What’s the Real Reason Behind the Left’s Freak-Out About the Department of Education?

Judging from the Left’s responses to President Trump’s order to wind down the Department of Education, you might be forgiven for thinking the president had just started World War III.

“Donald Trump has officially declared war on America’s students,” Rep. John Garamendi, D-Calif., posted on X.

Kelley Robinson, president of the Human Rights Campaign, responded to the news by accusing the administration of aiming to “demolish the nation’s public education system.”

“I’m so mad, I’m spitting mad about this, because it’s hurting the people who can’t vote, children don’t vote!” Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said on MSNBC.

These people know, of course, that eliminating the Department of Education doesn’t actually mean “declaring war on America’s students” or demolishing the “public education system.” (Even school choice, which may weaken public schools by allowing tax dollars to follow students to home schooling and other options, will only introduce competition for public schools, not destroy them.)

President Trump didn’t order the demolishing of schools—he ordered the Department of Education to begin the process of turning its functions over to state education departments and to other federal agencies.

For instance, he directed that the Small Business Administration should start handling student loans and that the Department of Health and Human Services handle special needs and nutrition programs.

Another tremendous move to advance the process of eliminating @usedgov!

Without student loans at ED, there will be little left at the agency. Just a few programs – certainly not enough to justify a cabinet-level agency. https://t.co/B3yF6aOX0J

— Lindsey Burke (@lindseymburke) March 21, 2025

Sure, the Left may not trust President Trump to reassign all the department’s functions to other parts of the federal government, but this sort of restructuring hardly represents the death knell of public education.

It does, however, represent a serious threat to the big national teachers unions, and those teachers unions are part of the Left’s funding apparatus.

America’s two largest teachers unions—the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association—are notorious for bankrolling Democrats and leftist causes. In the 2024 presidential election cycle, NEA gave $3.2 million to Democrats and $29.2 million to liberal groups, according to Open Secrets. The AFT gave $2.8 million to Democrats and $4.4 million to liberal groups.

As I expose in my book, “The Woketopus: The Dark Money Cabal Manipulating the Federal Government,” these unions also help to bankroll the leftist groups that staffed and advised the Biden administration, using the federal bureaucracy to force woke ideology on the American people.

The NEA sent $420,000 to Sixteen Thirty Fund, between 2019 and 2021, for example. Sixteen Thirty Fund, one of the nonprofits established by the for-profit company Arabella Advisors, helped fund other activist groups that staffed and advised the Biden administration.

It also funded the Center for American Progress, which fed more than 60 leaders and staff into the Biden administration, and the Human Rights Campaign, which demanded the administration implement a laundry list of LGBTQ+ priorities. (By my count, the Biden administration implemented 75% of HRC’s demands.)

The American Federation of Teachers gave $840,000 to Sixteen Thirty Fund from 2020 to 2023, $75,000 to the Center for American Progress in 2019 and $100,000 to Center for American Progress Action in 2023, among others.

NEA and AFT also heavily influenced the Biden administration. President Biden notoriously hosted Weingarten and NEA President Rebecca Pringle at the White House on his very first full day in office.

This access may be the central thing the teachers unions and their allies fear losing.

Jonathan Butcher, an education research fellow at The Heritage Foundation, noted that the dissolution of the Department of Education won’t deeply impact the American school system—where states and local governments make the most important decisions—but it will deprive the unions of their access to a central decision-making authority.

“Teacher unions benefit from access to a central place where they can advocate for programs that benefit them,” Butcher told The Daily Signal in a Friday interview. He mentioned Title II spending, which funds teacher training and recruitment. “Any increase in federal Title II spending allows them to promote the idea that they need to hire more staff, which potentially gives them more members.”

“Having access to a central office from which they can lobby for large sums is more cost-effective to them than 50 different states,” he explained. However, having a central office may become a two-edged sword.

“Teacher unions’ power base is in the states—their members are in states and local chapters,” he noted. “Surveys of state and local chapters find that they don’t always approve of what the national office is doing.”

“I think the biggest long-term change is that the central office of the AFT and the NEA will have less of a reason to convince local chapters that the central office needs to exist,” Butcher explained. “The California Teachers Association’s budget is larger than some state departments of education budgets.”

He noted that while the California teachers union has been lobbying against the mandating of Phonics, the NEA and the AFT are largely silent on the issue.

Finally, without a Department of Education, “there’s less reason for the next Democrat president to invite Randi Weingarten and Rebecca Pringle to the White House for a photo-op, and that hurts the promotion that unions do.”

The outrage may have more to do with the top bureaucracy at these unions losing their access to power than it has to do with education policy.

The Left may also fear that if the NEA and AFT lose some of their power, the money they funnel to Democrats and to leftist causes may also begin to dry up.