The Trump administration continues to steamroll its way through the bureaucracy, and the internal #Resistance is growing desperate. Trump nominees have dropped the hammer on woke insanity, while his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is sifting out waste with a fine-tooth comb — then carting it away by the truckload. But some agencies are so far gone that it’s simpler for them to parcel off some responsibilities wholesale.

One department in desperate need of reform is the Department of Education (DOE), where career bureaucrats are determined to foil the will of the people’s elected chief executive, even if it means violating their own precious rules (more on this below).

“The Department of Education … has hurt us since its inception in 1979, with over $1 trillion spent and no good outcomes,” declared Rep. Tim Walberg, Chairman of the U.S. House Education and Workforce Committee, on “Washington Watch” Thursday. He expressed his hope that, under the Trump administration, “it certainly gets de-powered.”

Trump’s reform agenda may launch as soon as its pilot straps herself into the cockpit. Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Education, former WWE wrestler Linda McMahon, cleared a key hurdle on Thursday when the U.S. Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee voted to advance her nomination to the Senate floor in a 12-11 party-line vote.

McMahon “knows that we need to do some ‘KOs of agencies, of programs. We need to shift some of those responsibilities,” said Walberg. “The Civil Rights Division of the Department of Education did not stop the anti-Semitic activity on campuses. Let’s give that to the Justice Department; they can handle that. The Treasury Department can cut checks for student loans or for our K-12 system … just as well as the Department of Education.”

Family Research Council Senior Fellow for Education Studies Meg Kilgannon, who formerly served in the Education Department under the first Trump administration, agrees with chopping up the department like sushi. “Until we can get legislation through Congress to completely shut down the Department of Education as a stand-alone agency, spinning off portions as Congressman Walberg and many others have described is important work,” she told TWS. “Repurposing the Office of Civil Rights to an enforcing function of common sense and common decency will only help with this effort.”

This doesn’t mean that all reform efforts have waited until McMahon can climb into the ring. President Trump has already made changes through executive orders, Walberg pointed out, “making a fast-paced action toward getting control of the education [system] and putting it back to an entity that made this country what it is. Because education is key to our workforce, and our workforce is key to staying ahead of the world.” Thus far, he listed, Trump has threatened to pull federal funding from colleges and universities that maintain DEI departments, told K-12 schools to cooperate with parents, and protected girls’ sports and locker rooms from biological males.

Indeed, these rapid-fire actions are already bearing fruit. “I’m getting calls from college presidents (both community college, independent colleges and universities, as well as major universities) saying, ‘We want to do this. We want to commit ourselves to following the law. But you have to help us to understand what that fully means,’” related Walberg.

This new attitude came about “simply by having a new sheriff in town, as it were,” Walberg suggested. “It’s a thrilling time to see, just by attitude and words, the president is already having some significant impact.”

But the staying power of Trump’s reform agenda will be determined by whether or not “Congress is able to get its act together,” as Walberg put it. For now, Trump executive orders and rules issued by the Department of Education “will have the weight of law, but only as long as he’s there, or another president who will abide by those and continue those policies.”

Family Research Council President Tony Perkins issued a similar warning. “Four years from now, if we were to see another shift in the country, all of these gains that we’re seeing — this common sense that’s returned — could be lost,” he said. “How do we make sure that that doesn’t happen, that our children are not like ping pong balls on a political table, that are bounced back and forth, depending upon who controls the White House?”

“That’s why Congress has to step up, in both the House and the Senate, and find a means by which we can codify some of these wonderful principles and executive orders that this president is putting forward,” responded Walberg. “And that’s not going to be easy to do because of the vote count we have.” Codifying Trump’s education reforms would be much easier, he added, if Republicans hold onto their congressional majority in the 2026 midterms, giving them two more years to act.

Even with Republicans in full control of elected positions, a hostile bureaucracy with the Education Department is conspiring to undermine their agenda, according to an undercover video published Thursday by Project Veritas.

“The one nice thing about the program that I work in is that we don’t ask [citizenship] status, and we’ve been able to keep that out of our federal statute,” says Travis Combs, Education Department branch chief for applied innovation and improvement, in the video. “If Congress actually knew that we don’t have [citizenship requirements] … there would be a lot of uproar. We would be positioned as a ‘sanctuary program’ where we’re spending federal dollars on illegal immigrants.”

Combs also complained that DOGE was “in the building, looking through everything. … It’s insanity. ‘Democracy Falling’ should be the title of the movie.” To evade DOGE-installed “software on our computer that tracks keystrokes,” he elaborated, Education Department bureaucrats who “want to have a conversation with somebody” must “take it offline, but you’re not supposed to. So, everybody uses… an app called Signal now.”

Signal is an encrypted messaging app that does not collect metadata and enables users to permanently delete messages, which is incompatible with the procedures for retaining government records.

Federal law (44 U.S.C. 3301) contains special rules governing the maintenance and disposal of federal records, which include “all recorded information, regardless of form or characteristics, made or received by a Federal agency under Federal law or in connection with the transaction of public business … as evidence of the organization, functions, policies, decisions, procedures, operations, or other activities.” Accordingly, the National Archives requires federal agencies to “capture, manage, and preserve electronic records with appropriate metadata and must be able to access and retrieve electronic records, including electronic messages, through electronic searches.”

In other words, if Combs’s tale is accurate, career employees at the Department of Education — who are otherwise skilled at crafting and sticking to the rules — are knowingly violating federal record retention requirements to hide the true nature of their work from employees of the White House.

Employees in the Education Department would do well to remember the words of Paul, “Would you have no fear of the one who is in authority? Then do what is good, and you will receive his approval” (Romans 13:3).

“The challenge that reforming the Education Department presents is laid bare by the Project Veritas recordings,” counseled Kilgannon. “Because political appointees will be unable to determine which career civil servants are honest brokers serving the country, and which are serving their own ideals and agendas, very many of them will have to be sidelined so President Trump’s mandate can be accomplished.”

Beyond legislative reinforcement and personnel changes, Perkins argued that “there has to be a cultural shift” to reform America’s education system. “And obviously the policies help influence that,” he said. But, more importantly, “we’ve got to have a spiritual awakening in this country to return to transcendent truth.”