When Elon Musk’s budget-cutters start hunting for waste in the US Education Department, good luck finding the smoking gun.
The agency’s roughly $240 billion annual haul isn’t a slush fund for whimsical bureaucrats — it’s mostly a conveyor belt, dutifully delivering dollars to programs Congress has already blessed.
Title I’s $18 billion for poor kids? Mandated. IDEA’s $15 billion for special education? Same deal. Pell Grants topping $30 billion? That’s the Higher Education Act, not some rogue educrat’s hobbyhorse.
Critics itching to dismantle the department often imagine it’s awash in frivolous spending, but the truth is more mundane: It’s mostly a middleman.
The real waste isn’t in the budget lines — it’s in the mailroom.