SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
education
Warren Leads Call for Education Department Watchdog to Probe DOGE 'Infiltration'
"We are concerned that ED undermined its own mission to 'protecting student privacy' in its collaboration and arrangements with DOGE."
Jun 09, 2025
U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren on Monday urged the Department of Education's Office of Inspector General to investigate an "infiltration" by President Donald Trump's government-gutting entity that, until recently, was spearheaded by billionaire Elon Musk.
In February, the Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) "initiated a 'takeover' of the Education Department," Warren (D-Mass.) and nine other senators wrote to René L. Rocque, the ED's acting inspector general. "Soon afterwards, we opened an investigation into the matter."
"Throughout the course of this investigation, ED revealed a limited set of new information about the extent of DOGE's access
to ED's internal databases, but refused to disclose whether and to what extent DOGE had access to student loan borrowers' data, specifically," the letter details.
"Because of the department's refusal to provide full and complete information, the full extent of DOGE's role and influence at ED remains unknown," the letter continues. "This lack of clarity is not only frustrating for borrowers but also dangerous for the future of an agency that handles an extensive student loan portfolio and a range of federal aid programs for higher education."
"Because of the department's refusal to provide full and complete information, the full extent of DOGE's role and influence at ED remains unknown."
The senators wrote that "we are concerned that ED undermined its own mission to 'protecting student privacy' in its collaboration and arrangements with DOGE," and urged Rocque to "conduct a review as to whether ED adhered to the Privacy Act, 5 U.S.C. § 552a, and 'all applicable laws and regulations concerning management of borrower data' and institutional data when it allowed DOGE access to its databases."
In addition to Warren, the letter is signed by Sens. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), Cory Booker (D-N.J.), Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.), Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.), Ed Markey (D-Mass.), Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), Tina Smith (D-Minn.), Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.).
The letter was first reported by ABC News. While the ED didn't respond to the outlet's request for comment, Harrison Fields, special assistant to the president and principal deputy press secretary, said that "the president's success through DOGE is undisputed and legal, and this work will continue to yield historic results."
Warren—who is set to meet with Trump Education Secretary Linda McMahon on Tuesday—struck a much different tone.
"The department is refusing to tell Americans who's digging through their personal data and if their data is safe," Warren told ABC. "I'm pushing for an independent investigation into what the Department of Education is hiding from us."
The letter comes amid a public feud between Musk and Trump—who ultimately aims to disband the Education Department—and after the U.S. Supreme Court on Friday sided with the administration in a legal battle over DOGE access to Social Security Administration data.
Keep ReadingShow Less
What Must Universities Become Today in Face of Trump?
In sliding too close to the regime that now attacks them, too many universities have lost much of the leverage needed to marshal wider public support for their most noble agendas.
Jun 08, 2025
Universities face vitriolic attacks today from the Trump regime. Several could even go under. When you keep in mind that he also targets other institutions of civil society—such as law firms, labor unions, the media, assorted churches, and the like—it becomes woefully clear what is going on.
The Trump regime seeks to force all independent sources of news, truth, and judgment to their knees, doing so to rapidly impose a fascist oligopoly that limits and demeans every orientation and viewpoint except his own. His is a recipe most autocratic regimes introduce early in the day. As M. Gessen has reminded us in a superb piece in the New York Times, the silencing of diverse centers of judgment and opinion marks the early stages of an authoritarian movement. I quote from her experience in Russia during the middle stages of the Putin takeover:
"I was shaken when Russian invaded Georgia in 2008. My world change when three young women were sentenced to jail for a protest in a church in 2012, the first time Russian citizens were imprisoned for peaceful action. I couldn't breathe when Russian annexed Crimea in 2014. And when the opposition leader Alexei Navalny was posoned in 2020, arrested in 2021, and almost killed in prison in 2024. And when Russian invaded Ukraine in 2022." (NYT, June 1, 2025, p B4).
The Gessen message is that it is unwise and dangerous to first feel shocked by such events and then allow them to become absorbed into the new background of life. If Trump has not yet made the same moves as Putin, his Big Lies, pardons of hundreds of convicted insurrectionists, attacks on independent centers of civil society, and extra-legal exportation of people to concentration camps in other countries are well on the way. We are shocked at each new round and then tend to forget how shocking such events were.
It is unwise and dangerous to first feel shocked by such events and then allow them to become absorbed into the new background of life.
So, the first thing universities and colleges must do today is to join hands with other institutions of civil society which are—or are about to—face the same sort of massive pressures, pressures often backed by militia threats to the livelihoods and safety of people in those same institutions. That is exactly why Trump, very early, pardoned the militias who joined him in drives to deny and violently overturn the results of the 2020 election. He may well need them in the future. "Stand back and stand by." It is also why Inspector Generals were immediately removed from key institutions in the government and why Elon Musk was given free rein to wreak havoc on government institutions focused on health for the poor, medical studies, and new scientific research.
The 'Viewpoint Diversity' Fraud
It must be emphasized from the start, too, how fraudulent new movements are within several universities—led, I fear, by the one in which I have worked—to "pluralize" intellectual perspectives within their schools. It is now called "Viewpoint Diversity." Those are attempts to move universities toward the right of the current distribution of power and opinion while the right itself holds bankrupt views about future dangers and possibilities. The fraudulence of this movement is easy to expose: If you campaign to move university faculty to the right in the name of institutional pluralism, why not—with the same vociferousness—call for greater economic and ideological diversity among university trustees, university presidents, corporate boardrooms, right wing think tanks, silicon valley entrepreneurs, the Claremont Institute, and Fox News reporting? For surely, these institutions on the right could use more diversity. The reason is that the so carefully selected calls for diversity within universities alone are designed to draw university culture—as one of the precarious holdouts against an autocratic regime—more securely into the orbit of that regime. Greater faculty "diversity," neoliberal university administrations, and external pressure will do the job.
Neoliberal university presidents and trustees may not love aspects of the Trump agenda, but too many show by their deeds that they prefer it to a university in which faculty control the curriculum, bloated administrative staffs are reduced, students express political opinions freely, and peaceful protests are treated as welcome aspects of university life that can educate wider publics about things many had failed heretofore to grasp. There have been valuable university challenges to public opinion to reconsider the Vietnam War, to resist the Iraq War, to ignite civil rights, to challenge Israeli genocide in Gaza, and to come to terms with an emerging period of climate wreckage that corporate/state institutions now try to ignore, downplay, or cover up.
The University As New Beacon
So, what should universities and colleges be doing today, then? Well, first, we must relieve our decades long great dependence on the state by curtailing military research. Faculties, students, and parents must also band together to demand a pluralization of boards of trustees, as we pull back the autocratic powers too many university and college presidents have assumed in recent years. More than that, faculties, students, and ecologists must demand that more teaching and research resources be devoted to studying the dangers radical climate wreckage poses to life in so many regimes today. (I note that this has never been one of the "signature" initiatives pursued by the president of my university, though he loves AI research).
As it becomes clear how current hurricane and tornado surges, wildfires, faster glacier melts, ocean rises, and a slowing ocean conveyor are harbingers of worst to come unless radical transformations are undertaken, university humanists, earth scientists, and social scientists must find new ways to work together. While some schools lead the way in this regard, many others are populated by faculties and students who would also give climate wreckage their highest teaching and research priority if only their trustees, provosts, and presidents would stop discouraging and marginalizing these activities. Too many of the latter are too close for comfort to Trump in this regard
The Risks and the Stakes
These are all big and risky moves. They will incite further Trump attacks as they focus on an accelerating condition he calls "climate crap." And yet, much more is needed, too. Universities must make themselves into living eco-egalitarian beacons today, doing so to encourage other institutions of civil society to follow suit. Most faculty know that today university presidents, deans, and college coaches too often pull down extravagant salaries and benefits. Those perks often draw their lifestyles and thinking closer to big neoliberal donors who increasingly see themselves inhabiting a different world from people in everyday life. This encourages college presidents to mimic the lifestyles of the donor class and to downplay the educational needs of the poor, racial minorities, and future high school teachers. The current structure of the university is exquisitely designed to foment working-class resentments among those who know their kids need to go to college but can't afford the exorbitant bill to do so.
Let the university not only practice affirmative action in admissions—an affirmative action that must now encompass class as well as race and gender—but itself become a living beacon of a more egalitarian way of being.
So, let's work to usher into being student/faculty/parent/movements to demand that the highest paid members of a university make, say, no more than eight times as much as the lowest paid members—the food staff, the janitors, the support staff, the groundskeepers, etc. Let the university not only practice affirmative action in admissions—an affirmative action that must now encompass class as well as race and gender—but itself become a living beacon of a more egalitarian way of being. One immediate effect will be to lower the cost of admission for working-class students.
These egalitarian practices must be joined to a variety of ecological practices, practices which enact in college organization what ecologists know are urgently needed in the wider society too. The university will now become a center in which fossil fuels are a thing of the past, replaced by solar and wind power. Its new buildings—hopefully now emphasizing the classroom buildings that are sorely needed—will also be constructed to conform to the most advanced ecological designs. Such redesigns can draw upon faculty and students from multiple fields to participate in their perfection.
A Utopian Agenda and Expose
Of course, it will be announced immediately that these are all utopian proposals. They are sooo unrealistic. They are indeed. In being utopian they not only expose how right-wing, anti-egalitarian, and anti-ecological the Trump regime is today. They also show how too many university presidents and trustees have lost their way as well, adopting modes of realism woefully inadequate to the risks faced today by universities and the larger society. University leaders often assume they can float above the inequalities and climate wreckage of today, and they too often support a university matrix that is desperately unattuned to the most urgent needs of the larger society in which they are nested. In sliding too close to the regime that now attacks them, too many universities have lost much of the leverage needed to marshal wider public support for their most noble agendas.
In sliding too close to the regime that now attacks them, too many universities have lost much of the leverage needed to marshal wider public support for their most noble agendas.
Under a new, or revivified, university regime, presidents, provosts and deans--albeit a much smaller cohort than the number which currently bloats these schools—will propose agendas to the faculty rather than imposing them from above and waiting for laggards to buy into their problematic neoliberal image of the world. They will enact democratic processes rather than putting the squeeze on faculty, students, and parents from every side.
When it comes to Harvard against Trump and Musk, the faculty must always side with Harvard. When it comes to the current authoritarianism of too many university presidents, provosts, deans, and trustees, more faculty members must call upon a new generation of students, faculty and parents to repair the damage collaborating university regimes have wrought both in their internal organization and in the public face they present to society. We must speak more vociferously to a wider public about the real situation the United States faces, as its autocratic leaders attack democracy, affirm racism, accelerate inequality, flirt with economic disaster, ignore climate wreckage, and refuse to acknowledge how their own climate policies help to promote the escalating migrations from south to north they so cruelly use to foment fascist energies at home. The odds, of course, are against those who seek to make the university a new center of egalitarian creativity and ecological awareness. But since the most likely alternative to that is disaster, those are the odds we must face and strive to overcome.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Despite Columbia's Acquiescence, Trump Admin Targets the School's Accreditation
"Trying to pacify Trump and his team will do little to slow their offensive," said one MSNBC political contributor.
Jun 05, 2025
The U.S. Department of Education on Wednesday alleged that Columbia University "is in violation of federal anti-discrimination laws" and so does not meet accreditation standards, the latest sign that the school's efforts to work with the Trump administration have not mollified the White House.
The Wednesday announcement states that following an investigation in Columbia, the Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights and the Department of Health and Human Services' Office for Civil Rights in May concluded "that Columbia University acted with deliberate indifference towards the harassment of Jewish students." In doing this, the statement alleges, the school violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which bars discrimination on the basis of race, color, and national origin in programs and activities receiving federal funding.
"Columbia is deeply committed to combating antisemitism on our campus," a spokesperson for the school said in a statement sent to multiple outlets on Wednesday. "We take this issue seriously and are continuing to work with the federal government to address it."
According to the statement from the Department of Education, the Trump administration has notified the Middle States Commission on Higher Education, the body that grant's the school's accreditation, that it believes Columbia "fails to meet the standards for accreditation."
"After Hamas' October 7, 2023, terror attack on Israel, Columbia University's leadership acted with deliberate indifference towards the harassment of Jewish students on its campus. This is not only immoral, but also unlawful," said U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon in the department's statement. Particularly during the 2023-24 school year, Columbia was the site of significant pro-Palestinian student activism.
Earlier this year, the Trump administration canceled $400 million in federal grants and contracts to Columbia, citing inaction over alleged antisemitism. According to The Washington Post, the university has remained in talks with federal officials in an effort to recoup that funding.
After the Trump administration announced that the $400 million would be canceled, the university agreed to implement several changes, including to heightened oversight of academic programs focused on the Middle East. Columbia was criticized for doing this.
Since the university made these changes, there have been reports that the Trump administration is interested in placing Columbia under a consent decree, essentially a way for the federal government to exert oversight over the school.
Steve Benen, an MSNBC political contributor and producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," highlighted Thursday that while the federal government has no formal powers over accreditation and hasn't itself sought to revoke it, the Trump administration's effort to get the school's accreditor to take action against Columbia based on the administration's allegations is "a remarkable step."
"But there's also the larger set of circumstances to consider: Despite the plain fact that Columbia agreed to most of the White House's demands months ago, they're still an administration target," Bennen wrote. "The message, to other schools and other institutions, couldn't be any clearer: Trying to pacify [President Donald] Trump and his team will do little to slow their offensive."
Jon Fansmith, the assistant vice president of government relations at the American Council on Education, echoed this point when speaking with CNN.
"Columbia's efforts to work in good faith with the administration made clear to every college and university the simple fact that this administration isn't interested in addressing antisemitism or working towards good policy," he said. "They want to harm and control schools."
Another school that has been in the administration's crosshairs, Harvard University, was dealt a fresh blow by Trump on Wednesday. The president put out an order imposing a six-month ban on international students entering the U.S. to study at the school.
Harvard has taken a different approach than Columbia, and has fought to defend its autonomy and challenged the administration in court.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular