Ryan McMaken makes a convincing case on Mises Wire for abolishing the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). But DHS is not the only executive branch cabinet department that has been occasionally mentioned as a candidate for elimination.
Aside from the US cabinet departments of State, Treasury, and Defense that date back to the earliest years of the nation, the names of other departments—Agriculture, Commerce, Education, Energy, Health and Human Services, Homeland Security, Housing and Urban Development, Interior, Labor, Transportation, and Veterans Affairs—do not typically roll off the tips of Americans’ tongues.
Many of these departments and agencies could easily be considered candidates for elimination or consolidation.
One embarrassingly unforgettable example of a proposed cabinet department abolition was former Texas governor (and Secretary of Energy in the Trump administration) Rick Perry’s fiasco during a Republican primary presidential debate in 2012. Asked which cabinet departments he would eliminate if he were elected president, he spent 53 seconds (a lifetime in a debate) trying to remember the third of three federal agencies that he would abolish, before admitting failure and saying “Sorry, oops.” One of the other Republican candidates in the debate—Mitt Romney—helpfully suggested that perhaps Perry was thinking of the Energy Department, but the point had been lost and Perry soon withdrew from the primary race.
Education’s Checkered Past and Current Critics
The US Department of Education (ED) was created in late 1979 during the Carter administration. He had run for president in 1976, advocating a stand-alone education department after the National Education Association (NEA) had offered to endorse a candidate who would support a new department. NEA by that time had transformed from a professional association to a labor union, and was flexing its political muscles.
that no count Olsen from ECI should of never been a instructor for Dept of Education