DeLauro and McMahon at Wednesday's hearing.
WASHINGTON — Rep. Rosa DeLauro used a House subcommittee hearing Wednesday to accuse Education Secretary Linda McMahon of “deliberately and flagrantly” breaking the law by refusing to spend congressionally approved funding on students and schools.
DeLauro said McMahon and the Trump administration had no right to withhold funding already approved by Congress and signed into law.
“Under your leadership of the department, hundreds of millions of dollars have been frozen, and entire programs have been terminated,” said DeLauro, the top Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee and the subcommittee that oversees education funding, which held Wednesday’s budget hearing,
“By recklessly incapacitating the department you lead, you are usurping Congress’s authority and infringing on Congress’s power of the purse,” DeLauro said. “As long as you continue to deliberately and flagrantly defy the law, you will continue to lose in court — but let us be clear about who is losing most of all: the children and families of this country.”
It is a theme that DeLauro has returned to again and again as she pushed back against Trump administration officials who have unilaterally cut agency budgets and programs funded by Congress.
“This administration is recklessly and unlawfully freezing and stealing congressionally appropriated funds from agencies, programs, and services across the government that serve the American people,” DeLauro told McMahon, a former Connecticut businesswoman who twice ran for the Senate in her home state. “You, President Trump, and Elon Musk are attacking public education to pay for tax cuts you stand to directly benefit from.”
In education, however, it’s personal. DeLauro said her mother used to take her after school to the sweatshop where she saw the women hunched over their machines making dresses. She recalled her mom telling her, “Get an education so you don’t have to do this.” Her immigrant father from Italy never went to high school but delivered the same message — “get an education” – she said.
McMahon said the agency was fulfilling Trump’s campaign promise to eliminate the federal bureaucracy and return education to the states.
“Since Jan. 20 of this year, we have operated on an accelerated timeline to review our programs and identify non-statutory activities, impose austerity on spending, and apply additional accountability measures across the board,” she said. “We have reassessed all contracts with third parties, executed a downsizing and reduction in force of nearly 50 percent, and suspended grants that violated federal law or conflicted with the priorities of most Americans, as reflected in President Trump’s electoral mandate.”
DeLauro zeroed in on funding for grants for student mental health programs, which she said have been cut despite being approved by Congress.
“Do you commit to us to follow the law and to obligate those funds or are you planning to break the law by withholding congressionally appropriated funds?” DeLauro asked.
“We are evaluating every single program,” McMahon responded.
“This is money that was appropriated,” DeLauro said. “You plan to break the law by impounding congressionally approved funds? Yes or no?”
“We are going to abide by the law,” McMahon said.
DeLauro also took issue with Trump’s proposal to cut $12 billion from the Education Department budget for the 12 months beginning Oct. 1, including reducing federal grants to states and cutting financial aid or work study opportunities for more than 2 million students.
“It is clear that your mission is to dismantle our federal investments in our nation’s public education,” DeLauro said. “You and President Trump explicitly seek to eliminate the Department of Education, which Republicans have proposed for decades. But let me be clear with you: You will not have the partnership of Congress in your efforts to destroy the Department of Education and eliminate public education in this nation. Not on our watch.”
McMahon, though, said the budget request reflected the administration’s priorities, including increasing taxpayer funds going to private and parochial schools, being responsible stewards of federal funding, and moving towards shutting the department.
“The era of indiscriminately spending money without correcting underlying problems must end,” she said. “This budget reduction marks a pivotal step toward responsibly winding down the department while preserving key programs and empowering states, parents, and educators to deliver a world-class education. We are consolidating and creating efficiencies in the bureaucracy as it exists: which means less taxpayer money is needed to fund it. This is an outcome that all should celebrate.”
When she was nominated for education secretary, McMahon faced strong opposition from U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy, one of the Democrats she ran against for a Connecticut U.S. Senate seat.
He was a “hell no” on her confirmation, accusing her of trying to weaken public schools and then sell them to private investors.
“What they’re trying to do is undermine public education as an excuse so they can then sell off our elementary schools and our middle schools to the highest bidder, to the private equity companies, to Wall Street,” he said in February. “They’re going to purposely make it bad so they can sell it off to their friends on Wall Street.”