This is the Catery Daily podcast for Friday, January 24th, 2025.

I'm Keelab Brown.

The end of the U.S. Department of Education is a good idea, and there is newfound energy behind that prospect.

But how you end that department matters.

Cato's Neil McCluskey details the ways in which the department

could and should be ended. Let's start with a very simple question, Neil. Well, maybe not that

simple. What does the Department of Education do? Well, the first thing people should know about the

Department of Education is what it does

not do, and what it does not do is teach any students.

So I think people have the impression that if the Department of Education were to be eliminated,

that suddenly there'd be a whole lot of education that went away.

But the federal government doesn't

teach anyone. It supplies money, but of course money has to come from taxpayers, who it turns out

live in states and school districts, go to Washington, gets burned off in a lot of bureaucracy

for a lot of different programs and then get sent back to them. But, you know, if you think of

the Department of Defense, they're actually supplying defense, the Army, the Navy, the Air Force.

But the Department of Education, it's not providing any educators. It's not doing any education.

And so people need to understand that it is really just a way or a place where money gets shuffled around in the name of education.

Thomas Massey, who has the distinction of being my representative in Congress, has for years offered a straightforward single page piece of

legislation that is, we're going to end the Department of Education. It will cease operations

on such and such a date. Still others have suggested getting rid of the Department of Education, but not simply ending its operations, shuffling those to some other departments.

How do you evaluate the seriousness of the desire, one, to get rid of the Department of Education and the, I guess, on the ground

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