So the proposed budget for the Department of Education, led by avaricious billionaire and every evil stepmother Betsy DeVos, has a $60 million increase in spending for charter schools. The DOE is doing so despite a growing backlash against the entire charter school movement, as well as real doubts about the effectiveness of charter schools and the constant fraud and mismanagement that has plagued them.
Meanwhile, the DOE has proposed cutting a shit-ton of programs. You've heard about the $17.6 million eliminated funding for Special Olympics Education programs, a number so absurdly low relative to the wave of negative press coverage and growing outrage that you've gotta think that Trump just asked his cabinet to spitball ideas for something really vile and needlessly cruel he could do.
But there is a whole fuck of a lot of good shit on the chopping block, like killing $1.2 billion in after-school and before-school programs that even the DOE admits "provide safe spaces" for kids. Or eliminating the only other need-based grant for college assistance, the Federal Supplemental Educational Opportunity Grant. Another particularly dickish cut is $29 million for Arts in Education, which supports arts initiatives for "students from low-income families and students with disabilities." Oh, and the budget cuts funds meant to hire more teachers because who the fuck needs that, right? We learn everything we need from Trump tweets in this time of the Great Stupiding.
Many of these are dismissed in the budget summary with the blanket statement that a program "has limited impact and funds activities that are more appropriately supported with other Federal, State, local, and private funds." Motherfuckers, if state, local, and private funds could have funded this, no one would have asked the federal government to get involved in the first place. And these are just the eliminated programs. I didn't even mention the cuts to programs for Native American kids, as well as blind and deaf kids.
This doesn't just stick it to the inner cities and all those dark people who won't ever vote for Trump. Red states are gonna get fucked redder by these cuts. For example, programs in Mississippi are gonna get reamed out Deliverance-style. The funds that would allow the state to hire around 700 new teachers? Cut. Services for before and after school for 22,000 kids? Cut. Over $60 million in cuts to just three programs in that state. Go around Red State America. Who's gonna make up the $94 million in cuts to Louisiana? The $150 million in Ohio? The $400 million in Texas? Will Betsy DeVos pitch in? Maybe she can sell one of her ten yachts.
Defending these cuts like an automaton set on "barely-disguised contempt for you goddamn poors," DeVos told a congressional committee that "We had to make some difficult decisions with this budget." Except they made stupid ones. Meanwhile, as pointed out at the hearing, a report showed that over $1 billion was wasted on "charter schools that never opened, or opened and then closed because of mismanagement and other reasons." Oh, yeah, and never forget that Republicans passed and Trump signed a tax cut for rich pricks that comes in at over $2 trillion over 10 years (or, you know, $230 billion a year, on average).
Why do this? Almost none of these things will pass. Many have already been declared dead on arrival Why put out a document that is the political equivalent of sticking one's mushroom dick in a light socket? Cutting Special Olympics has to be on the first page of the "Shit You Don't Do, Even In Case of Emergency" pamphlet they give you when you arrive in DC.
I could come up with all kinds of reasons that presuppose some sort of genuine ideology at work here. I could tell you it's part of the conservative push to make the federal government have no role in the everyday life of everyday Americans (unless you want an abortion). I could try to place this in context with typical GOP budget fuckery, where military spending is always huge, along with tax cuts, and domestic spending is always the target.
But, really, I think the answer is far more mundane and yet far more sinister. They do this shit because they get off on it. They get off on the outrage. It's what rich motherfuckers have always done to the rest of us. They make us dance and they make us scramble for their amusement. And they get away with it because they know nothing can ever really touch them.
