US education department plans to cut half its workforce

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

59% : The agency also plays a prominent role in administering and overseeing the federal student loans used by millions of Americans to pay for higher education.
54% : Established in 1979, the department oversees funding for public schools, administers student loans and runs programmes that help low-income students.
54% : The agency had 4,133 employees when Trump was sworn into office, an announcement from the department states.
52% : Trump has long sought to eliminate the department, a long-cherished goal of some conservatives, but such an action would require approval by Congress.
46% : It hasn't been done because it would take an act of Congress to accomplish, which in the current makeup would mean Trump would need Democratic support.
37% : "The massive reduction in force at the Education Department is an attack on opportunity that will gut the agency and its ability to support students, throwing federal education programs into chaos across the country," the union's president Randi Weingarten said.
35% : Several lawsuits have also challenged actions by the Department of Government Efficiency (Doge), a team aiming to slash government spending that's being led by Elon Musk.
32% : Reports have suggested that Trump, for weeks, has considered signing an executive order impacting the Department of Education, though he has not yet done so. Several of his executive orders have been met with lawsuits, as have Trump's dramatic cuts at agencies around Washington.
31% : More recently, though, Trump and other conservatives have attacked the department for its so-called "woke" agenda, which includes protections on gender and race.
27% : Trump has claimed the agency was "indoctrinating young people with inappropriate racial, sexual, and political material".

*Our bias meter rating uses data science including sentiment analysis, machine learning and our proprietary algorithm for determining biases in news articles. Bias scores are on a scale of -100% to 100% with higher negative scores being more liberal and higher positive scores being more conservative, and 0% being neutral. The rating is an independent analysis and is not affiliated nor sponsored by the news source or any other organization.