Dr. Carol M. Swain said the U.S. Department of Education’s cut to its workforce was a “great decision” and a step in the right direction to make the department a “smoother running organization.”
Last week, Department of Education Secretary Linda McMahon announced that the department initiated a force reduction that will impact nearly 50 percent of its workforce. The impacted staff will be placed on administrative leave beginning Friday.
The reduction to its workforce will leave approximately 2,183 workers, according to the department.
Swain said she believes the cut to the department’s workforce is simply “bloat,” explaining how “Democrats use their institutions as a way to give people patronage jobs.”
“I have watched how Democrats use their institutions as a way to give people jobs, like patronage jobs. I would imagine that’s just bloat, that they can operate with half of their workforce. It’s great,” Swain said on Thursday’s edition of The Michael Patrick Leahy Show.
Swain added that securing a job in the federal government has become comparable to a tenured position of which individuals are reluctant to leave.
“With the civil service, once you got a job with the government, it was almost like tenure for the most part. Couldn’t get rid of the people,” Swain said.
“I’m not sure it cripples the organization because they may be a smoother running organization by getting rid of 2,600 people that may not have even shown up for work. That may have been just people that you look at them and wonder how they even got a job,” Swain added.
Noting how the U.S. ranked much higher in education prior to the Department of Education being founded under the Carter administration, Swain said most of the work completed by Department employees is simply “busy work” that is unlikely to reach and benefit classrooms across the nation.
“[The work] gets filed, not necessarily read, but it gets filed and all of these reports follow a certain model and for the most part, we’ve seen the studies that our government funds and most of the time the research questions that are being asked and the methods they use, it’s just meaningless,” Swain said.
“It’s just people doing busy work,” Swain added.
Tune in now to The Michael Patrick Leahy Show – your AMERICA FIRST news talk w in studio guest @CarolMSwain
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Kaitlin Housler is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Follow Kaitlin on X / Twitter.
