2/12/25: Project 2025 Cheers Ed Department Destruction, Elon Betrays MAGA Working Class
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We're excited to be joined now by Lindsay Burke. She is the director at the Center for Education Policy at the Heritage Foundation and also wrote the chapter in Heritage's Mandate for Leadership, also known now as Project 2025, on education policy. This is a very timely conversation given recent developments of the last 24 hours about how Doge is starting to turn its attention to the Department of Education. So, Lindsay, first of all, thank you so much for being here.

Yeah, thanks for having me, Emily. Yeah, no, we appreciate it. I think you and I come from a very different place than Ryan does on this. And the question about just like what's going to happen to the Department of Education is obviously a sensitive one for parents around the country who are worried about a shutdown affecting them. So, Lindsay, I think maybe a good place to start is actually if you could walk us through your take on why people...

why parents with kids in schools that are almost entirely, unless they're at Hillsdale, funded by the federal government in some part, should not be afraid, from your perspective, of Doge kind of tackling the Department of Education? Yeah, well, first we should make a distinction between K-12 and higher ed. So in the K-12 space,

Federal funding is less than 10% of all school funding across the country. And it's worth noting, and so this is different than higher ed, right, where you get student loans, it's wholly federally funded, 93% of all loans are originated in service by the federal government. So two separate things.

But in K-12 education, it's very important to remember the Department of Education does not run a single school. It does not pay a single teacher salary. It does not educate a single child in America. And so I would assuage parents' concerns. And I would make the case to most parents, you will be better off when your local teacher, your local school principal is not having to worry about federal mandates handed down from the Department of Ed. And for taxpayers, too, who

who I think are so often left out of the conversation, for them, it has meant their money is taken, sent to Washington, filtered through this ineffective bureaucracy, and then 65 cents on every dollar is sent back to local classrooms. And somehow that's supposed to improve educational outcomes or lead to academic excellence. And it clearly hasn't.

So, that's where I would start, just to assuage any concerns parents might have. And the other quick thing I would say is, just because the Department of Education is eliminated, and we'll see what ultimately happens,

doesn't mean that programs and spending go away. Most of the proposals that are out there, including ours, would move many of the programs that are actually effective or appropriate to other federal agencies. So you look at something like the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act funding under IDEA, that would move over to HHS.

Data collection, things like the National Assessment for Educational Progress, send it over to the Commerce Department. Let the Census Bureau handle that. Student loans, move them to Treasury. So this idea that eliminating the physical structure of the Department of Education will somehow have negative benefits on education, I think it's quite the opposite. So the 2025 proposal seemed pretty heavy on block grants.

Like we'll take, you know, right now, like to take the disabilities provision that you talked about. So you would move the, you would move that over to HHS. But the key thing there to me seems to be that you would also just block grant it. And for people who don't know, block grant just means,

all right, we used to fund under these requirements. The states had to submit this kind of paperwork and meet these requirements to get this money. Now we're just going to add up the amount of money, send it all out. And that means they'll get more money because it's not going to get filtered through that bureaucracy that you talk about. But imagine you're a parent who has a child in school here who benefits from one of these IEPs or something.

It's already, as you know, a war that parents have to go through with their schools to get these IEPs because you get an IEP, it's going to cost a little bit extra money. So the school districts are generally doing everything they can to say, well, your kid actually doesn't qualify for this. And just to make it so difficult for parents that they just eventually give up and only the most dedicated ones get through. So if you no longer, and that, so it's a war, despite the fact that you have the federal government

kind of looking over their shoulder and saying, you know, you need to do this if you're going to get this money. If the federal government just walks away and just hands the money to the schools, given the school's impulse already, why wouldn't the school just reject everybody's IEP, keep the money, cut property taxes?

And then use the money to just fund their general operations. And there are a couple other block grants. You can remind me, you know this better. Yeah, Title I. There are a few others. Like, why wouldn't they just do the same thing? And just now the federal government is just, that money isn't supporting these projects. It's just...

supporting the school and then the school cuts taxes. Yeah. The city cuts taxes. So a couple of things. So your example with IDEA is a really important one because I think those are the parents, absolutely right, who have had the most contentious, unfortunately, relationship getting the services that they are entitled to under federal law. And it's something like 15 million parents have gotten through the thicket

Or 15 million kids, right? Right, right. And so what we want to do is provide them with the tools to actually fight that war effectively and not be reliant on a process where too often they end up in litigation, trying to get the services they are entitled to under federal law. And so what do those tools look like?

Once we block grant that funding to the state, so it doesn't go directly to schools, right? So a state can receive the block grant. At that point, a state can decide that parents can have access to their dollars. So states could make those IDEA dollars portable. And if a family wanted, they could take their kid's share of IDEA dollars. And honestly, at the per pupil level,

It's not that much in the overall scheme of what we spend per pupil. We're talking about maybe $2,000 a year. But if a parent doesn't feel that their school is providing services appropriately to them, they could tap into that money and they could pay for private services and providers, schools, service providers, whatever it might be, that they feel better meets the needs of their children. The other thing I would add is- Would that pay for private school or are you talking about-

$2,000 a year or something. Right. So services. So probably additional services, right? It's not going to pay for tuition at a private school. However, if you're in a state that has a school choice program already, and we're now to the point where over half of them do, and most of them are education savings accounts, and most of them

started off for kids with special needs, in fact, if you're in one of those states, you could easily envision a family getting an ESA, enrolling in private school, and then under this proposal, also being able to tap in to their funding under IDEA and topping off that amount to get additional services. So you could certainly envision that situation. And we're to the point, by the way, quick non sequitur, if Texas

get school choice this year, which finally it looks like they're going to do, we're going to be at the point where over half of all kids across the country have access to private school choice. So this is happening. But on IDEA specifically at the federal level,

I would add that the law that is supposed to protect these children, that doesn't go away. Right. And that law, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, predated by the Education for All Handicapped Children Act in 75, that predated the creation of the Federal Department of Education, as did so many of these laws. Right. So this idea that

access or protections for kids with special needs or low-income children go away. All of those protections came well before Carter acquiesced to the teachers union in order to get their support to be elected president and created a federal department of ed. So none of that goes away. But just from a news perspective, what can you tell us? What do you know about what the

Trump officials were doing at Ed yesterday in the sixth floor, that Jen Bender, we had a Jen Bender retweet from HuffPost up there. Other people are saying that 89 contracts were cut totaling something like $900 million. What do you know about what's been cut so far and what insight do you have into what further cuts are coming? Yeah.

So I don't have insight into what the administration is doing or thinking yet. I think we're all just waiting to see what a potential executive order might include. And look, I mean, there is... They're not working with you? I mean, you wrote the...

Look, we put out for years. In fact, I've been at Heritage 17 years now. So for almost two decades, we've been writing about the need to wind down the department. And our writing on that predated the chapter that you all referenced there.

And so, you know, we have a map for exactly what you would do with every single program. We have a three-part test, which programs you would keep. Are they ineffective? Are they duplicative? Or are they inappropriate at the federal level? If they check any of those boxes, they're gone. The handful of programs that remain, we map out more appropriate receiving agencies to manage those programs. And so all of that's out there. I'm very excited to see an administration finally willing

to try to correct Carter's mistake and wind down this bureaucracy. I mean, look at the recent NAEP outcomes, right? They were awful. Kids have lost, just if you look at fourth grade reading, kids have lost almost a year's worth of learning, almost a grade level worth of learning just over the past decade. And I mean, the recent outcomes were really just heartbreaking for so many families.

And this has been a trend that has continued since 1965, right? And we talk about the department, but really, it was the war on poverty, right? It was Lyndon Johnson, it was 1965. When we first see the federal government get involved in pre-K and K-12 ed and higher education, there have been no improvements as a result of that involvement. You look at the

the gap between low-income children and more affluent kids, it's four grade levels worth of learning. Four. It's exactly the same today as it was in 1965. We have just not moved the needle and improved academic outcomes to speak of. And so, yeah, we're all very excited to see the administration make some of these important cuts. And as far as what contracts and programs we will see, we know that there is a lot of

You know, DEI adjacent stuff that has infused the department over the past few years. So hopefully that's first on the chopping block. Before we move to higher ed, I wanted to just get your take on this. Here are the collapsing scores, I think, that you were just referring to, which, you know, also show an increase, you know, from...

And you have other ones that show an increase before. I feel like correlation is not causation. I look at the timing of some of these collapses and I see the rise of kind of cell phones and social media and screens. But let me go a little bit further. So when you look at these long-term trends, so this is from your Project 2025 document here.

um, you know, pretty flat, you know, flat and rising for a 13 year old reading, um, rising for nine year old reading, you know, going back to 1971, you know, rising for math, uh, for 13 year olds and nine year olds though, you know, falling a bit, you know, around the pandemic, you know, pandemic and screens. Um, I think a combination of those two, you know, two things. Um, so why, like, what do you, what do you think accounts for the, um,

The increase, like if you look at those numbers, like, well, like I said, correlation is not causation, but, you know, Department of Education came around and scores went up for decades. Screens came in and scores went down. So...

And then the pandemic, an absolute catastrophe for schooling. So is unwindingness going to reverse that? Yeah. So what we didn't include and we should have are the 12th grade results. If you look at the 12th grade results, they are flat. Flat in reading, flat in math. And so even though we see some increase in reading and math for 13-year-olds and 9-year-olds,

that doesn't persist throughout high school. And so we're just not seeing those gains throughout the years. The longer a kid spends in school, the less the gains are there over time. And so I should have included that too. Look, in terms of the department, again, I would certainly not peg the department to any of those increases. And if you look at the charts where you see those slight increases that, again, don't persist over time,

have they do correlate more with one could argue some of the accountability measures that right and I'm no fan of No Child Left Behind but that were included in NCLB and I mentioned that because there was a concerted effort at that point to care about reading outcomes the way that the federal government wrote NCLB the sanctions that were put into place did not work well at all for states and

But we did see a focus at that time on reading by third grade. You look at Florida at that time period, right? You had Jeb Bush there who would continue to beat the drum about, you know, if a kid from kindergarten to third grade is learning to read from third grade on, they're reading to learn, right? And if they don't get that right, they're going to have a very hard time throughout the rest of their academic experience. And so there was a real focus. And so I think that that focus on reading may account for some of those early gains

But again, they didn't persist. And I am also heartened to see that we have a renewed focus on phonics-based instruction now. That's something that is long overdue. We had this shift toward whole language, which we know really failed, honestly, generations of children in learning to read. And so that's been great to see a renewed focus on phonics-based instruction. So hopefully that will accrue to the benefit of reading in the next few years. But yeah, I mean, the

the pandemic declines. And I say pandemic declines, these were teacher union-induced school closures that kept kids locked out of schools, right? Far after, far after we knew it was safe for schools to reopen. And so those significant declines lay squarely at the feet of the teachers' union's heads. And

You know, that's going to stick with these kids for decades to come, unfortunately. Well, I wanted to ask one question, Lindsay, sort of from a conservative perspective. It's kind of different for me to imagine if this was a Ron DeSantis administration versus a Trump administration with Elon Musk coming in. People like you really have spent years carefully crafting decisions

detailed plans, like granular level plans as to how to put the Department of Education on an off ramp, essentially, with all kinds of ideas as to how gaps that would happen if the centralized federal department is shut down will be filled.

And I'm curious if it worries you at all the way that DOGE has approached other departments, you know, without debating what should have happened to USAID, even just the way that it was sort of like an ad hoc, oh, we're finding something here, gone, like the mile afuera approach to government. Right. So does any of that concern you that you have this carefully crafted, ideologically

sound plan from a conservative perspective. And you kind of have the wrecking ball coming for different departments now. No, it doesn't. Honestly, we need a wrecking ball at Ed. And we're in the, I would say, enviable position that families across the country understand the

big through experience and just intuitively that the Department of Ed has failed them over the years. We don't have to make the case. Look, I go and give talks all the time. And the biggest applause line is always closed on the Department of Ed. I mean, it is. So we're we're in a good position there. I think there's a

fairly high level of understanding among the public at large about how little the investment is at the federal level in K-12 ed relative to the red tape and regulations that the agency hands down. So, you know, I think with USAID, there was just less, I think, understanding about what the agency does among the general population. And so I think we're on pretty solid ground there. So what would funding levels look like? Yeah.

in your ideal world. As we look at the world now, it's so hard for teachers to...

live near their schools, for instance, or to just live a dignified life, which makes it then harder to attract the best people into the field. So what does it look like in your world where you've gotten rid of the Department of Education? Yeah. Look, I agree, right? I mean, for teachers, so over the decades, the unions made a decision that they wanted

more teachers rather than, and I say teachers, they wanted more education employees, right? So I should add, the teacher to non-teacher ratio right now is one-to-one. If you look at your typical school district, for every teacher in a classroom, there's an administrative counterpart. So the unions made a decision over the years to prioritize increasing staff because, of course, that accrued to the benefit of their bottom line, right? More dues-paying members.

rather than taking ever-increasing state, local, and federal spending and putting that into higher teacher salaries. So that was a conscious decision that was made on the part of special interest groups.

We should pay teachers more, those who deserve to be paid more, right? We should reward teachers based on merit, right? Not just on the amount of time that they've spent in the classroom. But that will require some changes, right? It's going to require us to no longer have this staff surge that we have had over, really since the 1960s, to, you know, put a damper on that. I mean, we've had 100% increase in the number of students in schools since the 1970s.

but a 700% increase in the number of administrators, just to put a finer point on it. So we need to stop that staffing surge, but we also need to be willing to say modestly increase class size a little bit, right? We know that at some point there's a diminishing return on reducing class size and it is low. Nationally, it's 15 to 1, right? So you could modestly increase class size

And then you could pretty significantly increase teacher pay for those teachers who increase student learning, right? If you get more than a year or a year's worth of learning over time, you deserve to be rewarded for that. How do we get to that 15 to one number?

I don't know. So that's National Center for Education. I mean, I'm not doubting that that's the stat, but like what happened such that most I bet most people watching this can be like, oh, there's 28 kids in my class. And I should say that's high school, high school numbers. So if you look at your elementary and second or your elementary numbers, they are slightly higher. But for your typical high school, 15 to one.

So to your question, which I don't think I answered, about what is the appropriate spending level. And are you thinking per pupil? Are you thinking at the federal level? Well, either. I mean, what matters most really is what gets down to the

Exactly. Yeah, 100% agree. So at the federal level, if you look at the plan that we've worked on for two decades now, what we have recommended is that you eliminate all of the competitive grant funding that the feds manage. It is completely ineffective. It has not moved the needle at all in terms of student learning outcomes. That's a lot of programs. It's not a lot of spending, to be honest. It's maybe not a lot, maybe $3 billion of the department's budget.

So, that would go away immediately. And there are certainly other areas where you could cut as well. But those large formula grant programs, which is where most of the funding is, those are the programs that would just go to other receiving agencies. So, again, you actually probably wouldn't see that large of a reduction in existing federal spending, but you would see some and you should see some.

As far as what the ideal per pupil spending level is, just to give the listeners an idea, we spend about $18,000 per pupil per year now nationally. So that's combined local, state, and federal revenue. And of course, the federal piece is a small share of that. It's about 45% federal, I'm sorry, 45% state, 45% local, 10% federal funding.

I would say we don't know the ideal number because we don't have a market-based system, right? We have a system that runs and functions much more like a monopoly than a market. But we can look at the school choice programs that are expanding in the state and get some sense of what it does cost to educate a child.

If you look at education savings account options in the states, states like Arizona, they're getting about $7,000 per kid. That's a base per pupil allocation. If you have a kid with special needs, you get a little more money. It's weighted based on disability.

And that is working great for families. Families are choosing to enter that program to take that amount of funding and then go find services that work for them rather than staying in the district system where they're spending twice that much and they're not getting a quality education. So it's hard to say exactly what it should be, but the evidence strongly suggests we don't need to spend $18,000 per child per year.

Is this a vicious cycle? Like, are the public schools that are seeing all of these kids leave and go to these private schools funded by the school choice, are they quickly collapsing? We haven't seen any close yet, honestly. And we should, right? I mean, schools that are trapping kids, cycles, like, you know, generations of kids in these ineffective institutions, they shouldn't be around, right? No kid should be trapped in a school that is failing them.

We're not seeing schools close yet, but we do see the kids who are least well served by these schools having an escape hatch out of them. And that tends to be the case with even if you look at states with universal choice programs or really large choice options.

You know, you look at Florida, you look at Arizona, it is still an escape valve for these kids. So we haven't seen schools shutting down. You know, I think two things are going to put more pressure on public schools than any school choice option. One is just the demographic difference.

collapse that's coming, right? I mean, that will put a lot of pressure on public schools in the future to either consolidate or downsize. They're just not going to have kids in seats because of the fertility crisis, not because of school choice.

And then the other thing is, if the argument of those on the left against choice was, well, it's going to harm public schools, right, we should be laser focused on funding children and not institutions. But if that were the case, why allow public school choice at all? Why allow families to even buy a house in another neighborhood? Right? Like, anytime you exercise public school choice.

that money leaves an assigned school and goes to another school. Same with charters, right? So this idea that private school choice is either going to lead to the end of public education as we know it, or that it already has, isn't founded. And I always come back to the Friedman argument, right, that we, yes, we will publicly finance K-12 education, but the public financing does not require government delivery of services.

So fund the kid, separate that out, allow the family to choose what works for them. We're running out of time to talk about higher ed. I was going to say. I'm sure a lot of our viewers are deeply concerned about like so.

What kind of wrecking ball are you guys bringing to the university system? Well, hopefully the biggest one of all, right? Like, I mean, it needs higher ed. Wow. I mean, it's more than a PR problem at this point, right? I mean, higher ed has entrenched systemic issues that will only be solved when we cut off the open spigot of federal aid that has been dumped on these universities from...

federal helicopters, to quote Richard Vedder, he's an economist at the University of Ohio, for decades now. If you look at the outcome of federal spending on higher ed, and again, it all goes back to Lyndon Johnson, right? It all goes back to 1965. Prior to that, we did not have widely available student loans and grants originated by the feds, right? We had the GI Bill, but that was targeted. It was an earned benefit, right?

But once we got the feds involved in 65, then we just see this inflation in tuition prices over the decades. And it had gotten so bad by the 80s. And I think everybody knows this at this point. But in 1987, Bill Bennett, who was Ronald Reagan's ed secretary, he wrote a famous op ed and it was The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal.

But it was called Our Greedy Colleges. And he said, continued spending at the federal level will lead colleges to increase prices. Sure enough. And that was called the Bennett hypothesis. It became true. Right. I mean, we know that that's the case. And even if you look at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, they did a study a few years ago where they found that for every additional dollar in subsidized student loans, universities increased tuition 60 cents. So they're capturing much of that.

federal largesse that's going there. But it has really enabled universities to not mind shop the way that they should, right? I mean, it has allowed this proliferation of DEI commissariat

to just, I think, really drain resources from higher ed and not create a better learning environment for students. It's enabled this facilities arms race where you get the climbing walls and the lazy rivers, right? I mean, it has really just been detrimental to higher ed, the prices increasing for students. And then, you know, we've had this policy over the decades of just trying to subsidize increases in costs, which haven't worked at all.

And so hopefully the wrecking ball includes eliminating the PLUS loan program, right? So this is all of the federal lending for grad students and for parents of undergrads, right? So you've got the main direct loan program that goes to undergrad students and grad students.

But then once you exhaust that, you can plus up, right? You can get additional funding from the federal taxpayer, subsidized by the federal taxpayer for grad school, or parents can borrow even more for their undergrads. And so if you ever hear these horror stories of people entering retirement with student loan debt, that largely falls at the feet of the Parent PLUS program, where they borrowed for their kids' undergrad experience, the parents did.

And so we need to cut off that open spigot of federal aid and restore to the private lending market responsibility for offering student loans and grants. And is the goal then that fewer kids go to college?

I mean, the goal is people for whom college is the right decision have access to that and can go and that those students who take out a loan repay that loan. And this is the problem, right? We have to get access if they don't look like let's say so just lay it out like you want to go. You don't can't afford it. Schools are now ungodly expensive.

How do you go? Yeah. Well, so back to what I said a second ago, our proposal doesn't eliminate the direct loan program, which is the basic loan program that the feds operate. What's that capped at? $55,000 aggregate right now, I believe. It's on that order, about $50,000. Which is good for about one year in college.

Well, I don't know that that's the case, right? I mean, you look at some of your state schools, that's not the case. And everybody forgets, by the way, Ryan, that you can also work while you're in school, right? I mean, this is... I did work study. I made $4.25 an hour. Minimum wage went up. I got a 10 cent raise while I was there. Right, you work while you're in school.

Exactly. That was beer money, though. Like, this is not the 1960s anymore. But look, you can also do that. But so the federal direct loan program stays in place. So we're talking about loans for grad students. We're talking about that additional parent plus loan.

But if you eliminate some of the federal largesse, you're going to see that there is still a private lending market, right? So it's not just the federal, granted, it's 7% of the market, but you can still get a loan through the private sector as well. And look, we need to have a lending program in place that actually does take into account your ability to repay in the future. Because what we have now is just open access to federal taxpayer dollars. I call them federal taxpayer dollars.

because they're subsidized and because we're forgiving them on the back end in large part. And so, you know, we have not encouraged students to really take a hard look at the school they're attending, the education they're getting, what the ROI will be on the back end. I mean, 44% of master's degrees have a negative ROI, right? And so we have enabled this profligacy on the part of higher ed institutions, but I

but also have created a situation in which students aren't well served at all. And yeah, we might have too many people going to college right now. There are people who would probably be better served not going that route, doing apprenticeship programs, doing career and technical ed options,

But the federal government has put the thumb on the scale in favor of traditional higher ed and has said this is your only path to climbing the ladder of upward economic mobility in America. And that is an unfortunate falsehood that does not serve students well at all. So if you keep those loan programs in place or the one that we were just discussing,

How quickly, reasonably, would tuition prices be expected to go down and there would be a market correction? Because it seems to me there might be a gap period where college is still ungodly expensive indefinitely. Yeah, there will probably be a gap, but there are other things we can do concurrent with the loan program to help prices decrease.

One of those, which has gotten some attention over the past few days, is indirect costs, which is this sort of like arcane little policy idea. But basically capping the overhead costs that universities can charge federal taxpayers for research grants. NIH, this was floating around a few days ago, where NIH said, we're now going to cap at 15% your amount of indirect costs. I mean, there are universities out there right now that are charging the taxpayer 60 cents on the dollar

for their research grant overhead. I mean, it's unbelievable. And so again, this is a part of the federal largesse that has been handed down for decades now that has enabled universities to continually increase prices knowing that there's more federal money coming on the back end. They need some spending restraint imposed upon them

And this is the only way we're ultimately going to see prices brought down is through reforms to loan programs, reforms to some of these other grant options that are out there. I mean, isn't research, though, one of the most overhead intensive programs?

things you could possibly have and aren't there, but they're, aren't they required to say like, here, here are the actual specific overhead costs that are connected to. They're very broad. What a university does, they'll say, here's the indirect rate that we charge. Uh, they might say, we'll accept a grant from, I don't know, fill in the blank, Google, uh,

and we'll accept a 5% overhead rate from Google, but we're gonna charge the federal taxpayer 60 cents for research grants. So we know that what they're charging the federal taxpayer is higher than what they necessarily need. And so one of the most interesting proposals, and this is my colleague Jay Green at Heritage has put this proposal out, but basically putting some market discipline in the indirect rate where you say to a university at the federal level, you cannot charge the federal government

an indirect rate that exceeds what you're willing to accept from a private funder. And so it just sort of resets. And yeah, look, of course, universities have some fixed costs. Of course, research has some fixed costs, but they will argue all of their costs are fixed, right? And that's certainly not the case. They'll use this to fund infrastructure where they have names on buildings, right, of donors who have profiled

privately provided significant funding, right? You have all of the title four programs, all of the student loan and grant options that are out there, other direct grants from the federal government. You've got private foundations, philanthropy, universities are swimming in money. This idea that putting a little discipline on their overhead rate that they're charging the taxpayers somehow going to have this detrimental effect on research, totally unfounded. I just worry that

So why not invest in technical schools, trade schools, in addition to colleges and universities? I worry that in the 70s and 80s and 90s, we decided to, as a policy, destroy our manufacturing base. And the thing that is keeping us afloat

is our college and university system in the United States. It's a thing that makes us globally competitive and makes people want to live here. The most talented people in the world want to come here. We're going to gut that too, and then it's just going to be...

A wasteland. Like, what do we like? What do we have at that point? Yeah, I hear you on that. But I think we are a little naive and believing that the quality of higher ed is equally distributed among institutions. It is not.

we have a lot, a lot of underperforming colleges and universities in this country. There are great, like the schools that we're probably thinking of, the great schools, right? You've got some great state schools that are out there, the flagship universities. You have some great smaller private great book schools and other faith-based schools that are doing really well. But you've got a lot of middling schools across the country, right? There are 4,000 or so colleges across the country

you know, a non-trivial number of those schools are having students leave, right? And by the way, they're spending six years on average to get a four-year degree. They're leaving with debt. Some of them leave and don't even get the paper credential that they were promised. And that's the worst situation that they can be in. And we know it's ineffective because employers report that constantly, that students who leave college are not prepared to enter the workforce. And

And so is there a better way to serve the needs of those students? Can we do more to give them flexibility with those existing federal funds to pursue career and technical ed? Right. So our at the end of the day, our position is simply you want to give students flexibility if we're going to fund this at the federal level with the type of post-secondary education they pursue. Right. Maybe they do go into a trade where they are leaving with no debt and making a good living right out of the gate.

But right now we're saying to everybody, you've got to go to a four-year brick and mortar. And by the way, probably a majority of them are not going to serve you very well in the long run. Lindsay, we could keep going on this, but we really appreciate your time and your willingness to talk through some of these difficult questions that will definitely be on people's minds in the days and weeks ahead. Thank you. We appreciate it. Likewise. Thanks for having me.

We're joined now by Saurabh Amari. He's actually my colleague at UnHerd and wrote a very, very interesting piece this week that crystal flagged for us. We wanted to talk about the headline is Elon Musk is a danger to Trumpism. And we should mention before we dive in that Saurabh and I also have a new newsletter that you can sign up for over at unheard.com. It's called Area 47. It's kind of a

Inside scoop from Trump world with a very like unheardy lens. We're having fun over there. So go ahead and sign up. And Saurabh, thank you for being here. Thanks for having me, guys. It's so good to join you on yet another platform.

Great to have you. Can you walk through the argument that you lay out in this article, especially through the lens of somebody who is on the right and is looking at what's just happened over the course of the first three weeks of the Trump presidency? And there's a lot probably to be critical of that people are dancing around or glossing over that you actually lay out here openly.

Yeah, so I start with the case of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau or CFPB, not a friendly acronym. And I tell the story of Rohit Chopra, who is President Biden's now ousted or outgoing director of the CFPB.

He did some numerous reforms that I think were pro-mainstreet, helping ordinary Americans who have very little bargaining power against banks and now big tech companies that increasingly act like financial institutions.

One of the things that he proposed just in his final days in office was a rule against debanking. This is basically that your financial institution can drop you as a customer based on your views or what you use your account to fundraise for or what you've said online.

And this was remarkable because it was kind of politically conciliatory. It's not just good policy, but in a way you have here someone from the progressive wing of the Democratic Party taking on a practice that mostly has been used against right-wing activists like PayPal, debanked an evangelical fundraising site that was raising money for January 6th defendants, etc.

Canadian truckers who protested the COVID mandates were debanked at the behest of the Canadian government. In Britain, Nigel Farage faced debanking for a while from his financial institution, which is called Coutts. Anyway, it was something that the right was exercised about. And he just very, with a very swift rule that says, you know, customers cannot be dropped based on their exercise of free speech, would have put a stop to it. Now, that's not the only thing the CFPB did. It did lots of good things.

But, you know, Musk had said that the CFPB must die. And sure enough, he did it. Not just Musk, by the way. Mark Zuckerberg also went on Joe Rogan's show complaining about why he's getting oversight from the CFPB. Well, it's because they track their

Facebook users, financial transactions and stuff, they surveil people. And so they're acting more and more like a financial institution. As Chopra himself told me, it's not that we are encroaching into big tech. It's that big tech is encroaching into the financial system. Yeah. And Marc Andreessen, too, went on Rogan to complain about CFPB, talk about how it was debanking people. And the debanking, I think,

point is a great entry into your piece and to the whole conversation because privately, Andreessen and the others, I don't think actually would be satisfied by what Chopra did at CFPB with his debanking rule because it said you cannot debank people for ideological reasons. But of course, you can still debank people for being drug traffickers and

or for working with cartels, working with sanctioned organizations. It's called know your customer. And it's one of the things that Silicon Valley, some elements of Silicon Valley have been so hostile to this idea that you have as a financial institution, some responsibility to know who your customer is and whether or not they are just, whether you're dealing with El Chapo.

They hate that. They think that that's an encroachment on their freedom to do Bitcoin commerce or whatever. And so when Andreessen talks about them having so many founders who were debanked, he's doing this kind of two-step where he's trying to make Rogan's audience think that these Silicon Valley tech founders were debanked because they supported Trump.

Or because they said something critical of like George Floyd or Black Lives Matter or something. When in fact, if you look at each case, it's like, oh, like they were, you know, they were moving crypto for a cartel. And so the bank was like, we're freezing this. And so for Chopra to come in and deal with the actual problem that people had.

is interesting because it shows that he's kind of responsive to the genuine public concern, but the public concern is not the actual oligarch concern. They're just kind of using that. So I guess the answer to the charge that you've gotten online of, and I get this too on the left or on the right, of naivete, that what did you expect? It's a bunch of oligarchs who got Trump into office. Did you actually believe they were going to do this? Yeah.

Yeah, so...

I get very irritated by that because I wrote a number of pieces in the lead up to the election as saying as someone on the populist wing of the right or the pro worker conservative, we have different names for people like me, conservative social Democrat. I'm very concerned about Elon's influence. I wrote a piece for the new statesman before the election where the headline was Trump will have to choose populism or Elon Musk. So it

It's not, I always saw that. And I know the administration is torn between these competing impulses. But I, what I will say is like the degree to which Elon has, has been empowered Elon and that kind of coterie of the so-called techno libertarian, right. It is a little bit disturbing, especially what I see as self-dealing. Right. So Elon wants to create an app out of X that is not just the social media company, but a kind of everything app like they have in China with,

WeChat. So it's just it's your payment system. It can do all sorts of things. And CFPB would have brought scrutiny to bear on what he was doing on the financial side of it. And he says, kill it and it is done. That's that's very disturbing. Another one, which I mentioned in the piece, is what's happening in the National Labor Relations Board.

So President Trump came in and he dismissed the general counsel of the NLRB. That's quite expected because President Biden did the same thing to Trump 1's general counsel. But then he also dismissed, without cause or notice, as required by both statutory law and Supreme Court precedent, one of the members of

Gwen Wilcox, who can only be dismissed for malfeasance or neglect causes like that. And there's no indication that she's done anything like that. And also with notice and she didn't receive notice. Now, what that does is basically the NLRB needs under Supreme Court precedent needs a quorum in order to actually uphold labor law to enforce the Wagner Act or the National Labor Relations Act.

Now, this happens against the backdrop in which Elon Musk and one other of the oligarchs who stood on the stage at the swearing in, namely Jeff Bezos of Amazon, have launched a lawsuit to declare the National Labor Relations Act unconstitutional altogether. Now, that's a drastic legal argument, and it's questionable whether even with a conservative Supreme Court, they're going to be able to kill the National Labor Relations Act, which is the fundamental labor law in this country. But

You know, is there a better alternative? Yes, basically to cripple the agency, which is what happens when you remove its quorum. You know, local NLRB offices can still investigate and so on. But when it comes to an actual labor dispute where the board as a whole has to uphold collective bargaining, it can't do that. And what I've heard is that they intend to keep things that way, essentially crippling the agency. So, Rob, one thing that I've heard

heard from people in Trump world or this argument from people who are sympathetic to Musk and Doge is that this is basically a generational opportunity to deal with the problem of waste, fraud and abuse in the government, which I think probably all of us agree is significant. You know, there's

It's sort of an inevitability, of course, and whether they're able to make a big dent in it without touching things like Medicare and Social Security, you basically can't. You could eliminate the Pentagon and still probably not put, not probably, you couldn't put a dent really in the deficit. So on the one hand, there's this genuinely important question of streamlining the federal government, making it more efficient and

and helping people in ways that are kind of populist in some cases, not all cases, but in some cases kind of populist. On the other hand, there's the idea that this is all being done by a literal oligarch, like as close as you can get in the American system to an actual oligarch. So how do you think about the balance between

this worthy goal, noble goal of cutting down on largesse and actually, you know, making the spending of taxpayer money more efficient. And on the other hand, having it sort of done by someone who at least has the potential to be a corporate raider for his own cause. Yeah, so that's a great question. We have to mentally separate different things here. The first is that you...

If you want social reform that empowers working people and consumers, that's not necessarily tantamount to supporting everything that's associated with big government. You know, like just a bloated administrative apparatus can actually be as...

Conservatives know this well, but it can be pretty oppressive to ordinary people and it can be gamed by incumbents to their own advantage. So it's telling, for example, that in Mexico, President AMLO, as he's popularly known, very left wing president, he actually slashed the size of government and he cut off all sorts of like magazines and NGOs and stuff that

survived only because the Mexican taxpayer was subsidizing them. And the Mexican kind of progressives, think about the Mexican equivalent of the Brooklyn left, were really, really angry with AMLO the whole time he was in power. They hated him, in part because he had cut them off from the public dole. And yet at the same time, he did things that empowers ordinary people relative to employers, relative to capital. So like raising the minimum wage, making it easier to organize jobs,

workplaces and so on. So it's not just like if you're in favor, if you consider yourself pro worker or pro labor or pro consumer, you should just want bigness in government for its own sake in every direction. But two things have to happen for this kind of reform. One is it can't be so self-dealing. It can't. The guy who has an obvious, you know, imminent misconduct

material interest in deleting quote unquote some agency should not be the one wielding that kind of scalpel. It's not even a scalpel, unfortunately. It's like an axe. It's a different thing. And the second thing I'd say is there are two different kinds of administrative agency. One is one that like, you know, it's just

you know, directly overseeing society. And I think those can be quite oppressive. However, agencies that came out of the New Deal, there's more, many more of them, you know, all the various like trade commissions, you know, et cetera. The New Deal era, I mean, New Deal order. LRB, yeah.

And then I think of the CFPB the same way, is more they're playing umpire. They're playing umpire between different social forces. So the state is mediating between labor, capital, consumers, state-backed electricity, co-ops, et cetera, et cetera. Those are not big government. What they're doing is just restraining the power of a few market giants and allowing, encouraging the other side of the market to...

exert what used to be called countervailing power by the new dealers. That's the difference, you know, like, and I think of social security, by the way, in the same vein, it's social security is not a big government program. It's not coming from the taxpayer and FDR deliberately set it up that way. It's

Going back to the 19th century and even the early 18th century, workers had set up these basically mutual organizations of mutual aid, where if one of them fell ill, the rest of them had contributed and they could take care of that person's family or if he died, the widow.

What the Social Security program did was take and just codify that and formalize it into a system. But because it's not funded by the taxpayer, it's impossible to quote unquote reform or very difficult. We'll see if Elon tries to go there. So I agree that like big government for its own sake in every direction. Sure, challenge that. It can be oppressive. But when the state plays umpire and tries to level the economic playing field between different social forces, I think that shouldn't be touched.

I'm just kind of curious, by the way, just in general, what makes people like you, a conservative social democrat, not just a social democrat? Like, what's the...

Well, that becomes a more philosophical question. So I think social democracy and we should say social and Christian democracy, they're kind of like twin traditions. In the U.S., the closest equivalent we have is the New Deal tradition is conservative, right? In other words, I'm not saying I'm not like a right wing guy who then occasionally says stuff to get like a pat on the head from like the New York Times or

or whatever. It's because as a person who wants to see a social order that is not completely disruptive to workers' lives, that conduces to family formation, things like that, well, capitalism is a profoundly revolutionary force.

It's very good at doing things efficiently and so on. We all know its benefits, but it can also be pretty disruptive. So as a conservative, I want to restrain that to try to bring it under. If we're going to have disruption, let's have it subject to political contestation rather than just having, you know, the few, the very, very powerful people.

direct the nature of so it's like a it's like a twist on the Buckley line where you know you're you're standing athwart the tide of capitalism and yelling yelling stop yeah I guess so

One last very quick point is also that the New Dealers, the Social Democrats of old, they were trying to prevent revolution. The idea was to stabilize the system in order to not have authoritarian leftism or authoritarian rightism come up. It was a conservative impulse. And I think

the people who call themselves democratic socialists would be offended to hear that. But the fundamental impulse here is not that we don't want totally classless society. Very few people do, only like really hardcore tankies. It's about restraining, keeping it under some political control, keeping it, you know, making the market safe for society is a good way to put it.

So such a, I think, important piece. So thank you for coming here to discuss some of this as it happens. Changes by the hour, seemingly. And we appreciate your time.

Thank you both. And it's good to join my colleague on a different show. All right, Emily, very nice to have your colleague on. Interesting show today. We didn't get a chance to talk about the new inflation numbers that just came out showing a rise in inflation, 3%. It's a real blow to Trump. Also a blow to your 401k. The stock market is diving on this news. It's probably going to push Trump to calm down a little bit on the trade war, you know,

And it's going to be interesting to see. I think he's just going to go into the Bureau of Labor Statistics and into the bowels of the Commerce Department and tell them to stop giving him ugly numbers. I think that's going to be Musk's task, give me better numbers. But in the meantime, I think it'll put a little bit of the brakes on that.

on the trade war. And you know, that is one of those things where it's tough. Cause like there actually are some tweaks that probably need to be made over at BLS, but then you, so like maybe there's a good end, there's a good outcome, but you just can't trust the process. Um, so something to keep an eye on for sure. Trump notoriously, uh,

cares very much about the markets on his watch, but also notoriously is a hardened ideologue on the question of tariffs. So an interesting clash here for sure. Thank you so much, everybody, for tuning in to today's edition of CounterPoints. We'll be back here next Wednesday with more. We know this was a longer show, so we appreciate everyone sticking with us. Yeah, and we'll do a little Friday thing for you just to keep you updated, and we'll see you then. ♪

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