The New Yorker:

The President cannot legally shut down a government agency, but his Administration could make it essentially impossible for the D.O.E. to function.

By Jessica Winter

Earlier this month, the Trump Administration announced that it was laying off thirteen hundred employees of the U.S. Department of Education, in addition to the hundreds of workers who had already either lost their jobs or accepted buyout offers. Three areas of the D.O.E. in particular were disproportionately affected by the cuts: student aid, civil-rights complaints, and education research. Then, on Thursday, this slow-motion vivisection of a federal agency culminated in a symbolic death blow, when President Trump signed an executive order declaring the imminent closure of the D.O.E. Trump cannot legally shut down a government agency without an act of Congress, but, as seen in the recent decimation of the U.S. Agency for International Development, which had eighty-three per cent of its contracts and programs cancelled in February, his Administration could make it essentially impossible for the D.O.E. to function, at least for a time.

In a speech ahead of the signing, Trump lamented the D.O.E.’s “breathtaking failures”—above all, the nation’s dismal reading and math scores. He nodded to the latest results, published in January, of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (naep), known as the “nation’s report card.” It found that forty per cent of fourth graders and one-third of eighth graders lack basic reading skills for their age level; in math, a quarter of fourth graders and thirty-nine per cent of eighth graders haven’t acquired basic skills. Given this bleak picture, Republican governors are eager, Trump said, “to take their children back and really teach their children individually.”

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