Some insane person wrote an op-ed in the New York Times today. He proposes balancing the budget by getting rid of the Department of Energy and the Department of Education. 

We ought to get rid of certain federal departments and agencies, stopping only to shift the role of governing back to the states, where it belongs. The Departments of Education and Energy, for example, are two bloated bureaucracies that we don’t need; their core functions would be absorbed by the states through block grants, saving taxpayers at least $500 billion over the next decade.

Constitutionally speaking, the federal government should not have a role in K-12 public education anyway. Overpaid Washington bureaucrats shouldn’t be deciding how to provide for teachers and students, whose own state and local governments are better equipped to understand their needs. A Heritage Foundation study showed that in 2010, the average salary of an Education Department employee reached $103,000 — nearly double the average public-school teacher’s salary. Let’s phase out a large portion of the department’s roughly $70 billion budget. We can transfer the remaining dollars directly to the states, where they will be used more wisely.

Nice of the New York Times to publish this crap. 

First of all, education is still largely a state and local function in this country. The federal government only provides 10% of all education funding. 

Second, Ronald Reagan came to office swearing that he was going to get of the Department of Education. He hand picked a guy whose main job was to get rid of the Department of Education. Guess what? After a few months on the job, he refused to do it. There was no political will to get rid of the department anywhere. Later, Reagan himself ended up embracing the role of the federal government and education by speaking out on his pet topics. 

Third, the Federal government's role in education is primarily to fill in the gaps of state and local government. They help the kids that need expensive help, like special needs kids. They help out disadvantaged kids, because the localities don't have the funds to properly educate those kids. They give money to schools on Indian reservations and army bases that can't impose taxes on the local populations. 

Fourth, towns WANT the money from the federal government. They are VERY pissed off about losing the money because of the sequester. 

Slight tangent. The lack of national coverage of the impact of the sequester on education is SINFUL. Major media fail. Instead, we're getting crap about the White House Tours and the Easter Egg Hunt. You know where they are really freaking out about the education sequester? In local newspapers and Patch articles. If you google "education cuts and sequester," there are perhaps one or two articles in major newspapers. All the rest are local news stories. Nice job, national media! 

Fifth, the stupid, stupid point about the salary of the education department official is stupid. Stupid, I tell you! A small fraction of the Department of Education's budget goes towards salaries. Most of it actually goes to the state and localities to pay for programs. 

And they are paying for good programs – school lunches. Money for disabled kids. Do we really want to stop funding this stuff? Really?