Edweek: Top House Lawmaker Supports Trump’s Bid to ‘Depower’ Education Department

The newly minted chairman of the U.S. House’s education and workforce committee said Tuesday that the U.S. Department of Education needs to be dramatically scaled back.

And the Michigan Republican indicated that he won’t stand in the way of President Donald Trump’s plans to hobble or even abolish the agency by administrative action.

“I certainly want to downsize, right-size, depower the U.S. Department of Education, unless our president can abolish it overnight some way,” Rep. Tim Walberg told former U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings in an onstage interview at an event sponsored by the Bipartisan Policy Center, the nonprofit organization Spellings leads.

“Even the best-meaning bureaucrat in the U.S. Department of Education, I don’t think they have the ability to understand what goes on in Onsted school district where my kids went to school, or Detroit, or Lansing schools,” Walberg said. “They’re all different.”

What’s more, federal reporting requirements take away from educators’ ability to serve students, Walberg argued.

“About 90-plus percent of regulatory paperwork, red tape comes from the federal government,” he said. “All of that has cost that takes away, generally speaking, from the student and the teacher doing what we want them to do.”