Fox & Friends host Brian Kilmeade balked at the MAGA White House’s controversial decision to effectively shut down the Department of Education.
“I know most Republicans are for this, I am just not comfortable with the Education Department collapsing,” the Fox mainstay said during a Tuesday appearance on the network. “The same states that are having a problem, they’re just gonna get worse, and the ones that don’t have a problem, probably don’t need the supervision, but then we lose total control at the federal level.”
“If you can’t read, you can’t do anything,” Kilmeade added. “When you can’t read, you have no foundation.”
MAGA has indeed launched a full-on assault against the nation’s highest education authority since Trump assumed the presidency for the second time earlier this year.
After axing almost half of the DOE’s workforce, Trump signed an executive order effectively dismantling the department in March, tasking the Secretary of Education, former World Wrestling Entertainment CEO Linda McMahon, with transferring the body’s student loans portfolio to the Small Business Administration, and the special needs and nutritional programs to the Department of Health and Human Services.
Regional DOE Office closures began this summer, with remaining functions of funding distribution, as well as quality assessment and accountability systems, now being moved down to the state level.
Upon signing his March executive order, Trump, who’s consistently argued the DOE represents unnecessary red tape, claimed his decision had been “45 years in the making” and that “we’re going to eliminate it” because “everybody knows it’s right, and the Democrats know it’s right.”
McMahon, whose role the president has candidly said is “to put herself out of a job,” has added the move “respects the will of the American people and the President they elected [through] the elimination of bureaucratic bloat,” arguing the changes will allow the MAGA administration to “say that we left American education freer, stronger, and with more hope for the future.”
Kilmeade appeared to be firmly alone in his objections over on Fox Tuesday morning. “From a constitution standpoint, the feds should never have been involved in education,” co-host Lawrence Jones said. “That’s just not one of the duties the founders gave them the ability to do.”
