Trump(dis)order: Assault on learning and wisdom gathering doesn't augur well for USA

Education, Trump's new enemy

- By W.A. Wijewardena

PRESIDENT Donald Trump, after trying to undo some of the disastrous mistakes he made in his new tariff policy by softening his earlier hard stance on China by reducing tariff from 145% to 30% for three months, has now diverted his attention to a local enemy.

That enemy is education in general and Harvard University in particular.

DOGE and its poor record of performance

Regarding education in general, immediately after he was sworn in as President, he disbanded the Federal Department of Education. This he did, as he had promised in the election campaign, to downsize the federal government to be within its revenue base. This was done through the newly established Department of Government Efficiency or DOGE which was kept under the direction of billionaire, soon to be trillionaire, businessman, Elon Musk of Tesla, the rising electric vehicle, fame. According to records, up to early May, more than 9,000 contracts which the Federal Government had signed with various government agencies had been terminated by DOGE saving about $ 13 billion if one goes by the budget of 2024.1 This is peanuts compared to the promised saving of $ 2 trillion made by Elon Musk during Trump's election campaign.2

Closing of US AID

One prominent agency that had been closed has been the US Agency for International Development or US AID which also had a global education and training component like Kenya primary literacy program and NextGen early reading activity program in Malawi. All these programs were put to a stop without notice leaving the beneficiaries as well as the workers in the lurch. The bad signal that had been given by this arbitrary measure was that the world can no longer trust US administration for sustained and consistent aid packages aiming at ameliorating the conditions of the helpless in the needy countries.

Assault on Federal Department of Education