Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., declared if Republicans seek to push a measure through the Senate to shutter the Department of Education, it would be “dead on arrival.”
President Donald Trump recently issued an executive order calling for the secretary of education “to the maximum extent appropriate and permitted by law, take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education and return authority over education to the States and local communities while ensuring the effective and uninterrupted delivery of services, programs, and benefits on which Americans rely.”
Trump said during remarks last week that “the department’s useful functions … will be preserved, fully preserved.”
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Regarding the notion of closing the department, Schumer asserted during a floor speech on Monday, “of course Donald Trump cannot proceed without an act of Congress. That’s the law.”
“Let me be very clear: If Republicans ever, ever, try to move a bill through the Senate that shuts down the Department of Education, Senate Democrats will halt it in its tracks. It will go nowhere. It will be dead on arrival,” he said.
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Congress created the department less than 50 years ago.
“In October 1979, Congress passed the Department of Education Organization Act (Public Law 96-88). Created by combining offices from several federal agencies, the Department began operations in May 1980,” according to the department’s website.
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Schumer has served in the nation’s legislature for nearly as long as the department has been operating — he started serving in the U.S. House of Representatives in 1981, then moved to the Senate in 1999.
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