Two hundred years ago, when Thomas Jefferson was founding the University of Virginia, it was suggested that he seek federal funding to assist the effort.
No, the former president replied, it would require a constitutional amendment before the federal government could fund education.
No such amendment was ever ratified, but apparently the author of the Declaration of Independence was wrong.
Released in May, the Fiscal Year 2020 Department of Education Budget Summary runs to 60 single-spaced pages. From it you’ll learn,
The Department's early learning, elementary, and secondary education programs annually serve approximately 18,377 school districts and more than 55 million students attending more than 98,000 public and 34,000 private schools. Department programs also provide grant, loan, and work-study assistance to approximately 12 million postsecondary students at over 6,000 institutions of higher education.
To make this happen, the Trump administration proposes to spend about $64 billion, plus “discretionary and mandatory funding that would make available $131 billion in new federal student aid.”
It plans to fund nearly 4,000 Education Department employees. That amounts to 10% less than what was appropriated by Congress for 2019. At least we’re heading in the right direction, right? Not so fast.
In 2019 Congress added more than $15 billion (23+ percent) to the Trump Administration’s education budget proposal. That appropriation was nearly $11 billion (15+ percent) more than Congress appropriated for education in 2018.
How did we get from "zero without an amendment" to hundreds of billions of dollars and thousands of employees?
Washington’s political elites—aided and abetted by unelected judges—have learned they can ignore what once was commonsense to men like Thomas Jefferson.
The constraint of “enumerated powers” written in 1787 and still functioning in 1819 when Jefferson founded UVA must be made explicit.
We need an amendment that sets well-articulated limits on Washington’s jurisdiction, particularly as concerns education.
Stop Washington from confiscating your money and giving it to its army of bureaucrats to spend. Sign our petition and volunteer to help COS Action today.
