The Trump administration continues to shuffle departments as if they were similar in training, skills and experience. His latest attempt at efficiency through Musk is to eliminate the Department of Education almost entirely and shift the student loan program administration to the Small Business Administration. At the same time Musk is reducing the staff at the Small Business Administration by 43% or 2,800 employees. This shifting of duties assumes that the people who pick up the student loan administration jobs at the Small Business Administration have some understanding of how that program works, what they’re supposed to do, and how they are to follow up on outstanding student debt. If you assume that all federal jobs are widgets and one widget can be moved to another widget department without any worry of loss of efficiency, then this process could work. For this reason the moves that Trump/Musk are performing will have little positive effect on efficiency for many years to come. It is also a well known fact among IRS employees that the efficiency moves employed by Musk have so far actually increased the cost to the federal government to perform the tax processing function. This process–when initiated a few weeks ago–required IRS employees to come in on a Monday morning to learn their fate and understand what kind of e-mail accomplishments they were expected to demonstrate. Since most of the IRS employees work a four day 10 hour week the call in on Monday morning required the federal government to pay thousands of employees overtime to hear the threats that their jobs might be eliminated and to tell them what their e-mails need to include. The use of AI in this process will only indicate the shortcomings of his approach and as a result attempt to justify Musk’s inclusion in the Trump orbit. Along with the issues involved in staffing a recent survey by the Pew Research group indicates that students in the public school systems in this country have fallen seriously behind the benchmarks that the school system and our general voting population expect. At least 53% of Americans indicate that the major problem here is that the schools do not have sufficient funding or resources to carry out their function. This is the worst time we can imagine to eliminate the Department of Education whose role is to maximize the investment American taxpayers are making in the education of their younger generation. Apparently that information escaped notice by Musk and Trump. As they continue to starve the education process it is impossible to imagine that test scores on reading and math for public school students will improve. In fact it is totally reasonable to presume they will fall even further. Remember to mention this when your local GOP representative attempts to explain why the Trump administration doesn’t care about the welfare of your children or for the future of your country. These educational failures will clearly spell difficulties for America going forward. As other nations not only strive to improve but radically surpass America and its education process we will be at a distinct disadvantage in the competitive world. This is what people voted for and this is what they’re going to get like it or not.
Comments are closed