I don’t want to pick on anyone in particular here, but this is the kind of linear thinking that we really have to work our way out of in order to understand what our near-term future is going to look like. If you eliminate the DOE, that doesn’t mean that the Trump Admin is going to do no ed policy. - ThreadSky

profhalloran.bsky.social • 14 days ago

I don’t want to pick on anyone in particular here, but this is the kind of linear thinking that we really have to work our way out of in order to understand what our near-term future is going to look like.

If you eliminate the DOE, that doesn’t mean that the Trump Admin is going to do no ed policy.

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amsee.bsky.social•14 days ago

They're just going to call it something different than the "Department of Education" and pat themselves on the back because tHeY dId iT.

I say they should just own what they're trying to do and call it the Ministry of Truth.

martyolliff.bsky.social•14 days ago

Bombing DOE lets the parts the Trump Regime want to save get scattered throughout other departments while allowing the civil rights and disability accommodations parts to bleed out.

profhalloran.bsky.social•14 days ago

This idea of “what can and can’t the government do” can be situated within a larger conversation about state capacity, which is absolutely worth having. But that’s a little orthogonal to the point that I want to make here.

profhalloran.bsky.social•14 days ago

Really, what I think is important to see is that the government is a complex adaptive system of systems—and those systems are all complex and are most often systems of systems as well and those systems are also all complex.

It’s complex systems all the way down.

🐢 🐢 🐢 🐢 🐢 🐢 🐢 🐢 🐢 🐢 🐢

profhalloran.bsky.social•14 days ago

There are just plain all sorts of consequences of understanding the state as a manifold of systems that pop up in all sorts of contexts.

But the above comment is about “turning off” part of the state, and that’s an aspect of this that’s worth thinking through for a moment.

profhalloran.bsky.social•14 days ago

Okay. Let’s eliminate the Department of Education.

So what *is* the DOE. Well, it’s the administrative agency that is the (a) institutional manifestation of competence in the policy area of education; (b) the implementing agency of Federal education policy; (among many other things).

It’s off now.

profhalloran.bsky.social•14 days ago

(It should be noted that there is a very real sense in which the Trump Administration cannot actually meaningfully simply turn the DOE off—like that is another complex systems thing that opens up an entirely different can of worms…)

profhalloran.bsky.social•14 days ago

Buuuuuut Federal education policy is not off.

Sure. Turning off the DOE shreds state capacity in some pretty significant ways and that’s not nothing for all sorts of very serious reasons. Buuuuuut Federal education policy is not off.

profhalloran.bsky.social•14 days ago

In fact, we’ve seen the Trump Administration monkey around in education policy through actions from the DOJ, NIH/NSF, hell, even the USDA here in the last week. Which, you know, has been kind of a hassle for folks in the higher ed domain.

So even with the DOE “on” its purview is hardly exclusive.

nuclearanthro.bsky.social•14 days ago

Nitpicky and:

Generally (officially) DoE refers to department of energy. ED (education department) is education.

profhalloran.bsky.social•14 days ago

I was under the impression that all style guides have been struck because of woke!

(Mea culpa, noted, won’t muff again.)

nuclearanthro.bsky.social•14 days ago

No worried and like I said nitpicky. That said, I thought you were talking DoE at first and was *very* confused.

Also: government acronyms. Nobody (should) expects us to get more than 60% lol.

lomagut.bsky.social•14 days ago

What they want to do, including disbanding the DOE, is all laid out in the Project 2025 document. It's right in front of us.

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