President Trump announced on Friday that the Department of Education will no longer manage the $ 1.6 trillion dollar student loan portfolio or oversee special education services in a major turmoil of an organization that has sought to eliminate.
Student loans will be moved under the management of small businesses, while special education services, along with nutritional programs, will move to the Ministry of Health and Human Services, Mr Trump said.
Mr Trump told reporters who gathered at the Oval Office that the moves would be “immediately”, adding that he believed that the restructuring would “work very well”.
“You will have a lot of training, much better than it is now, with half the cost,” he added.
Mr Trump laid the groundwork for his announcement on Thursday, with an executive order to close the training department. The department cannot be closed without the approval of Congress, which created it. But once Mr Trump assumed duties, his administration has reduced the department’s workforce by more than half and eliminated $ 600 million in grants. The restoration of its primary functions will further steal the organization.
In turn, the president compared the size of the Federal Student Loans portfolio with that of Wells Fargo, the Bank – noting that Wells Fargo had over 200,000 employees, while only 1,500 people worked at the Student Aid Office of the Department of Education.
“The Ministry of Education is not a bank and must return the bank’s functions to an entity equipped to serve America’s students,” the mandate said.
The moves will convey some of the largest programs that have handled the Department of Education to organizations that had little participation in schools and passing the same reductions.
Small Business Administration, led by Kelly Loeffler, announced on Thursday that it will reduce 43 % of its approximately 6,500 employees, while the Ministry of Health and Human Services, led by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Mr Kennedy has struggled to improve nutrition and the abolition of highly processed foods from school meals.
But it has also made a series of polarized statements accusing environmental toxins and a broken food system for the “epidemic” of chronic disease that left America’s children among the most sick in the developed world.
It has also adopted marginal theories about the role that diet can play for disease prevention such as measles, while challenging the effectiveness and safety of proven vaccines, arguing that they cause autism.
