• President Donald Trump signed an executive order Thursday to officially start shutting down the Department of Education. The thing is… he can’t do that, at least not unilaterally. Shutting down the Education Department will require an act of Congress. But the Trump administration has already done a pretty thorough job of gutting the department from the inside, cutting the DOE’s staff in half earlier this month. Arne Duncan, who served as education secretary under President Barack Obama, talks about the potential catastrophes on the horizon.
• And in headlines: Maryland Congressman Glenn Ivey became the first sitting Democrat to call on Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer to step down, a federal judge blocked the Department of Government Efficiency from accessing personal information on the Social Security Administration’s data systems, and the United Kingdom and Germany issued travel warnings for the U.S.

• Check out Arne’s work with gun violence –chicagocred.org/team/arne-duncan/
• Subscribe to the What A Day Newsletter – https://tinyurl.com/3kk4nyz8
• Support victims of the fire – votesaveamerica.com/relief
• What A Day – YouTube – https://www.youtube.com/@whatadaypodcast

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TRANSCRIPT

Jane Coaston: It’s Friday, March 21st. I’m Jane Coaston, and this is What a Day, the show that is not going to buy stock in Tesla, especially if the Secretary of Commerce goes on Fox News and says we should all buy stock in Tesla. At this point, if Howard Lutnick told me the sky was blue, I’d check a few times first. [music break] On today’s show, the federal courts deal another blow to the Department of Government Efficiency. And the UK tells travelers, be careful if you’re headed to the U.S. of A. But let’s start with the end of the Department of Education. For real this time. Sort of, maybe.

[clip of President Donald Trump] Today we take a very historic action that was 45 years in the making. In a few moments, I will sign an executive order to begin eliminating the Federal Department of Education once and for all. [sound of applause]

Jane Coaston: On Thursday, in front of a bunch of kids sitting at desks for some reason, President Donald Trump signed an executive order to start shutting down the Department of Education. Well, in his opinion. But if you’ve been listening to the show, you know that this has been the plan all along. For weeks, the Trump administration has been attacking the Department of Education, cutting almost 50% of the department’s staff last week. In a letter to the department, Secretary of Education Linda McMahon said that her job was to foment a quote, “effective transfer of educational oversight to the states,” adding, quote, “this is our opportunity to perform one final, unforgettable public service to future generations of students.” Unforgettable, definitely. Maybe even irreparable. But again, you can’t just end the Department of Education with an executive order. It actually requires an act of Congress. Remember them? Now, Louisiana Republican Senator Bill Cassidy has promised to sponsor a bill eliminating the department, saying, quote, “I agree with President Trump that the Department of Education has failed its mission,” but he didn’t give a timeline. So to talk more about Thursday’s executive action and the end of the Department of Education, maybe, I spoke with President Obama’s former education secretary, Arne Duncan. Secretary Duncan, thank you so much for being here today. 

Arne Duncan: Thanks for the opportunity. 

Jane Coaston: So what actually changes with this executive order? Because the staff reductions were already happening. Education Secretary Linda McMahon has already said she saw it as her mandate to dismantle the department and Trump still needs Congress to actually shut down the department. So what is this? What should we be taking from this? 

Arne Duncan: That’s the right question and it’s actually just performance art. It’s performative to actually close the department you would need 60 senators to vote for that to happen and that’s never going to happen u and then he has already tragically already dismantled the department. He’s already stripped it for spare parts sort of down to the bone. And so the damage has already been done. It’s not that they can’t do more damage but this is unprecedented in the history of our nation. It’s an assault on public education. And he’s already started assaulting higher education, as you’ve seen in recent days as well. 

Jane Coaston: Yeah, let’s get into higher ed specifically, because colleges and universities are facing a full on assault from the administration, like demands to ditch DEI, threats of having their grant funding pulled. And I want to mention here that what DEI is, is never very clear here. You have international students being detained for joining campus protests over the war in Gaza and a broader attack against free speech in general. So you can you talk a little bit more about what this administration is trying to do to colleges and universities? 

Arne Duncan: Yeah, it’s actually, all of it is pretty terrifying, quite honestly and I don’t scare easy. I work on gun violence here in Chicago. But what this means, not just for education, but for our country is truly terrifying. So let’s be very, very clear. This is an assault on Black and Brown people. This is a white supremacist, white nationalist agenda that you can’t sugar coat or pretend that it’s not. And, you know, Elon Musk comes out of apartheid South Africa, and that’s what he would like to take us back to. Um. And everything they do is political, uh folks who have the extraordinary opportunity to go to college, to be able to think critically, to have a chance to get a college degree. Many of those folks don’t vote for Trump. And so this is just, that’s the enemy. And that’s just how he views the world. So anything he can do to attack higher education, attack the institutions of higher learning, um he will do that, because that’s in his personal political self-interest, and that’s all that he ever cares about. 

Jane Coaston: What would shuttering the Department of Education mean for higher education? Or are the other attacks that we’ve just been talking about, are those bigger threats? 

Arne Duncan: Well, he won’t shutter it, but it’s very, very interesting. So, Federal Student Aid, FSA, which administers billions and billions and billions of grants and loans every single year. For me, when I led the department, that was always, for me, the biggest operational risk. That was the thing as a CEO I worried most about is you just didn’t want to get that wrong. You didn’t want to mess it up because the stakes were so high. And what they’ve done is they’ve laid off staff and I desperately hope this doesn’t happen. But you could never get me to take the secretary of education job today because the operational risk there is so high and something catastrophic could happen. There’s a saying, you walk in some stores, there’s a sign on the door saying, you know, if you break it, you own it, you buy it. Trump has broken the department of education. He’s broken federal student aid and he will try and blame, you know, Biden or something, but he will own it um if there’s a real catastrophic failure around federal student aid. 

Jane Coaston: At what would, I mean, I’m almost afraid to ask, but what would something catastrophic around student aid look like? 

Arne Duncan: It’d mean aid not going, grants and loans, not going to individuals, people not having access to their Pell Grants. And you know it’s just like, it’s like mind boggling, but whether universities would have to shut down, whether thousands and thousands, hundreds of thousands of students wouldn’t have the chance to go to college, they would be, you know they wouldn’t be allowed to go because they’re not paying their tuition. And again, I desperately hope this doesn’t happen. But the risk of a catastrophic failure has gone up exponentially because they’ve gotten rid of all that expertise. It’s a tough analogy, but it’s just like, you know, if you got rid of half your flight controllers who are directing traffic, your odds of having a catastrophic crash go up, that’s exactly what we’re seeing on this side. 

Jane Coaston: Secretary, do you think that that might be the end goal to shutter some colleges and have fewer kids go to college? 

Arne Duncan: There’s no question. I mean, the goal is always chaos. And if if it were to you know shut down a number of universities or have hundreds of thousands of folks not have the chance to go to college, that was, as I said earlier, that would be a political win for president Trump. There’s no question about that. And, you know, he’ll always play things politically. So it’d be universities in certain states, you know, that he would, you know, try and protect or whatever, but this is a surgical strike um to inflict damage and uh that could well be the end goal. 

Jane Coaston: We had your successor, John King, on the show to talk about the staff reductions. And the zeal within today’s Republican Party for shutting down the education department, he said it wasn’t there when he was in charge. And this isn’t a popular position to take. Polls show most Americans do not want to see the education department go away. But, you know, I’ve been following conservative politics for a long time and conservatives have wanted the Department of Education to go away since it was created. So what do you think are the risks for Republicans who are clearly just going to go along with Trump on this? 

Arne Duncan: Yeah, well, as you said, if you poll the American public, two-thirds of the public don’t want this. And let’s be very, very clear. The fair question is, what does the Department of Education do? And what it basically does is it adds additional resources to some of our nation’s most disadvantaged, most vulnerable children. So uh it’s more money for poor children who live below the poverty line. It’s money for children who live in rural communities. Obviously, many of those happen to be Republican communities um who need more help. It’s money for special education children, you know, 7.5 million of those who need additional aid or more time or whatever it might be. We talked about Pell Grants. 6.5 million students have access to a Pell Grant, many first generation college goers. And if the U.S. Department of Education were to go away, if all this just is delegated to the states, there’s no accountability for outcomes. And this is not Trump’s money. He’s not, he’s not, you know, this is your money. It’s my money. It’s your listeners’ money. It’s all of our tax dollars. And you want to make sure that money is actually helping poor children learn how to read and helping special needs children have that, the chance they need to get a free and fair public education and helping Pell Grant students have access to higher education. And if you give up on that accountability, if you just, you know, uh grant money, block grant money to states. states could actually divert that money away from education to use for other things with no accountability at all. And that for me is extraordinarily troubling and scary. 

Jane Coaston: Now the people listening to this podcast do not want this to happen. So what do you recommend? How can we fight back? 

Arne Duncan: Yeah, I mean that’s the right question. And as you know, the math of this isn’t hard. You need four or five Republican congressional leaders, you need three or four Republicans in Senate to step up and say, this is not what my constituents want. It’s not good for my state. It’s not good for education. It’s not good for my families. It’s not good for the economy in my state. It’s not good for our democracy. And so whatever we can do to challenge, beg, implore, plead, talk with Republicans in the House and Senate to understand how devastating this is for the people they swore that they would serve, that’s the most important thing we can do now is you know, there are a number of legal challenges that Trump continues to lose a lot in court and we need to keep those legal challenges going, but ultimately um we’re losing our democracy. In a democracy, there are checks and balances. As you know, there’s an absence. There’s zero checks and balances right now. If we had some checks and balances, that would be the game changer. 

Jane Coaston: What gives you hope right now in this very bleak time for people who care about education? 

Arne Duncan: Yeah, it is and I never want to sugarcoat stuff. I’m always honest. Um. Talking to higher education leaders, I spoke to 2,000 educators in Orlando, Florida recently from 50, all 50 states. I have never felt and seen this kind of fear before in my life. It was visceral. It was like heartbreaking. People are scared for their profession. They’re scared for their jobs. They’re scared for the students that they serve. And I can’t say you know this movie is going end well. This could end you know horrifically for the country. Um. What does give me hope is I see the hard work going on every single day. I’m out in the community every single day. I just left a couple hundred young Black male students um who are doing a brilliance and excellence program here on South Side of Chicago, just extraordinary hard in commitment. What we can’t afford to do now is be silent. And there’s a saying, I should know who said it, that the darkest, you know, reaches of hell are reserved for those that remain silent. And so this is a time we can be scared. I’m scared. But the question is, what do you do with that fear? Do you try and hide and crawl under a rock, or do you stand up and speak up and support each other? And when folks are coming together and building community to push back, that’s the most important thing that we can do. That’s what gives me hope. That’s our chance to survive this nightmare. 

Jane Coaston: Secretary Duncan, thank you so much for joining me. 

Arne Duncan: Thanks for the opportunity. 

Jane Coaston: That was my conversation with former Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan. We’ll get to more of the news in a moment, but if you like the show, make sure to subscribe, leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts, watch us on YouTube, and share with your friends. More to come after some ads. [music break]

[AD BREAK]

Jane Coaston: Here’s what else we’re following today. 

[sung] Headlines. 

[clip of Representative Glenn Ivey] I mean, people are furious because of what Trump is doing, what Elon Musk is doing. We had an opportunity to try and block that. Um. And, you know, they passed it up. So uh that’s kind of what led me to that. 

Jane Coaston: On Wednesday, Representative Glenn Ivey from Maryland was the first Democrat to publicly call for Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer to step down. Ivey cited Schumer’s decision late last week to allow a Republican funding bill to pass. The bill avoided a government shutdown but left many Democratic politicians and voters feeling betrayed. They’re wondering whether their party is doing enough to fight the Trump administration’s agenda. What a Day newsletter writer Matt Berg spoke to Ivey. The congressman said Schumer could redeem himself in September when lawmakers have to do the shut-down dance all over again. 

[clip of Representative Glenn Ivey] My hope is, you know if they if he figures things out and you know decides he wants to go with us this time, we can all move together. 

Jane Coaston: Prior to Senate Dems allowing the bill to pass, all but one House Democrat voted against the bill. House Dems opposed the bill for many reasons, including the fact that it didn’t contain language limiting the Department of Government Efficiency’s powers. Several other representatives, including New York’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, have joined Ivey in demanding accountability for Schumer’s actions. And large progressive Gen Z organizations, including Indivisible, the Sunrise Movement, and College Democrats of America, told Schumer to either stand up or resign. No senators have called for Schumer to step down yet. We asked Ivey what kind of person he’d like to see replace Schumer. He said House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries. 

[clip of Representative Glenn Ivey] If I could clone Hakeem and run him for Senate, uh that would be great. I really do think he’s phenomenal. I really do. And so obviously he can’t be in the House and the Senate at the same time. We’re glad we got him in the House and we’re going to keep him until he becomes Speaker. 

Jane Coaston: Not many Democrats think Schumer’s position is in any real danger, and he isn’t up for re-election until 2028. A federal judge in Maryland temporarily blocked the Department of Government Efficiency from accessing personal information on the Social Security Administration’s data systems. Whew. Normally I would not want to hear DOGE and Social Security mentioned in the same breath. In her Thursday order, U.S. District Judge Ellen Hollander wrote, quote, “The DOGE team is essentially engaged in a fishing expedition at SSA in search of a fraud epidemic based on little more than suspicion.” Hollander said DOGE’s access likely violated privacy laws. And she also ordered Elon Musk, who has called Social Security a Ponzi scheme, and the DOGE Bros to get rid of any data it’s already obtained that hasn’t been anonymized. The Trump administration claims DOGE’s directive is to identify waste in the federal government. The judge said even though that’s in the public interest, quote, “that does not mean that the government can flout the law to do so.” But Hollander did suggest that DOGE staffers who undergo all the proper training could be granted access to redacted data. Her order comes in response to a lawsuit filed by a coalition of unions and retirees. Woefully insufficient, that’s what a federal judge called the Trump administration’s response Thursday to his repeated requests for more details on deportation flights over the weekend. Those flights carried hundreds of people, including alleged Venezuelan gang members the administration deported under a wartime law known as the Alien Enemies Act. U.S. District Judge James Boasberg had given Justice Department lawyers a Thursday deadline to hand over more information about the flights bound for El Salvador. It was the administration’s second chance to turn over those details. But Boasberg said Thursday the DOJ’s filings, quote, “repeated the same general information about the flights that had already been disclosed in hearings earlier this week.” Boasberg now says the DOJ has until 10 AM Eastern today to give details about ongoing discussions within the administration to invoke the state secrets privilege. To shield information from court it thinks could harm national security. And by Tuesday, the DOJ must say whether it plans to invoke those privileges. Judge Boasberg has also scheduled another hearing today over the administration’s use of the Alien Enemies Act for deportations. Lee Gelernt is deputy director of the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, which is fighting the administration’s use of the wartime law. He told MSNBC this week it’s their position that the act can’t be used during peacetime against a gang. 

[clip of Lee Gelernt] These individuals have to be given due process to show they are not gang members and don’t even fall within the terms of the proclamation. They were given zero due process to show that, much less have a lawyer to help them. 

Jane Coaston: The United Kingdom has issued new travel advice for its citizens who plan on coming to the U.S. The advice tells travelers to follow all immigration and customs rules carefully and warns American authorities enforce those rules strictly. Earlier this week, Germany issued a similar travel warning for the U.S. It said German citizens should not expect visas or entry waivers to get them into the country and that, quote, “the final decision regarding entry is made by the U.S. border official.” And that’s the news. [music break] One more thing. It’s Friday, the weekend, a time to relax and reflect, and a time for you, this weekend, to take a break. Yes, we are in some super fucked up times. I know that. You know that. Hell, those suburban resistance moms protesting who were, to be clear, right the whole time know that. And if they’re holding a protest at a town hall near you, you should probably go. There is a lot of work to be done on the local, state, and federal level to try and fix all of this shit. But first maybe, just perhaps, watch some college basketball. Yes, seriously. It’s March Madness, one of my personal favorite times of the year, up there with college football season and when my seasonal allergies stop acting up. Right now, today, there are 16 men’s and 16 women’s basketball games on television. Teams from all across the country and schools that never get much attention are on your TV right now doing something incredibly wonderfully cool. A thing that bothers me about our political conversations about colleges and universities is that those conversations always tend to be about like 10 schools, mostly in the Ivy League. I didn’t go to an Ivy League school and chances are you didn’t either if you went to college in the first place. There are just over 350 schools with a division one men’s or women’s basketball team in the United States. And this time of year is the biggest stage those schools might ever get. schools like UC San Diego, High Point University, or Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, all of which educate thousands of people every single year, maybe you’re among them, and all of which got their first ever ticket to the NCAA tournament this year. Yes, there are the blue bloods of the sport, Duke, the University of Connecticut, Michigan State, but I watch for schools like Alabama State, which won its very first NCAA tournament game ever this year on a buzzer beater. And they’re all participating in one of the few sporting events where it genuinely feels like anything can actually happen. A one seed can go down to a 16 seed. It’s now happened twice on the men’s side and once on the women’s side. Granted, that was in 1998, but the point still stands. A player you’ve never heard of in your life can become a massive superstar in like four days. That’s how we first heard of Davidson great Stephen Curry, who I hear has done pretty well in the NBA. And if you’ve been watching high-scoring talents like University of Southern California’s JuJu Watkins or UConn’s Paige Bueckers all season, the NCAA tournament can be where they cement their incredible legacies. I keep saying this and I’ll keep saying it, but sports can be good. Yes, sports are deeply political and weird and can have some truly problematic elements, but at their core, sports can be so good. They can break down barriers and bring people together in a way that few other venues really can. And I would go even further and say that sometimes, sports can make you happy. Really, when I go back and watch Mississippi State beat UConn in overtime back in 2017 to end the UConn women’s 111-game win streak, it makes me just as happy as it did when I got to watch it live. So, watch some basketball this weekend. Even better, get some folks together and watch some basketball with other people. Or head to a bar and watch basketball with strangers and find yourself high-fiving someone you will never see again. because you just saw a 15 seed win a game literally no one saw coming. It won’t fix our politics. It won’t save the world, but it’ll be good and fun. And sometimes that’s enough. [music break]

[AD BREAK]

Jane Coaston: That’s all for today. If you like the show, make sure you subscribe, leave a review, remember that you are not alone in thinking that firing thousands of federal employees and calling the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America and closing the Department of Education is very stupid, and tell your friends to listen. And if you’re into reading, and not just about how you don’t need to take it from me, because here’s Fox News. 

[clip of unnamed Fox News host] Voters oppose President Trump’s efforts to reduce the number of government employees, changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, and ranking near the bottom in support, his campaign promised to close the Department of Education. 

Jane Coaston: See? What a Day is also a nightly newsletter. Check it out and subscribe at crooked.com/subscribe. I’m Jane Coaston and seriously, Gulf of America is so dumb. [music break] What a Day is a production of Crooked Media. It’s recorded and mixed by Desmond Taylor. Our associate producers are Raven Yamamoto and Emily Fohr. Our producer is Michell Eloy. We had production help today from Tyler Hill, Johanna Case, Joseph Dutra, Greg Walters, and Julia Claire. Our senior producer is Erica Morrison, and our executive producer is Adriene Hill. Our theme music is by Colin Gilliard and Kashaka. Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East. 

[AD BREAK]