Demolition - Part 3

From the LA Times: President Trump signaled his plans Tuesday to diminish the U.S. Department of Education, saying that he has told Secretary-Designate Linda McMahon that he wants her to “put herself out of a job” and that he would work with Congress and teachers unions to achieve his goal of turning education over to the states...

The department’s K-12 programs serve more than 50 million students attending 130,000 public and private schools; federal grant, loan, and work-study assistance benefits more than 13 million post-secondary students. Student loans also fall under the department’s authority. Conservatives have criticized the student loan process, with Republican states successfully suing the Biden administration over its multiple attempts to cancel wide swaths of the nation’s ballooning federal student loan debt. According to the Education Department, the government is owed more than $1.5 trillion in student loans by more than 43 million Americans...

California has a massive stake in how the department is run. The state receives more than $2.1 billion in Title I grants to counteract the effects of poverty — more than any other state — with $417 million provided to Los Angeles Unified, the nation’s second-largest school system, according to the California Department of Education. More than 200,000 low-income students in the California State University system, the largest and most diverse four-year higher education system in the nation, annually rely on $1 billion in federal Pell grants to afford college. At the University of California, more than 80,000 undergraduate students received about $454 million in Pell Grants in the 2023-24 academic year...

Full story at https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-02-04/trump-to-diminish-education-department-financial-aid-fate-uncertain.