MAGA’s War On Education

Yesterday, I posted about the threat to higher education spearheaded by a Florida organization that proposes to redefine education as job training and to defund college courses that don’t promise graduates good salaries. 

The fact that the sponsoring organization is located in Florida shouldn’t surprise us: under DeSantis, that state is leading the way when it comes to MAGA’s war on education. He has already destroyed New College, which offended him by being “woke.”

As one observer recently wrote, DeSantis’ goal was to convert a liberal institution into a conservative one by using government money and purges. But by 2023, one third of its faculty had departed for jobs elsewhere, students were unable to find classes, and those with housing contracts were living in an airport hotel.

Today, New College spends more per student than any other institution of higher education in Florida–but the “return on investment” that so fascinates the Right has failed to materialize. The school has dropped 60 spots in the US News & World Report rankings, and its administration is currently trying to turn things around by–wait for it–recruiting student athletes and eliminating all-gender bathrooms. (In all fairness, maybe it will work. Indiana University’s winning football team has succeeding in diverting attention from the widely-criticised performance of IU’s president.)

Efforts to replace education with indoctrination aren’t limited to Florida. An article in Talking Points Memo notes that, when it comes to waging war on education, Trump appears to have taken yet another a page from the Confederacy.

In the early twentieth century, devotees of the ahistoric Lost Cause (it was all about state’s rights, not slavery) like the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) used their considerable political influence to revise history curricula. As the article reports, “For the next several decades, nearly 70 million Southern students were taught that the enslaved were actually servants and that the Confederates fought merely to preserve a Southern way of life.” The article traced the numerous efforts that commandeered state-level commissions and controlled the “history” taught to generations of students, particularly–but not exclusively– in the South.

Under President Donald Trump, this blueprint is being adapted and disseminated directly from the White House. The president in September announced the Department of Education’s partnership with dozens of conservative and far-right organizations including Turning Point USA, Moms for Liberty, and PragerU. The group will lead the Trump administration’s 250th anniversary civic education efforts “in schools across the nation.” Among the administration’s priorities? “Renewing patriotism,” and “advancing a shared understanding of America’s founding principles in schools across the nation.”…

Trump II is leaning heavily on the “again” part of his MAGA slogan by pushing policy that propels the nation backward. Experts told TPM that by partnering with right-wing groups, Trump and his allies are exercising control over the retelling of history in hopes of shaping the political opinions of the youngest Americans. With groups like TPUSA and the Heritage Foundation at the helm, the Trump administration threatens to propagandize public education for generations to come, and to revive the highly politicized, and ahistorical, curriculum campaigns of the early- and mid-20th centuries.

The linked article goes through the history of these (undeniably successful) efforts to distort history, and is very much worth reading in its entirety. It also highlights Trump’s partnership with PragerU, a conservative, anti-DEI media nonprofit, to produce “educational materials” about the Revolutionary War. 

PragerU has published materials with false claims about slavery and racism, echoing the ethos of the UDC, in the name of “American values.” Like the UDC and other 20th century education activists, the group has been lobbying to get its materials in schools for years. Under Trump, the architects of the next decades of public (and charter and private) schooling appear to be right-wing groups like the PragerU, the Heritage Foundation, and Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point.

If that isn’t chilling enough, a glance through the administration’s wider efforts to control what Americans learn is instructive. 

The administration’s numerous threats to museums and libraries are part of that war. At the end of December, The New York Times reported the destruction of NASA’s largest research library, described as “a facility that houses tens of thousands of books, documents and journals — many of them not digitized or available anywhere else.” According to a NASA spokesman, while some materials would be stored in a government warehouse, the rest would simply be tossed away. That library’s closure followed the shutdown of seven other NASA libraries around the country since 2022, including three this year. 

I think it was Santayana who warned that those who are ignorant of the past are doomed to repeat it…

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Defining “Return On Investment”

What is education, and why should we care? 

Well–as I have repeatedly argued–education is not job training. (Not that there is anything wrong with job training; it is obviously both useful and important.) Education, however, is a far more capacious concept. Familiarity with human history and with classic works of art and literature, appreciation of science and the scientific method, a basic understanding of the workings of government and the economy, the role played by the rule of law, and the ability to distinguish between logic and error–between fact and fantasy– are skills that dramatically  enhance an individual’s life and that not so incidentally make democratic regimes workable.

Which brings me to the utter idiocy of a proposal to defund college courses that don’t show a financial “return on investment.”

From a recent article in the Indianapolis Star, we learn that

An Indiana bill, written by a conservative think tank based in Florida, would deny grants and scholarships administered by the Indiana Commission for Higher Education to college degree programs that don’t provide a sufficient return on investment for graduates, just less than a year after lawmakers forced colleges to eliminate or merge hundreds of degrees.

Senate Bill 161 is based off of a similar provision in President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which blocks federal student loans and other aid from “low earning” degrees.

Words fail.

Proponents of this ridiculous measure rather obviously limit their definition of “education” to training programs that provide “real economic value.”  (Indiana’s Secretary of Education, Katie Jenner, has demonstrated her utter lack of qualification for that position by promoting the bill as “an accountability measure for schools.” )

Students whose major motive for continuing education is financial can easily find out which programs offer a monetary “return on investment.” Students and families that define “return” differently–who define it as an improved ability to understand and appreciate the world they live in– attend institutions of higher learning in order to explore the multiple gifts and lessons that previous generations have left them. For those students, the “return on investment” manifests itself in lifelong interest in the world they inhabit, and in increased understanding of –and ability to navigate– that world.

Ironically, even evaluating this proposal on its own terms shows how stupid it is.

Students who major in philosophy, the arts, or history may initially earn less than those taking courses tailored to the needs of current markets–but those essentially vocational education courses often turn out to provide considerably less financial security when market conditions change–which they do quite frequently. Meanwhile, a genuine education provides its recipients with an invaluable skill: the ability to learn, change and adapt to a rapidly changing world–including a rapidly evolving economic environment. 

This proposal isn’t the only indication that Indiana’s pathetic legislature is either unfamiliar with the concept of an education or actively hostile to it. Our legislative overlords either confuse education with job training, or they want to replace it with “Christian” indoctrination.

As the Indiana Citizen reports, among the bills filed for the 2026 legislative session were seven measures that would “incorporate Christian religious texts or beliefs commonly associated with Christian social teaching into public education and laws governing sex and gender — areas that have become recurring flashpoints at the Statehouse.”

Among the measures being advanced by Indiana’s culture warriors are bills mandating the display of the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms, bills allowing chaplains to serve in public schools, and measures that would reshape civics education to emphasize “traditional values” and to restrict how gender is defined or recognized under state law. 

The Indiana Citizen reminds readers that, during the 2025 session, more than 20 House lawmakers co-authored a House Resolution urging legislators to “humbly submit” their work to Jesus Christ and govern according to biblical principles. The resolution confirmed the results of an examination by the Arnolt Center for Investigative Journalism at Indiana University  that found Christian nationalist ideology significantly influencing Hoosier legislation. (Separation of Church and State? Evidently, only people with actual educations understand the operation of the First Amendment…)

Ironically, our legislature’s inability to understand the dimensions of an actual education is a major reason for our lackluster economic performance. Viable businesses locate in areas where they can access an educated workforce–people who have learned how to think and how to learn.

Employers aren’t looking for people trained in narrow skill-sets who’ve been taught to submit to Jesus. 

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Lessons We Are Learning

The upside of a very down time is that the grifters, clowns and neo-Nazis currently laying waste to American government and our international reputation are (accidentally, to be sure) illuminating longstanding structural weaknesses that have facilitated the damage they’re now doing.

One of those weaknesses is a result of the so-called “privatization” movement–especially as that movement co-opted organizations in the nonprofit sector. When I was still on the university faculty, that co-option was the subject of several of my academic publications.

The privatization movement overall was a response to the belief that government agencies don’t do anything well. (The people who criticise “bureaucratic waste” somehow never notice that similar problems with redundancies and “red tape” are present in any large organization, public or private…) The results of that anti-government bias have been profound–vouchers that send tax dollars to private, mostly religious schools that demonstrably don’t perform any better than the public schools, and the delivery of a wide variety of social services through not-for-profit organizations.

There are several problems with “contracting out,” the practice of paying businesses and nonprofits to provide government services.

With respect to nonprofits, one problem is “mission creep.” Mission creep occurs when a nonprofit organization has become dependent on government dollars, and the government program that they’ve been delivering ends. If the government is launching a different program–one that isn’t really consistent with the nonprofit’s mission–the organization will often contract to provide that service, despite the mismatch with its mission, in order to keep the dollars flowing.

When government benefits are delivered through nonprofit organizations, there is also a significant lack of transparency. Citizens are typically unaware that they are benefitting from a government program. (Remember the guy who shouted “keep your government hands off my Medicare at a Congressman? That was a rather extreme example…)

More troubling is the substantial research showing that the practice of contracting with for-profit and nonprofit organizations to deliver government services “hollows out”–erodes–important government capacities. In addition, managing and monitoring a contract with an outside provider requires skills that differ from those needed in most government work. Those  skills are frequently lacking, increasing the potential for waste (and worse).

The practice of contracting out also masks the growth of government. Delivering services through private or nonprofit entities doesn’t shrink the public sector–it governmentalizes the private sector. Private contractors are a significant portion of the “true” federal workforce, with some studies suggesting that their number exceeds the number of direct federal employees.

Then there’s the state action problem.

In the American legal system, the difference between public and private action matters.  Public or state action is action taken by a unit of government.   The Bill of Rights restrains only government, so it is important to know whether a particular act was public (i.e. governmental) or private.  Government cannot insist upon random drug testing of its employees, for example, although a private employer may legally do so. Public schools cannot insist that students pray, but private schools can. Government cannot ban books, discriminate against women or Wiccans, or deny citizens due process of law. Under certain circumstances, private organizations can do all of those things. The distinction between public and private is absolutely central to American constitutional law and the idea of limited government.

Contracting out can make it difficult to distinguish private from public activity. On the one hand, if a city buys computers or pencils from a private company, that vendor shouldn’t suddenly be considered part of the public sector. But what happens when the city or state engages a private company or nonprofit organization to deliver services that had previously been delivered by government employees? Can the private company engage in practices that would be unconstitutional if the government did them?

All of these issues preceded Trump. But his administration’s efforts to stamp out anything our mad would-be king considers “woke” or “DEI” or critical of him has uncovered a previously unrecognized threat. When nonprofits are dependent on government dollars, they either bend the knee or lose critical funding.

In addition to threats to revoke the tax exemptions of disfavored organizations, the administration has paused distribution of federal grants and loans. Though courts stepped in to block some actions, those initial freezes caused fear and planning uncertainty. Other administration actions have included halting previously-appropriated funding for environmental, health, and community programs, which indirectly hurt nonprofits dependent on those grants.

We need to put “rethinking government contracting” on our list of items to address once we eject the Keystone Kops who are running amok in Washington.

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Fascism Versus Market Capitalism

Thomas Edsall’s columns in the New York Times share a consistent pattern: Edsall poses a question or initiates an inquiry, then contacts several experts, posing the relevant questions, and sharing their responses. Most recently, he explored the mechanisms that have characterized the Trumpian replacement of market capitalism with a “bend the knee in order to earn government’s blessing” approach that–like so much of Trump’s administration–is reminiscent of bygone fascist regimes.

It has become common to label Trump’s administration fascist, but usually that accusation arises in the context of ICE thuggery, the attacks on minorities and the evisceration of constitutional rights–actions echoing the Fascist regimes that focused on whitewashed pasts, and claimed traditional class structures and gender roles were essential to the “social order.”

These comparisons are accurate but incomplete; fascism also–and importantly–engaged in a thoroughgoing and intentional subversion of market economics.

Fascism is sometimes called “national Socialism,” but its approach to the economy differs significantly from socialism. The most striking aspect of fascist systems, of course, is the elevation of the nation—a fervent nationalism is central to fascist philosophy. That nationalism accompanies a union between business and the state; although there is nominally private property, fascist governments control business decisions.

In one of his recent columns, Edsall explored the current echoes of that approach, and how dramatically it differs from former Republican agendas and beliefs. As he notes, Trump and his administration regularly apply a “financial and regulatory chokehold” on businesses, corporations and nonprofits that he believes are antagonistic to him, from electric cars and wind energy projects to service-providing nonprofits and television networks.

“The administration has terminated, to use one of Trump’s favorite words, wind energy projects and ended tax and other incentives for electric-powered vehicles, two industries he believes are the creation of Democratic policies.”

As Edsall notes, the Trump administration’s extensive intrusions into the private sector are in direct conflict with traditional Republican and conservative beliefs, which held that government interference with the free market should be limited. Trump, of course, is  neither conservative nor Republican–for that matter, he appears incapable of developing anything remotely like a coherent agenda, economic or otherwise. For him, government regulation is not ideologically an anathema; it is a tool to exercise power and control in his constant pursuit of self-aggrandizement.

Trump is often referred to as “transactional,” but a more accurate description of his corrupt dealings would be “quid pro quo.” Private sector businesses needing government approvals (or needing government authorities to ignore improper activities)  “bend the knee” in exchange for those desired outcomes. In effect, they have acquiesced to the government’s control of business decisions–the sort of control that characterized fascist regimes.

The administration’s growing chokehold on the private sector are also tools allowing Trump and MAGA to pursue their culture-war aspirations. According to an email to Edsall from a political historian at George Washington University,

The president’s use of the government’s power to approve corporate mergers, the fear — and the actuality — of lost research funding and government contracts have enabled Trump to shift the culture in his ideological direction. Social media companies have lifted bans on far-right hatemongers and made X and Facebook more hospitable to pro-MAGA content. Universities such as Columbia; law firms like Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher and Flom; and media institutions like ABC News have reached settlements with the Trump administration to stave off existential threats, including canceled licenses, loss of research funding and revoked security clearances.

CBS, once a key source of critical reporting on the Trump administration, has, for example, been taken over by Larry and David Ellison, Trump allies, who put Bari Weiss, the anti-woke publisher of The Free Press (and a former writer and editor for Times Opinion), in charge of the news division.

The takeover of information sources may be Trump’s most politically consequential victory. As Edsall reports, “key platforms and hubs in the social media complex — TikTok, Meta, X — have been taken over by Trump allies or have shifted right to accommodate Trump,” shielding low-information voters from vital information, and spreading bigotry and propaganda.

These incursions haven’t been limited to the private sector; as noted sociologist Kim Lane Scheppele wrote:

The entire nongovernment community (or — as we might say in tax parlance — the 501(c)(3) sector) has been threatened with a combination of loss of tax exemptions, cuts to federal funding and potential investigations.

Some statistics indicate that fully one-third of NGOS incorporated in the U.S. lost funding in the first half of 2025.

As a professor of public policy noted in his email, every part of Trump’s government is intent upon bringing private institutions to heel.

The old GOP is long gone.

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Competition And Corruption

I’ve posted before about Independent Indiana, a new organization working to make it easier for independent candidates to run for office in Indiana. Currently, those candidates face obstacles to getting on the ballot–obstacles that don’t face Republican or Democratic (or even Libertarian) candidates– and the organization wants to level that playing field.

Those changes would be in support of Independent Indiana’s major mission: making Indiana elections competitive.

Thanks to gerrymandering, it has been a long time since voters in Indiana have been able to choose between viable competing candidates. In far too many districts thought to be “safe for the GOP,” Democrats haven’t even bothered to run anyone. (In the few districts into which redistricting has crammed Democrats, the situation is the same, only reversed.)  That  situation might explain why, despite the formidable odds, over 230 people ran as independents during the past two election cycles–to offer citizens an actual choice.

And guess what? When voters have a choice, turnout and enthusiasm improve. Fifty-two percent of those independent candidates won.

There are several lessons here, but perhaps the most important is the critical importance of competitive elections. When the candidates of any party are essentially assured of winning–when the only meaningful competition occurs in the primaries–we experience two major negative consequences.

One of those consequences is broadly understood. Since primary voters are more ideological, primary contests pull candidates to the extremes. Democrats protect their left flanks, Republicans move to the right. In Red Indiana, that has given us a legislature dominated by culture warriors.

The second consequence is less well recognized, although it should be predictable. Safe seats suppress all votes, especially those of the minority party; in Indiana, that’s Democrats. The resulting apathy and embarrassingly low turnout confirm the conviction that Republicans have a continuing lock on public office in the state, and that conviction fosters corruption and self-dealing by elected officials.

Recently, Governor Mike Braun appointed State Senator Andy Zay to chair the Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission. Zay has close ties to the energy industry, and according to Vox, consumer groups have questioned Braun’s choice of Zay to lead the body that regulates that industry. There have been other allegations of questionable behavior by the Governor; a former Indiana State Police Superintendent has publicly claimed that a state police investigation into a political ally of Braun’s was dropped after Braun took office, despite the fact that the case seemed “strong.” 

Allegations are not proof, and Braun’s problems may stem more from cluelessness and ham-handedness rather than outright wrongdoing, but he certainly isn’t the only Hoosier Republican to be accused of self-dealing. Over the past few years, we’ve seen former State Rep. Sean Eberhart, a longtime GOP member of the Indiana House of Representatives, plead guilty to a federal corruption charge (he accepted the promise of a high-paying job from a gaming company in exchange for legislative support of a bill favorable to that company) and former State Senator Brent Waltz pled guilty to federal campaign finance violations and making false statements to the FBI. 

Local officials have also been in the news for corrupt behaviors. Former Clark County Sheriff Jamey Noel pled guilty in 2024 to 27 felony charges including theft, tax evasion, official misconduct, obstruction of justice, and money laundering. Noel used millions of dollars of taxpayer and emergency service funds for personal expenses like planes, cars, flights, clothing, and other luxury items. 

These are the people who got caught. We have no way of knowing whether other public officials who feel insulated from competition and thus accountability have engaged–or are currently engaging–in unethical or criminal behaviors. Not only do these revelations undermine public confidence in Indiana’s government, the cynicism they produce is manifestly unfair to the many public servants in both parties who are discharging their duties ethically and honorably.

And that brings me back to the importance of competition, the importance of giving voters a genuine choice–the importance of returning to a system where those voters choose their representatives from a slate of legitimate, competing candidates rather than going to the polls (or, increasingly not going to the polls) to discharge what is seen as a performative exercise.

If the success of independent candidates over the past couple of cycles demonstrates anything, it demonstrates that voters will turn out to participate in genuinely competitive elections, and that those voters aren’t necessarily happy with the anointed partisans who currently fill state and local positions.

If Independent Indiana can make the Hoosier state more competitive, the organization will have done us all a great service.

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