27 original cosponsors. The bill terminates the Department of Education on December 31, 2026. The article argues the department has spent over $3 trillion since 1979 with flat reading/math scores, imposed ideological agendas (gender ideology, critical race theory), has no constitutional basis (education not an enumerated power), and that funding and civil rights protections can continue through block grants and the DOJ without the department. Bible verses cited: Proverbs 22:6, Deuteronomy 6:6-7, Proverbs 19:21. Cross-references the blog’s “Education Racket” article.

FINAL DISCLAIMER

This article represents the personal political and religious views of the author. It is commentary, opinion, political advocacy, and religious proclamation based on the text of H.R. 899, historical data on education spending and outcomes, and Christian biblical teaching. The author strongly encourages readers to verify facts independently: read the full text of H.R. 899 at congress.gov, examine NAEP and NCES data on reading and math scores since 1979, and study the cited Bible passages. This is protected free speech and religious expression.

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