'Soon We're Going Into Education': Trump Previews Elon Musk's Next DOGE Targets (Forbes Breaking News)

The Higher Education Inquirer continues to document the DOGE takeover of the US Department of Education. 

While some Democratic officials in Congress have protested this action by DOGE, there has been little resistance otherwise. 

DOGE consists of Elon Musk and several young men who have been tasked to reduce the federal budget by at least $1 Trillion. The US Senate has oversight of the Department of Education through the HELP (Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions) Committee, but Republicans, who are led by President Trump, control the Senate, and appear to be supporting these aggressive measures. 

While Mr. Musk has claimed that the Department of Education no longer exists, its website is still operating. 

DOGE also promotes the buying and selling of cryptocurrency.  

Elon Musk says US Department of Education no longer ‘exists’ (MSNBC)

Rep. Scholten, Oversight Dems Introduce Bill to Hold Musk, DOGE Accountable to the American Taxpayer

(Press Release)

Today, U.S. Congresswoman Hillary Scholten (MI03) introduced the Consistent Legal Expectations and Access to Records (CLEAR) Act, which clarifies that temporary organizations created under 5 USC 3161, like DOGE, are subject to FOIA. Given the breadth of power these organizations wield, they should be subject to the same standard of scrutiny and public information sharing that other agencies are beholden to. 

As it currently stands, DOGE does not need to comply with FOIA requests from the American public. Scholten is joined by House Committee on Oversight and Reform Ranking Member Gerry Connolly (VA11), Dave Min (CA47), and Kweisi Mfume (MD07) as co-leads on her legislation.

“In the first two weeks of Trump’s second term, chaos has reigned and has many asking… what is happening? An unelected businessman with numerous conflicts of interest has been given unprecedented access to government data and Americans' personal information. These are taxpayer dollars he’s controlling, and the American people deserve to know what’s happening. Knowledge is power, and in America, that power belongs to the people. My bill will make sure that no president, Republican or Democrat, can hide their actions from the American people,” said Rep. Scholten.

President Trump created DOGE through an executive order using an authority that allows the president to set up "temporary organizations." Congresswoman Scholten introduced this legislation to make it clear that any organization created this way is automatically subject to FOIA. The bill would apply retroactively, meaning all of DOGE’s records since it was formed would become public if the legislation is signed into law.

[Editor's note: The Higher Education Inquirer has requested digital copies of all emails between the White House and DOGE sent or received on February 5, 2025.] 

The US Will Lose To China If It Doesn’t Stop (Rogue Rocket)

The Business Plots, Then and Now

In 1933, a group of American businessman planned a coup to take down the new President, Franklin Roosevelt. In this scheme, General Smedley Butler would be tasked with orchestrating the overthrow. This attempted coup was called the Business Plot.  

College students today may ask, so what's so important about this moment in history?  The point is that we have entered an era again where big business has a dominating influence over American politics. In the case of the 1933 moment, the coup was reactive. American business had failed, a Great Depression was in progress, and businessmen were fighting to maintain control, a control that they were used to having under Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover. The man tasked to lead the plot, General Butler, squashed it before it happened. And the story largely faded away. 

Eight years later, in 1941, the US would be fighting a world war against global fascism and imperialism.  In the aftermath of the war, a stronger nation would arise. Today, we are also a nation facing intense competition and conflict, this time against China, Russia, India and other nations, with global climate change being a factor that wasn't apparent back then. 

In 2024, US business people, some of the richest people in the world, did something similar, but more proactive and less controversial. Today, folks, in general are OK with American businessmen pulling the strings. The most wealthy man have succeeded where big banks and big business failed before. And they have elected a friend. Today, cryptocurrency is booming. The stock market is booming for now. Unemployment is at record lows--for now. Big business has managed to gain greater control of the US government with little or no uproar. 

 

DeVos Funnels $250k to Musk’s Pro-Trump Super PAC (David Halperin)

Billionaire Betsy DeVos, who resigned from her job as Donald Trump’s secretary of education over Trump’s incitement of the deadly January 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol, has donated $250,000 to America PAC, the pro-Trump super PAC created by the world’s richest man, industrialist Elon Musk.

The Independent first reported the contribution, disclosed in a Federal Election Commission filing that covers the period October 1 to 16.

DeVos sent Trump a letter of resignation dated January 7, 2021, telling the then-president, “There is no mistaking the impact your rhetoric had on the situation, and it is the inflection point for me. Impressionable children are watching all of this, and they are learning from us.”

DeVos told Trump her decision to resign was “in support of the oath I took to our Constitution, our people, and our freedoms.”

On January 6, after Trump encouraged his supporters to march to the Capitol to fight the counting of electoral votes that would declare Joe Biden the winner of the 2020 presidential election, he sat and watched television as an armed mob violently attacked police officers and threatened the lives of Members of Congress and Trump’s own vice president, Mike Pence — who, like DeVos, has grounded his conservatism in a deep Christian faith. For hours, Trump repeatedly ignored the pleas of his staff to call off the rioters.

Now, while Pence has refused to support Trump’s 2024 election bid, DeVos has sent cash to help Trump become president again.

And it’s not as if Trump subsequently was revealed to be a Sunday school teacher.

Since leaving office, Trump has been impeached and indicted for encouraging the January 6 attack on our democracy and Constitution, for other efforts to cheat in the 2020 election, and for stealing classified documents from the White House. He was convicted in New York over the summer of 34 felonies for falsifying business records to hide his misconduct from voters in the 2016 election.

Trump’s central business enterprise, the Trump Organization, was in January 2023 fined $1.6 million by a New York state court after the company was convicted by a jury of 17 criminal felonies, including tax fraud and falsifying business records. Trump himself was found liable in February 2024 by a New York state judge for civil fraud and was ordered to pay a $355 million penalty.

And in May 2023, a New York federal jury in a civil case ordered Trump to pay E. Jean Carroll $5 million for battery and defamation after it found that Trump sexually abused Carroll in a department store dressing room in 1996.

But DeVos’s own version of morality makes her conversion back to Trumpism less than surprising.

As Trump’s Secretary of Education, DeVos hired as her top higher education advisors former executives of predatory for-profit colleges, and she trashed almost all the work done by the Obama administration to protect students against deceptive, over-priced schools. Instead of holding predatory colleges accountable, DeVos mocked broke students ripped off by these schools as people demanding “free money.”

DeVos as secretary also repeatedly attacked and demeaned public schools and criticized her own cabinet Department.

In August, DeVos appeared to revisit her view of Donald Trump, telling The Detroit News she was willing to join a new Trump administration “if it was with the goal of phasing out the Department of Education….”

DeVos and her husband’s wealthy family, which made its fortune through the troubling multi-level marketing company Amway, have been major donors to Republican candidates and right wing causes for decades. Two of DeVos’s brothers-in-law, and their two wives, gave $250,000 each to the Musk PAC.

[Editor's note: This article originally appeared on Republic Report.] 

Rehumanization in Higher Education: An Alternative to Maximizing Panic and Profit

It's questionable whether the Earth's tech bros (e.g. Gates, Musk, Bezos, Thiel, Zuckerberg) really believe in democracy, but they do believe in enriching themselves, like the robber barons of the 19th century, or going back even further, to myths of flawed rulers and gods of ancient times. A few of these bros, believing mostly in themselves, have suggested that democracy is incompatible with progress. There are probably more of these elites (and their backers) who agree, but on the back stage. 

Today, there are apps for just about everything, and there are some good ones. But there are few signs that the most recent technological innovations have improved the overall existence of humans, the planet we live on, or the many other species with share the planet with. Life is great for some, good for many, and not as happy for many more. Folks feel anxious, alienated, and dehumanized and for good reason.

Rehumanization: An Alternative to Maximizing Panic and Profit 

Despite all this new technology, climate change is an existential threat and its consequences are looming. Wars and conflicts are raging around the world and there are threats of more war. Stock prices have risen, but American Quality of Life (QOL) has not improved significantly. Information for the masses is laced with toxic propaganda. Mental illness is rising. US life expectancy has plateaued. Debt is a normal part of middle class life. People are more sedentary and obese. 

For many in this new tech world, sh*t jobs are plentiful and good jobs are hard to find. Bitcoin is an alternative (and speculative) currency used for illegal and predatory activity. Online teachers and content creators are throwaway items. You can have prepared food, of varying quality, delivered to your door. Pornography is omnipresent. Mass surveillance is accepted and normalized. Brutality and genocide can be watched like entertainment, to be played over and over or swept away at the touch of a finger. Online robocollege education is available 24/7/365 and cheating is rampant, but for many a degree is just a ticket to be punched in a world of hypercredentialism.   

Some of us are half-conscious of the algorithms of oppression and those who dictate the code, but we have enough faith in technology and the tech bros that it will be ok if we accept certain social realities--and don't fight it or challenge it. If we just go along. However sick, pathological, or evil it is, no matter how greedy these tech bros and their enablers are, "it is what it is." 

How is this progress? And does it have to be this way? We don't think so. There are even models to bring light into the approaching darkness.

That's why we want to highlight the bright spots in higher education in a series called the Rehumanization of Higher Ed. Stay tuned.