Donald Trump hijacked Tulsi Gabbard’s swearing-in ceremony to rant on his plans to “immediately” close the Department of Education and complain about the way American aircraft carriers launch their fighter aircraft.
The president swore in Gabbard at the White House as his Director of National Intelligence on Wednesday before becoming embroiled in an hour-long question-and-answer session with reporters.
Speaking in the Oval Office during the hastily assembled ceremony following Gabbard’s confirmation by the Senate earlier in the day, Trump told reporters he was planning to sign an order for unilateral tax increases on Americans in the form of tariffs on imports from countries that have their own tariffs on American imports.
He then proceeded to launch into a winding description of how “billions and billions of dollars” were being “thrown away illegally” through unspecified “fraud” in government expenditures and praised Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” for rooting out the alleged “massive fraud” while complaining about his efforts being stymied by “judges that are activists.”
He then turned to the subject of the Department of Education, which he said was “going to be a disaster” and compared the department to the longstanding effort to replace the Boeing 747 aircraft used for presidential transport.
“We signed a very strong contract. I signed a guaranteed maximum contract, which they haven’t seen in a long time, and they’re saying they’re getting hurt by it, but they have to produce the product, and we expect them to produce the product,” he said.
“They have to produce the product. They agreed to build planes at a certain price. They’re not used to that. They’re used to having time and material contracts where whatever it costs, time and material, no dates, no anything, it ends up costing five times more,” he said.
Trump also complained about the electromagnetic elevators used in the country’s Gerald R Ford-class aircraft carriers and the cost of those massive ships, which he said had ballooned from $3 billion to $18 billion apiece.
“This is one of the biggest ships in the world. It’s like landing at LaGuardia Airport, but you look at the kind of waste, fraud and abuse that this country is going through, and we have to straighten it up,” he said.
Asked whether he wants the Education Department — which has nothing to do with the cost of aircraft carriers — to be shuttered, Trump replied: “I’d like it to be closed immediately” and called the department “a big con job.”
“So they ranked the top 40 countries in the world. We’re ranked number 40th, but we’re ranked number one in one department, cost per pupil, so we spend more per pupil than any other country in the world, but we’re ranked number 40. We’ve been between 38 and 40. The last time I looked, it was 38 and then I looked two days ago, it came out the new list. It came out at number 40. So we’re ranked 40,” he said.
The president suggested that the task of education regulation should be returned solely to the states with no federal involvement, and said there are “35, maybe 37” states that could “do as well as Denmark, Norway, Finland, Sweden” when it comes to educational rankings.
He also suggested that states could divide responsibility for running schools into “sections” — which is how most states run their elementary and secondary educations currently — as a model for how education would work absent federal government involvement.
“Look at New York, you give it to Westchester County, you give it to Long Island, you give it to Nassau County. You give it to Suffolk County. Same thing you go out to and you give it to upstate New York. So you’d have four or five sections. You give it to Manhattan. Manhattan’s a little bit tougher for some reason. I don’t know why it would be tougher, but it is,” he said.
“You give to California, and you go to various areas outside of Los Angeles, and you might have six or seven different subgroups, but generally, like in if you go to Iowa, you give it to Iowa, you don’t have subgroups. You have Iowa,” he added.
In fact, Iowa does have multiple jurisdictions at the city and county level that operate their own school districts.
