08/25/2026
Has your family been directly impacted by these changes to the department of education? If so did you reach out to Mike Rounds? And do you feel comfortable sharing his response to you?
Posting an excerpt from an email from Al Franken of the Midwest Values Pac. This is what is happening due to Senator Mike Rounds, Representative Thomas Massie, and Education Secretary Linda McMahon:
What's happening to the Department of Education right now is abhorrent.
In June, Secretary Linda McMahon quietly moved the office that oversees special education for 7.5 million kids with disabilities out of the Education Department and into Health and Human Services. She moved the office that enforces civil rights in schools — protecting kids from discrimination based on race, s*x, and disability — into the Justice Department. No vote. No debate. Just interagency paperwork.
Here's the part that should worry you even if you don't have a kid in public school: McMahon isn't hiding the goal. She's called these moves “proof of concept” — proof that the Department of Education can be hollowed out piece by piece without Congress ever having to touch it.
And this is just the start. Republicans in Congress (Mike Rounds in the Senate and Thomas Massie in the House) have introduced bills to eliminate the Department of Education outright. They haven't found the votes for that — so McMahon is just doing it for them anyway, one interagency agreement at a time, with nothing stopping her. Next up: Title I, the funding that keeps schools serving low-income kids afloat. Turn that into a block grant with no oversight and you're looking at close to 180,000 teaching positions gone and 2.8 million kids in low-income communities losing out.
The plan is to shrink the federal government down to a size where it can't help anyone.
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