The Department of Education's $238 Billion Grip on American Classrooms Was Never Constitutional
The federal Department of Education commands a $238 billion annual budget and exercises regulatory authority over virtually every public school in the United States — despite the fact that education does not appear in the Constitution and the Tenth Amendment explicitly reserves unenumerated powers to the states. What began in 1979 as a cabinet-level bureaucracy justified by Cold War anxieties has metastasized into a de facto national curriculum office, and the push to eliminate it is not a radic