Wednesday Morning Rant

Big news yesterday about cuts to the Department of Education amounting to around $880 million, with around $100 million of that specifically being cut from DEI-type programs. No matter who you are, that is a lot of money and I am glad to see it get sliced out. It does make me wonder, however, just how much money it actually is. With numbers this large, it is usually easier to understand it by looking at it in its own context.

So how much is $880 million, to the Department of Education? It should be a lot, because Ed shouldn't exist at all, but is it? Per the Department's FY2025 budget proposal as put forward by the Biden administration, I guess the answer is, "kinda." We don't do "budgets" anymore, of course, but we do at least pretend to track spending and per the linked document, the 2024 appropriations amounted to $79.6 billion, with Biden asking for $2.9 billion more for this fiscal year. Yesterday's cuts represent 1.1% of the 2024 appropriation.

A good start? Yes, of course. Any cut is a good start. But where the hell is that much money going? There are around 50 million students enrolled in public schools in the United States. Assuming that every penny of the Department's budget went to students, that comes out to a staggering $1,592 dollars per student nationwide. That is a stupendous amount of money. It just about covers the per-pupil capital costs of public schools (that is, the schools themselves). If, of course, that's where the money goes. It isn't.

About $19 billion, or a quarter of the Department's budget, went toward "Education for the Disadvantaged" in the form of grants to public school systems across the country. This is the "core mission" for the Department. Even assuming that money does any good at all, it's a minority of the budget. Of that $19 billion, about 2% of it went directly to subsidizing state costs for educating "migrants" under Title I-C. Hey, DOGE? I found another $375 million for you!

About $1.5 billion was in "Innovation and Improvement" grants including such things as "Education innovation and research" ($284 million) and "Supporting effective educator development" ($90 million). I strongly suspect that this is where most of the cuts DOGE announced yesterday came from, and there's surely a lot more room to cut. How much money is being shunted around in these "improvement" grants, and to whom? I look forward to finding out more as the Trump Administration and its budgetary skunkworks at DOGE continue to improve spending transparency.

Like in the $890 million discretionary spending category called "English Language Acquisition." How much of that is going directly into services for illegal aliens? How much of the $350 million - $255 million of it discretionary - put toward "Aid for Hispanic-serving institutions" in higher education went into services for illegal aliens? Tom Homan might end up saving more than DOGE.

There's more, of course. There's always more. Did you know we have mandatory (that is, legislated) spending for HBCUs? We do. It was about $80 million last year - a paltry sum when compared to the discretionary spending of $396 million in that same category, and the $120 million in discretionary spending for HBCU graduate schools. And that apparently (if I am reading the sheet correctly) doesn't count the $227 million spent on Howard University, which is a separate line item (though not Howard University's hospital, which is yet another separate line item). That is over $740 million of discretionary spending pumped into HBCUs, which have a total enrollment (as of 2022, per Pew) of around 300,000 students. That's around $2,500 per pupil. That's a lot of money, too. Where's it going? Inquiring minds want to know.

And we will likely find out, at least some of it. DOGE sliced almost a billion dollars out of Ed's budget seemingly without even trying. Good. Excellent. But as Ace put it yesterday,

This is just the easy stuff, the lowest-hanging fruit. I'm sure he can trim another $2-3 billion without much trouble at all.

posted by Joe Mannix at 11:00 AM

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