BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON  |  MAR 17, 2025 

Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn, who reigned during much of the period from 1940-1961, famously said that, “Any jackass can kick down a barn, but it takes a good carpenter to build one.”

There are other pithy Rayburnisms: “Drudgery, darkness, and muddy roads are not conducive to anything that is good.”

They are apropos today, while President Donald Trump and his liquidator, Elon Musk, dismantle or downsize Federal agencies. They are not using a magnifying glass to assess the damage. They are not using a surgical scalpel to operate, careful to not fix what is not broken. They have even abandoned the meat-axe approach. They’ve revved up the bulldozer, without defining or explaining what they are doing.

A backstory: Back in the early 80’s my boss on the Hill, then Republican Whip Bob Michel, would introduce amendments to what were then the appropriation bills for the departments of Labor and Health, Education, and Welfare. He was the senior minority member of the (Labor-HEW) subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee.

The amendments required the agencies to cut a tiny percentage (one or two percent) of spending that could be traced to waste, fraud, and abuse. We knew the amendments would not pass the Democratically-controlled committee, but Michel had already tried to reduce spending through reductions in the increases in spending for those programs. He failed every time. The targeting of waste, fraud, and abuse was a way of reminding his colleagues and the American people that there was indeed wasteful spending in those programs.

Cutting waste, fraud, and abuse is now all the rage. It’s understandable, after years of condemning wasteful spending without doing much about it. The problem is a familiar one. If done with across-the-board spending cuts or immediate and wholesale layoffs of thousands of personnel, the actions miss their mark, just like those amendments in the eighties. It sends a message but doesn’t deliver the desired result.

There is no better example than the Department of Education. President Trump and Mr. Musk have climbed down from the cab of the bulldozer and taken the controls of a wrecking ball.

Another backstory: I was working for Mr. Michel when the Department of Education was proposed by President Jimmy Carter and authorized by Congress in 1979. It was on shaky ground from the start. Members of Congress on both sides of the aisle were skeptical, if not flat out against it, but the Department survived, as the Wall Street Journal wrote recently, partly because the National Education Association (NEA) wanted it, implying it was a payoff for the NEA endorsement of Jimmy Carter for President in 1976.

President Carter though said it would “eliminate unnecessary bureaucracy, cut red tape, and promote better service for local school systems,” according to the Journal.

Well, as is the case in the history of many Federal agencies, the Department of Education went well beyond its core mission and consumed much more of the taxpayers’ money than anyone assumed at the time. It also became the tool for ideologues who insisted on imposing their beliefs on our children and imposing their will on teachers, parents, and guardians who don’t share their beliefs.

But the Education Department also has produced an enormous amount of good. It has developed a vital source of data and information on how well our educational system—from top to bottom—is performing.

The National Center for Educational Statistics, for example, produces, among other valued studies, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), which has measured educational achievement for decades. It is the nation’s report card and has uncovered an alarming decline in a wide range of studies from math and reading to civics. The data have helped states and localities rethink their curricula and the quality of their programs.

Granted, it has also generated Federal regulations and dictates. The staff of the statistics agency has gotten the boot, according to Mark Schneider, who directed the Institute of Education Sciences for six years.

Other cuts in other agencies have been rammed by the wrecking ball in a similar manner, including student loans.

“The latest cuts,” according to the Washington Post, “decimated the office that conducts education research and administers federal student tests. These data show students are struggling—the same numbers the administration cites for wanting to shutter the Education Department. The ‘vast majority’ of the Institute of Education Sciences was laid off this week, the acting director, Matthew Soldner, told staff members in an email. He said the office’s ‘core work’ would be taken over by “others but did not say who.”

Frederick Hess, director of education policy at the American Enterprise Institute called the firings huge and unprecedented. He told the Post, “I’m sympathetic to concerns about redundancy and inefficiency and bloat, but the administration has an obligation to be transparent about what it’s doing, about which positions are being eliminated, about how much this is saving taxpayers, about how it plans to handle necessary routine and congressional mandated activities. And we haven’t gotten any of that.”

Therein lies the rub, as Shakespeare’s Hamlet would say.

We know what we are not getting, but we don’t know what we are getting.

President Trump seems bent on keeping campaign promises to drain the ‘swamp’ and expose the ‘deep state’. But he’s having it done without the oversight of Congress, without identifying the core and vital missions of Federal programs that should be protected. He hasn’t told us how those core programs are going to be preserved in other departments or agencies. We don’t know whether the mass firings are discharging personnel essential to those functions or are, in fact, all non-essential.

There is no transparency but a lot of subterfuge.

It is certainly arguable that the Founding Fathers never intended that the Federal Government would have a heavy hand in our educational system. Education has been a primary function of local and state agencies. But the country has changed. There are critical roles that now must be performed on a national level, from the national report card to the distribution of Federal funds to ensure equality of opportunity and an equivalency in the human and physical resources provided to America’s schools. These roles can and should be performed at the Federal level, but without the over-regulation and excessive controls that have become the hallmark of past progressive administrations.

We have tilted from one excess to another to satisfy an insatiable political appetite for instant gratification, ignoring the inevitable consequences.

There is and should be a median. An Administration and Congress must offer the American people some sort of vision of where they want to go and pragmatic ways to fulfill that vision, without throwing the baby out with the bathwater. They must be able to act without striking terror into millions of people who expect to be harmed or already have been by brash, impulsive, unbridled, and sometimes illegal or unconstitutional scorched-earth rampages through the government.

The transparency cited by Mr. Hess does not exist. Presidents Trump and Musk have made claims that are out-of-this-world, where Musk hopes to rule someday. There are dozens and dozens of fabrications, misrepresentations, and falsehoods underpinning their assault on Federal programs and personnel, the Congress, and courts.

Politics has always produced falsehoods, especially on the campaign trails, but the more it has become tolerated, it has also become more flagrant. The Trump-Musk subterfuge is unprecedented in its velocity, frequency, audacity, and vastness. One simple example is the claims of huge cost-savings. They are simply not true.

We are not an autocracy. We are not a monarchy. We are not anarchists. We are not a dictatorship. We are not an oligarchy. We are a Republic and ultimately the people must rule. They cannot rule in the dark. They must know and understand what is occurring and what they can expect. Most importantly, the people must be told the truth, the real unvarnished truth.
We’re at our desks, the bell has rung and anxious to be educated, but honestly and transparently. Step up to the old chalkboard, Mr. President.