OPINION
The Biden-Harris administration has weaponized every single area of the federal government over the past four years. Their Department of Defense expelled service members who refused the COVID vaccine. Their Department of Justice engaged in nonstop persecution of President Donald Trump and his supporters.
Even their Department of Agriculture tried to take lunch money away from poor students whose schools refused to let boys compete in girls’ sports.
It’s going to be a full-time job just undoing the damage that the Democrats have wrought in each and every federal department and agency. When it comes to the Department of Education, however, President Trump can be confident that he’s already found the right woman for the job.
Last month, President Trump announced that he was choosing Linda McMahon to become his next Secretary of Education. McMahon has decades of experience as a business executive and conservative fighter. She has education experience, having spent two years on Connecticut’s state Board of Education and 16 years as a member of the Board of Trustees for Sacred Heart University.
She also has government experience — she was head of the Small Business Administration during Trump’s previous term. And she has policy chops, serving as chair of the board at the America First Policy Institute and as co-chair of the Trump-Vance transition team.
All that experience will serve her well at the Department of Education, which has gone off the rails under the Democrats' rule and is badly in need of a complete overhaul. The Biden-Harris administration has used the Department of Education not to educate America’s children — who are steadily falling behind — but instead to push their radical cultural agenda on America’s kids and to punish anyone who dares stand in their way.
Under current Education Secretary Miguel Cardona, the Department issued guidance arguing that schools need to allow boys to compete in girls’ sports. Incredibly, they declared that any school refusing to do so would be in violation of Title IX, the statute that is supposed to protect women’s opportunities in education.
Even more outrageously, they also asserted that refusing to allow males into girl’s bathrooms and locker rooms also went against Title IX.
Cardona’s time at the Department of Education has been marked by extremism. He was the one behind the infamous letter labeling concerned parents as “domestic terrorists,” a letter which Biden’s Attorney General later ordered the Department of Justice to act on.
And Cardona has spent the last years of his tenure pushing for colleges to discriminate on the basis of race, despite the Supreme Court finding that such practices violate the Constitution.
Under Cardona, the Department has also engaged in a far-reaching scheme to target Christian schools in a scrutinize-and-penalize scheme slapping them with record-setting fines for any infraction they could find.
Their record-setting penalties levied against Grand Canyon University and Liberty University totaled more than all other penalties assessed by the Department of Education over the previous seven years, including fines on Michigan State University and Penn State for their handling of the sexual misconduct of Larry Nassar and Jerry Sandusky, respectively.
While the average fine against public and private schools for Clery Act violations was $228,571, the average fine against a Christian school was $815,000.
Just undoing all the damage the Biden-Harris administration has caused will be a huge task. But doing all that while fulfilling Trump’s campaign promises to end school gender insanity and revitalize American education is an absolutely enormous undertaking.
Linda McMahon’s experience shows that she’s up for the challenge.
Terry Schilling is the president of American Principles Project. Follow him on X at @Schilling1776.