Yesterday, the federal government took significant steps toward dismantling the Department of Education, including shifting management and oversight of K–12 public education and its $28 billion budget line to the Department of Labor. They’re also pushing a plan to move $20 billion in special-education funding to the Department of Health and Human Services.

This is not okay.

The Department of Education isn’t some faceless D.C. bureaucracy — it’s the only federal safeguard standing between our most vulnerable students and a system that has historically underfunded, overlooked, and excluded them. Eliminating it doesn’t “return power to the states.” It drags us back to the inequities that the states have never fixed on their own.

And let’s be clear: this move by Trump and McMahon cracks open the door for the ultra-wealthy and their private interests to siphon federal education dollars into unproven voucher schemes, for-profit colleges, and unaccountable charter networks.

Trump and Education Secretary Linda McMahon see our children as future labor for their billionaire friends, not as students with unlimited potential. They see students with disabilities as patients to be managed instead of learners who deserve dignity, love, and real support. They see public schools — and public goods — as assets to be auctioned off for profit.

We believe these actions are illegal and violate Congress’s explicit authorization of the Department of Education. But Congress won’t stand up unless we make them. We have to move quickly and tell them NO — our children are not workers-in-waiting or patients to be processed so billionaires can take home even more taxpayer money.