Hey, guys, ready or not, twenty twenty four is here, and we here at breaking points, are already thinking of ways we can up our game for this critical election.
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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 twenty twenty five on education policy. This is a very timely conversation given recent developments of the last twenty four 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 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, and you know, schools that are almost entirely unless they're at Hillsdale funded by the federal government in some park, 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 twelve and higher ED. So in the K twelve space, federal funding is less than ten percent of all school funding across the country, and it's worth noting. And so this is different than high red right where you get student loans, it's holly federally funded. Ninety three percent of all loans are originated in serviced by the federal government.
So two separate things. But in K twelve education, it's a very important 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 swage 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 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 sixty five 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 swage 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 in 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 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 twenty twenty five proposal seem pretty heavy on block grants, like we'll take right now to take the disabilities provision that you talked about, so you would move the you would move that over TOS. But the key thing there to me seems to be that you would also just block rerant it. And for people who don't know, blockrant just means all right, we used to fund you know, under these requirements. The states had to you know, 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 you know that means they'll get more money because you know 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 dedicate 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 you 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 remind you can remind me
you know this better way titles. 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, so a couple of things. So your example with IDA 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 and.
Something like fifteen million parents have gotten through the thicket for fifty 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 rent that funding to the states, so it doesn't go directly to schools, right, So a state could receive the
block rent. At that point, a state could decide that parents can have access to their dollars, so states could make those IDA dollars portable and if a family wanted, they could take their kid's share of IDA dollars. And honestly, at the per pupil level, it's not that much. And the overall scheme of what we spend per pupil, we're
talking about maybe two thousand dollars 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, would that pay for private school or are you talking about two thousand 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 and rolling in private school and then under this proposal, also being able to tap in to their funding under IDA 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 secutor, if Texas gets 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 they have
access to private school choice. So this is happening, but on IDA 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 Acts predated by the Education for All Handicapped Children Acts in seventy five, 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.
Just from a news perspective, what can you tell us? What do you know about what the Trump officials were doing at ED yesterday and the sixth floor that gen Vender we had a gen bender between from hot post up there. Other people are saying that, you know, eighty nine contracts were cut totaling something like nine hundred million dollars. What do you know about what's been cut so far, and what insight do you have into what further cuts or 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.
Is they're not working with you. I mean you wrote the blueprint, right.
Look, we put out for years, in fact, for almost I've been a Heritage seventeen 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 reference 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 or they do plicative or are they inappropriate at the federal level.
If they check any of those boxes, they're gone. The handful of programs that remain 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 NATE 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 nineteen sixty five. Right, And we talk about the Department, but really it was the War on Poverty, right, it was
Lyndon Johnson. It was nineteen sixty five when we first see the federal government get involved in pre K and K, twelve D and higher education. There have been no improvements as a result of that involvement. You look at the gap between low income children and more affluent kids, it's four grade levels worth of learning for It's exactly the same today as it was in nineteen sixty five. 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 you know what contracts and programs we will see, we know that there is a lot of uh, 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. Here, I wanted to just get your take on this. Here's the here are the collapsing scores. I think that you were just referring to which you know also show an increase you know from you know, and you have other ones that go show an increase before it. I feel like, you know, correlation is not causation. I look at the the timing of some of these these collapses, and I see the rise of kind of cell phones and social medias, screens.
But let me go a little bit further, so long like when you look at these long term trensis. So this is from your your project twenty twenty five document here, you know, pretty flat, you know, flat and rising for thirteen year old reading, rising for nine year old reading, you know, going back to nineteen seventy one, you know, rising for math, uh for thirteen year olds and nine year olds though you know, falling a bit, you know around the pandemic. Pandemic and screens. I think a combination
of those two you know, two things. So why like, what do you what do you think accounts for the the increase, like if you look 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, you know, absolute catastrophe for for schooling. So is you know, as is on one winding, this going to like reverse that.
Yeah, So what we didn't include and we should have are the twelfth grade results. If you look at the twelfth grade results, they are flat flat and reading flat and math. And so even though we see if some increase in reading a math for thirteen year olds and nine year olds, that doesn't persist throughout high school. And so we're just not seeing those gains throughout the years. The longer kids spends in school, the less the gains are, 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 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. 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 the 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 the benefit of reading in the
next few years. But yeah, I mean the pandemic declines, and I say pandemic declines, these were teacher union into 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 kind of 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 Rond De Santis administration
versus Trump administration with Elon Musk coming in. People like you really have spent years carefully crafting detailed plans, like granular level plans as to how to, you know, 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 dog has approached other departments, you know, without debating what should have happened to usaid even just the way that it was, it was sort of like an ad hoc. Oh, we're finding something here gone like
the melea 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 ed. And we're in the i would say enviable position that families across the country understand through experience and just intuitively that the Department of Ed has failed them over the years. We don't have to make the case like I go and give talks all the time and the biggest applause line is always closed down the Department of ED. I mean it is, So we're you'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 twelve, a relative to the red tape and regulations that the agency hands down. So you know, I think with us AID there was just less I think understanding about what the agency does among the general population. And so I think we're we're on pretty solid ground there.
So what would funding levels look like in your ideal world? You know, as we look at the world now, it's it's so hard for teachers to live near their schools, for instance, or to just live a live a dignified life, which makes it then harder to attract kind of 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 union's made a decision that they wanted more teachers rather than and I say teachers, they wanted more education employees. Right, So that 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 pay 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 nineteen sixties. To put a damper on that, we've had one hundred percent increase in the number of students in schools since the nineteen seventies, but a seven hundred percent 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 fifteen to one, 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 fifteen to one number? I don't know.
So that's a National Center for Education.
I'm not doubting that that's a stat But like what happened such that most I bet most people watching this are gonna be like, huh, there's twenty kids in my kids class.
And I should say that's high school high school numbers. So if you look your elementary and second or your elementary numbers are they are slightly higher, but for your typical high school fifteen to one. So interesting to your question, which I don't think I answered, about what is the appropriate spending level? And are you thinking for pupil are you thinking at the federal level what was either spend either what.
I mean, what matters most really is what gets down to the school.
Exactly, Yeah, one hundred percent 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 three
billion dollars 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 over 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 eighteen thousand dollars 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 forty five percent federal I'm sorry, forty five percent state, forty five percent local,
ten percent 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 seven thousand dollars 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 eighteen thousand dollars 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 And.
We haven't seen any clothes yet, honestly, and we should, right, I mean schools that are trapping kids cycles and like you know, generations of kids in these ineffective institutions should be around, right, No kids should be trapped in a school that is failing them. We're not seeing schools closed yet, but we do see the kids who are leased well served by these schools having an escape patch 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. Well, I think two things are going to put more pressure on public schools than any school choice option. One is just the demographic collapse that's coming, right, I mean that 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 if the argument of those on the left against choice was well, it's going to harm public schools, right, we should be are 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 found in And I always come back to the Freedman argument, right that we, yes, we will publicly finance K twelve 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 high ED. I was going to say it was sure a lot of our viewers are deeply concerned about, Like, so what's yeah, what kind of wrecking ball are you guys bringing to the university system.
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, a federal aid that has been dumped on these universities from federal helicopters. To quote Richard Vetter, 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 Lennon Johnson, Right, it all goes back to nineteen sixty five. 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 sixty five, then we just see this inflation intuition prices over the decades, and
it had gotten so bad by the eighties. And I think everybody knows this at this point. But in nineteen eighty seven, 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 R 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 or they found that for every additional dollar and subsidized student loans, universities increased tuition sixty cents. So they're
capturing much of that federal largest that's going there. But it has really enabled universities to not Mind's shop the way that they should, right, I mean, it is 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 facility's 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 cost 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?
No?
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.
They get access if they don't like, let's say so just lay it out like, yes, 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's fifty five thousand aggregate right now. I believe it's on.
That order, which is which is good for about like one year in college.
Well, I don't know whether 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 right hour, there was a management minimum wage went up, I got attention while I was there.
Exactly.
That was beer money. Though, like college, it is not the nineteen sixties anymore.
But look, you you can also do that. But so the the direct loan program stays in place. So we're talking about loans for grad students. We're talking about that additional parent plus one. But if you eliminate some of the federal large ss, you're going to see them. There is still a private lending market right, So it's not just the federal granted it's seven percent 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 tax payer dollars. I call them federal tax pay 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, forty four percent of mass degrees have a negative ROI, right, And so we have enabled this profligacy on the part of higher ed institutions, 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 LD 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 has not served 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.
Yeah, and definitely, yeah, there is there will probably be a gap. But there are other things 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 cost, which is sort of like arcane little policy idea, but basically capping the overhead cost that
universities can charge federal taxpayers for research grants. INIH, this was floating around a few days ago where INNIH said we're now going to cap at fifteen percent your amount of indirect costs. I mean, there are universities out there right now that are charging the taxpayer sixty cents on the dollar for their research grant overhead. I mean, it's unbelievable. And so again, this is a part of the federal large s 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 to reform to the 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 things you could possibly have, and aren't there, but they're what they required to say, like here, here are the actual specific overhead costs that are connected to there's very research.
What a university does. They'll say, here's the indirect rate that we charge. They might say, we'll accept a grant from I don't know, fill in the blank, Google, and you know, we'll accept a five percent overhead rate from Google, but we're going to charge the federal taxpayer sixty 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 privately provided significant funding. Right, you have all of the title for 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 seventies and eighties and nineties 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. Like that, it's a thing that makes us globally competitive, and it makes people want to live here for like the you know, the
most talented people in the world want to come here. Like, we're going to gut that too, and then it's just going to be, you know, a wasteland, Like 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 high 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 Books 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 four thousand 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 so is there a better way to serve the
needs of those students. Can we do war to give them flexibility with those existing federal funds to pursue career and technical ed Right, So, 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, 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 you willing us 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 sorob Amari's actually my colleague at Unheard and wrote a very very interesting piece this week that crystal Flag for us we wanted to talk about. The headline is Elon Musk is a danger to trump Ism and we should mention before we dive in that. SOB and I also have a new newsletter that you can sign up for over at onheard dot com. It's called Area forty seven. It's kind of inside scoop from
Trump World with a very unheardy lens. We're having fun over there, So go ahead and sign up, and Sarab, thank you for being here.
Thanks for having me, guys, it's so good to join you on yet another platform.
Heavily 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, you know, 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 a CFPB, not a friendly acronym, and I tell the story of Rohi Chopra, who was President Biden's now housted or outgoing director of the CFPB. He did some numerous reforms that I think were pro main street, 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 d banking. This is basically that your financial institution can drop you as a customer based on your views or what you know, 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 d banked and evangelical fundraising site that was raising money for January sixth defendants Canadian truckers who protested the COVID mandates, where d banked at the beheads of the Canadian government. In Britain, Nigel Faraj faced d banking for
a while from his financial institution, which is called Coots. 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 cfpv did. It did lots of good things. But you know, Musk had said that the CFPP 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 that they surveiled 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 a big big tech is encroaching into the financial system.
Yeah.
And Mark Andresen too went on rogan to complain about CFPB, talk about how it was de banking people and the d banking. I think a point is a great entry into this, into your piece and to the whole conversation because privately, Andresen and the others, I don't think actually would be satisfied by what Chopra did at CPB with the with with his de banking role, because it said
you cannot debank people for ideological reasons. But of course you can still dbank people for being drug traffickers or for you know working you know, working with cartels, working
with sanctioned organizations. Like there's a you know, 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 and whether or not they are just you know, you know, you're whether you're dealing with al Chapo. They hate that. They think that that's an encroachment on their freedom to
you know, to do bitcoin commerce or whatever. And so when Andresen talks about that them having so many founders who were debanked, he's doing 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 Choper to come in and deal with the actual problem that people had is interesting because it shows that he's a 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, so answer the answer 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, you actually believe they were going to do this.
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 whether before the election where the headline was Trump will have to choose populism or Elon Musk. So it's not I always saw that, and I know
the administration is torn between these competing impulses. But 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 we Chat. So it's just it's your payment system. It can do all sorts of things. And CFPD 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 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 CF of the NLRB. That's quite expected because President Biden did the same thing to trump One's general counsel. But then he also dismissed without cause or notice, is required by both statutory law
and Supreme Court. President one of the members, gwyn 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 nl RB needs under Supreme Court, president 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 Bisos 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 super 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 and LRB offices can still investigate and so on, but when it comes to an actual labor dispute where the Board as a whole has to apol 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 one thing that I've 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 kind of 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 can take you could eliminate the pentagon and still probably not put not probably you couldn't put a dent really in the debt and the deficit. So on the one hand, there's this genuinely important question of streamlining the federal government, making it more efficient 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 you know, the idea that this is all being done by a literal oligarchic is 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 large s and actually, you know, making the spending of tax para 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 raid for his own cause.
Yeah, so that's a great question. We have to separate mentally separate different things here. The first is that if you want social reform that empowers working, 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 though as well, but it can be pretty oppressive to ordinary people, and it can
be gained by incumbents to their own advantage. So it's telling, for example that in Mexico President am Loo, 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 at the 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 workplaces and so on. So it's not just like if you're in favor, if you're 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 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, uh, 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 a new Deal, uh, the the U, and then I think I think of the CFB. 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, you know, state back electricity co ops, et cetera, et cetera. Those are not big government. What they're doing is just straining the power of a few market giants and allowing, you know, encouraging the other side of the market to count 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, and in the same vein social Security is not a big government program. It's not coming from the taxpayer, and FDR deliberately set it up that way. In the going back to the nineteenth century and even the early eighteenth 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 in every direction, sure challenge that it's it can be, 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.
But I'm just kind of curious, by the way, just in general, what makes people like you 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 US. The closest equipment we have is the New Deal tradition is conservative right it. In other words, I'm not safety. I'm not like a right wing guy who then occasionally says stuff to get like a pad in the ahead out of the head from like the New York Times or whatever.
It's because as a 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 it's benefit. 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 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 the tide of capitalism and yelling, yelling stuff.
Yeah, I guess so. So one one let's very quick point is also that like the New Dealers the social democrats of old, they were trying to prevent revolution, right like the The idea was to stabilize the system in order to not have you know, authoritarian leftism or authoritarian rightism come up. It was a conservative impulse and I think the peopleeople who call themselves democratic socialists would be offended to hear that, but they're 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 we didn't get a chance to talk about the new inflation numbers that just came out showing a rise in inflation three percent. It's a real blow to Trump, also a blow to your four oh one k. The stock market is diving on this news. It's probably going to push Trump to calm down a little bit on the on the the trade trade war, you know, uh, 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 him to stop giving him ugly numbers that like, I think that's going to be Musk's task, give me better numbers. But in the me in the meantime, I think it'll put a little bit of the brakes on the on the trade war.
And you know, that is one of those things where it's tough because like there actually are some tweaks that probably need to be made over at BOLS. But then you so like maybe there's a good end, there's a good outcome, but you just can't trust the process, so somebody to keep an eye on, for sure. Trump notoriously cares very much about the markets on his watch, but also notoriously as 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 will be back here next Wednesday with more. We know this is a longer show, so we appreciate it one sticking with us.
Yeah, and we'll do a little Friday thing for you just to keep you updated. And we'll see that