During a House Appropriations Committee hearing last week, Rep. Stephanie Bice (R-OK) asked Secretary Linda McMahon about alleged 'waste, fraud, and abuse' at the Education Department.
00:00Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you, Secretary, for being here this morning with us.
00:07Let me start by saying it's amazing to me that our colleagues on the other side of the aisle
00:12want to defend an agency that I believe has become an abject failure.
00:19If you look at the stats of students across the United States,
00:23the reading scores have plummeted, the math scores have plummeted.
00:27We are not doing well in science.
00:30And we have to do something different.
00:33You mentioned Oklahoma and Governor Stitt.
00:37And in Oklahoma, we have certainly adopted charter school programs and have expanded school choice.
00:45And I think it's important to talk about why school choice is so important.
00:50You have students attending Good Shepherd, which is a school in Oklahoma that is focused on making sure
00:58that our students with developmental disabilities, particularly with autism, have the opportunity
01:05to attend a school that meets their needs.
01:08You have Mission Academy, which is a school that helps children who are battling substance abuse.
01:14It's a very unique environment for them to be able to leave a public school in many cases they've been in
01:20and be able to get a specialized education, but also address the issues of substance abuse with these young people.
01:27So I applaud what you're trying to do.
01:30I think it's important that we look at the results.
01:33That's what we're looking for here.
01:34As a mother myself who decided to send my children to a private Catholic school because I wanted them to get a faith-based education,
01:43that was my choice.
01:45And I appreciate that.
01:47And it is frustrating to me to hear my colleagues, you know, talk about how great education is
01:55when we know the numbers say something very different.
01:58So I want to start with that.
02:02I applaud your efforts to return education to the states and reduce the bloated D.C. bureaucracy.
02:08In 2023, the average U.S. Department of Vet employee made $112,000,
02:15and the average teacher in my home state of Oklahoma made $61,000.
02:20As you know, under President Trump, the department was the smallest cabinet-level agency
02:24but controlled the sixth-largest budget.
02:28I would like you to, maybe in more detail, describe some of the reforms you're implementing
02:32to cut waste, fraud, and abuse at the department and return education to the states,
02:37and particularly, I want to make it very clear, you said something in a previous response
02:41that I think is worth noting, and that is, you are not eliminating Title I-A funding,
02:46and you are not eliminating IDEA funding, which is important to students and families in my state.
02:52But can you elaborate a little bit on what you're looking at restructuring for the Department of Ed?
02:56Certainly.
02:57Well, first of all, we did look at numbers of employees we had at the Department of Education,
03:05and based on the fact that we are looking to wind down the department,
03:10we started looking at was there overlap in the number of people that we had.
03:14So we did reduce the department by about half, but we brought some back when we really evaluated all of our programs.
03:24I think we looked at them very carefully.
03:26We wanted to make sure we had the right number of people doing the right number of jobs.
03:29We are doing that.
03:31We are delivering on all of our statutorily required programs.
03:37We haven't missed a beat on those.
03:40And so I'm happy to report that.
03:42And so I think that was a big thing.
03:45But when you also look at rent, when you look at utilities, when you look at building space,
03:50we've decreased that footprint.
03:52So we're having savings there.
03:54But other ways we're looking at savings.
03:56We have examined some of the contracts.
03:58One of the things we've talked about here are the NAEP scores, the nation's report card.
04:02And I want to assure everyone the NAEP scores are going to continue.
04:05The contracts are in place to take us through the next four or five years.
04:08It is important to have a national report card.
04:12But what we found out in looking at all of the IES contracts was that we were spending about a billion dollars a year
04:21on programs and contracts and surveys and research that stayed on the shelves in schools.
04:28Teachers didn't use them.
04:30Other superintendents didn't use them.
04:32So we've taken a good close look at that.
04:34And as we enter into the new contracts, we've cut that by over 40 percent already.
04:38So that is one big cost savings.
04:42And those are the kinds of things we're doing.
04:44We're taking a look at what has just been kind of status quo.
04:48We can no longer have status quo.
04:50Thank you for that.
04:51And one quick other point I want to bring up, and I don't think we have time for a full response.
04:57But under the Biden administration, there were 2,500 anti-Semitic incidents on college campuses and K-12 schools.
05:05I have a friend who lives here in the Washington, D.C. metro area.
05:10His daughters were attending a public school.
05:13They were Jewish.
05:15They were targeted by other students.
05:17The public school did nothing.
05:20And they were forced to remove their children from that public school and put them in a private school.
05:24So I hope you will continue to fight to stand up for our friends so that they don't continue to see this anti-Semitic rhetoric across the country in schools.
