The U.S. Department of Education may be “dissolved” in the coming days, U.S. Rep. Melanie Stansbury (D-NM) reportedly has said, claiming that Elon Musk’s DOGE team currently is “actively dismantling” Department of Education programs.

Congresswoman Stansbury “said Elon Musk’s DOGE team is ‘actively dismantling’ federal Department of Education programs today,” HuffPost White House and congressional reporter Jennifer Bendery wrote Tuesday afternoon.

“They are in the building, on the 6th floor, canceling grants and contracts,” Stansbury said.

“Stansbury says her understanding is the Trump admin ‘has been running drills for the last couple of weeks, planning for this,'” Bendery reports. “She also said she expects that ‘the Department of Education is going to potentially be dissolved in the coming days.’ And yes, this is illegal.”

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“It’s not legal. They know it’s not legal. But they’re doing it anyway,” Stansbury told Bendery. “The only recourse we have right now is to … go the courts.”

The U.S Department of Education was created in 1979 by an act of Congress and would legally require another race of Congress for it to be shut down.

Musk, according to The New York Times, has announced cuts at the Department of Education of more than $900 million.

“Most, if not all, of the contract cuts hit the Institute of Education Sciences’s portfolio, including Education Innovation and Research grants and review projects associated with the What Works Clearinghouse, which produces and curates research on best practices in education, according to three people familiar with the department’s contracting. The people requested anonymity out of fear of reprisal because they were not authorized to discuss the cuts,” the Times noted.

“Less than two weeks after the release of new federal testing data showing reading achievement at historic lows, the cuts were likely to hit research intended to answer questions about some of the biggest problems in American education since the Covid-19 pandemic, such as absenteeism and student behavioral challenges.”

Should Trump go through with attempting to eliminate the Department of Education by means not including Congress, it would be up to the federal courts to stop him. But Trump and his vice president, JD Vance, along with a growing number of their allies, appear to have convinced a number of his MAGA base that judges should not have the ability to block any actions the president takes. Judges, however, can, and do.

Last week, MSNBC reported that “Elon Musk says Department of Education no longer ‘exists’.”

Democrats on Tuesday hit back.

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“The chaos and the corruption at the White House continues unabated,” U.S. Rep. Pete Aguilar said Tuesday (video below). “Elon Musk has illegal access to sensitive personal information of every taxpayer in America. He’s setting his sights on cutting Social Security benefits for American seniors who have earned their benefits over a lifetime of work, just so Tesla can continue to pay zero dollars in federal taxes.”

“And now Donald Trump has directed him to launch a Republican war on students by dismantling the Department of Education,” the California Democratic congressman continued. “President Trump and Elon Musk want to cut public education for our children and our neighborhood schools to finance a five trillion dollar tax giveaway to billionaires and wealthy corporations. By eliminating the Department of Education, Republicans are sending a clear message that they don’t care about our children reaching their full potential.”

“The American people did not vote for their neighborhood schools to be closed or class sizes to be larger. They did not vote to cut special education. The Republican war on students won’t lower the cost of eggs or groceries, but it will raise property taxes as the costs of Trump’s education cuts will be forced onto parents and homeowners,” Aguilar said.

Watch the video below or at this link.

.@RepPeteAguilar on Elon Musk: “Donald Trump has directed him to launch a Republican war on students by dismantling the Department of Education…Trump and Elon Musk want to cut public education…to finance a $5 trillion tax giveaway to billionaires and wealthy corporations.” pic.twitter.com/fr8gKettn0

— CSPAN (@cspan) February 11, 2025

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Image via Reuters

A federal judge has directed harsh criticism at the Trump administration for removing countless public health web pages and websites, ordering them restored by midnight, and suggesting their deletion may have risked violating federal law.

U.S. District Judge John Bates, a George W. Bush appointee, “ordered federal health agencies Tuesday to restore pages they removed from their websites last month to comply with President Donald Trump’s executive order on ‘gender ideology and extremism,’ saying the decision to pull them down could be detrimental to public health,” Politico reported. The order extends to the CDC, HHS, and the FDA.

“In his opinion,” Politico added, “Bates said the agencies’ decisions to take down certain webpages ‘likely’ constitute an ‘order’ that’s reviewable under federal administrative law.”

The Trump administration’s claims that the removal was necessary to review their contents and amounted to mere “maintenance” were not arguments the judge appeared willing to accept. Judge Bates instead denounced the “widespread disruption that defendants’ abrupt removal of these critical healthcare materials has caused.”

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Bates blasted the Trump administration, writing, “it bears emphasizing who ultimately bears the harm of defendants’ actions: everyday Americans, and most acutely, underprivileged Americans, seeking healthcare. These individuals rely on the care of doctors… If those doctors cannot provide these individuals the care they need (and deserve) within the scheduled and often limited time frame, there is a chance that some individuals will not receive treatment, including for severe, life-threatening conditions. The public thus has a strong interest in avoiding these serious injuries to the public health.”

In his opinion granting Doctors for America a temporary stay, Bates offered several examples of “irreparable harm” the government’s actions have already caused.

Doctors for America “has shown its members are already suffering such harm. To start, [one doctor] serves the students of ‘one of the most underserved high schools in Chicago.'”

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“In this work, she ‘regularly’ relies on CDC’s resources on sexually transmitted diseases (‘STDs’)… The harm she has suffered since CDC removed those pages is neither hypothetical nor far off. The high school ‘recently had an outbreak of Chlamydia,’ and now that she is ‘[w]ithout t[he] crucial CDC resources,’ she is ‘not able to do [her] job to help address this urgent situation.'”

Bates also cited a statement from a leading physicians’ group, and wrote that “the lost materials are more than ‘academic references—they are vital for real-time clinical decision-making in hospitals, clinics and emergency departments across the country.'”

“Without them, health care providers and researchers are left ‘without up-to-date recommendations on managing infectious diseases, public health threats, essential preventive care and chronic conditions.'”

Politico reports Doctors for America had sued “the Office of Personnel Management, the CDC, the FDA and HHS last week, claiming the missing information ‘deprives’ doctors and researchers of ready access to data that’s critical to treating patients and addressing public health emergencies.”

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Image via Reuters

In 1976, during America’s bicentennial, President Gerald Ford became the first president to recognize February as Black History Month. Ten years later, after a joint resolution of Congress decreed it, President Ronald Reagan signed a proclamation observing the event. Every president since Reagan has issued proclamations observing Black History Month.

President Trump’s Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, has scrapped recognition of all “identity” events, including Black History Month, Pride Month, Hispanic Heritage Month, Women’s History Month, and National Disability Employment Awareness Month — declaring them all “Dead,” via a memo, according to USA Today.

“Our unity and purpose are instrumental to meeting the Department’s warfighting mission,” Hegseth’s memo, titled, “Identity Months Dead at DoD,” reads. “Efforts to divide the force – to put one group ahead of another – erode camaraderie and threaten mission execution.”

Standing on a stage last week at a Pentagon town hall (video below), Secretary Hegseth elaborated.

“I think the single dumbest phrase in military history is ‘our diversity is our strength.’ I think our strength is our unity. Our strength is our shared purpose. Regardless of our background, regardless of how we grew up, regardless of our gender, regardless of our race, in this department, we will treat everyone equally. We will treat everyone with fairness. We will treat everyone with respect, and we will judge you as an individual by your merit and by your commitment to the team and the mission. That’s how it has been. That’s how it will be.”

READ MORE: The 27 Words the NSA Is Scrubbing From Its Websites: Report

Last week, Reuters noted that “Hegseth has criticized diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives in the military, and, in his latest book, asked whether the top U.S. general has the job because he is Black. Reuters has previously reported about the possibility of mass firing among top brass, something Hegseth repeatedly refused to rule out during his confirmation process.”

Journalist Errol Louis, who has degrees from Harvard, Yale, and Brooklyn Law, last week commented on Hegseth’s remarks: “In 5 years, most recruitable adults will be people of color. The military’s current recruitment crisis is likely to worsen under Hegseth.”

On Monday, Military.com reported that at least four of the five Military service branches — Army, Navy, Air Force, and Space Force — have pulled out of a top recruiting opportunity, “a prestigious Black engineering event,” and by doing so they are “turning down access to a key pool of highly qualified potential applicants amid President Donald Trump’s purge of diversity initiatives in the military.”

“Until this week, Army Recruiting Command had a long-standing public partnership with the Black Engineer of the Year Awards, or BEYA, an annual conference that draws students, academics and professionals in science, technology, engineering and math, also known as STEM,” Military.com reported. “The event, which takes place in Baltimore, has historically been a key venue for the Pentagon to recruit talent, including awarding Reserve Officers’ Training Corps scholarships and pitching military service to rising engineers. Past BEYA events have included the Army chief of staff and the defense secretary.”

Three years ago, DOD News, part of the U.S. Department of Defense, reported, “The Defense Department is likely the largest employer of engineers in the United States, and the department will need even more to continue to protect the nation, said Barbara McQuiston, who now performs the duties of the deputy undersecretary of defense for research and engineering.”

“The DOD has over 100,000 engineers, and they are incredibly important to us,” McQuiston also said, DOD News added. “You can imagine the range of capabilities and personnel that we have working on the hardest problems — from civil engineers and software engineers to material engineers and chemical engineers — just a whole range of engineers looking at some of the toughest problems for DOD. We couldn’t function without them. They touch everything that we do.”

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It appears some Army recruiters and officers are not pleased with the decision to pull out of the Black Engineer of the Year Awards conference.

“This is one of the most talent-dense events we do,” an unnamed Army recruiter told Military.com. “Our footprint there has always been significant. We need the talent.”

“It’s f—ing racist,” an unnamed active-duty Army general told Military.com. “For the Army now, it’s ‘Blacks need not apply’ and it breaks my heart.”

But the Pentagon’s involvement in some other recruiting events has not been scrapped.

“Last week, the same Army recruiting unit that would have attended BEYA instead participated in a National Rifle Association-sponsored event in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, a predominantly white gathering that recruiters acknowledge is less likely to yield high-quality applicants,” Military.com noted.

Military.com spoke with five recruiters who “saw the move as a significant and problematic escalation in the Pentagon’s rejection of diversity initiatives, which have been widely interpreted as programs that recognize women and troops with minority backgrounds, as well as gay and lesbian troops.”

On Monday, Secretary Hegseth announced a “pause” for all medical treatments of transgender service members, and a pause on accepting any new transgender service members into the U.S. Military. During his first term, Trump tried to throw out every transgender service member, but his efforts were stymied in the courts.

Also on Monday, President Trump continued his efforts to entirely reshape the culture of America’s Armed Forces, starting at the very beginning of the pipeline.

“Our Service Academies have been infiltrated by Woke Leftist Ideologues over the last four years. I have ordered the immediate dismissal of the Board of Visitors for the Army, Air Force, Navy, and Coast Guard,” the Commander-in-Chief announced Monday afternoon. The Boards ensure accountability and civilian oversight at institutions like West Point. “We will have the strongest Military in History, and that begins by appointing new individuals to these Boards. We must make the Military Academies GREAT AGAIN!”

Watch the video below or at this link.

.@SecDef Pete Hegseth: “The single dumbest phrase in military history is ‘our diversity is our strength.’ I think our strength is our unity. Our strength is our shared purpose.” pic.twitter.com/xgXobOndeo

— CSPAN (@cspan) February 7, 2025

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