Conservative nonprofit names top Education Department bureaucrats Trump should fire

FIRST ON FOX – The American Accountability Foundation, a conservative government research nonprofit, has compiled a “watch list” of top bureaucrats on Institute for Education who he recommends should be fired by President-elect Donald Trump.

A non-profit organization funded by the conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation, published the list on its website. AAF compiled 19 “dossiers” naming “America’s most subversive education bureaucrats.”

AAF President Tom Jones, a former Republican congressional staffer, told Fox News Digital that the list “for the public” was not compiled at the behest of Trump’s transition team, but because the conservative organization believes it is important for the American people to “understand that there are many government officials within the federal government, and especially within the Department of Education, who are not dispassionate technicians carrying out the tasks of the president, but ideologues who have an agenda they are willing to implement despite the clear direction of the voters in November.”

“At the end of the day, it’s fundamentally undemocratic. What you get is a group of people who do not reflect the will of the American people who are implementing their agenda instead of what the American people said was their will in November. At the end of the day, that means you have a leftist approach education, especially higher education,” Jones told Fox News Digital. “The the higher education system in America is broken. I think the events of last summer, where you saw left-wing pro-terrorist groups taking over American campuses and faculty and administration supporting them, really should have been a wake-up call for all Americans. And I think this could be a wake-up call for this administration.”

Jones said those on the list include individuals who are “serial donors” to Pete Buttigieg, Elizabeth Warren and President Biden, as well as other “hardline ideologues” who will prioritize their own progressive agendas, such as promoting Biden’s student loan “bailout,” ” strengthening regulations on successful online class partnerships and conducting “witch hunts” against Christian and career colleges through the Office of Student Financial Aid enforcement.

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Jones identified one individual in the Office of Enforcement who “spent his career in the Maryland Attorney General’s Office researching career colleges and Christian colleges.” He pointed to another person who said he would work to turn the DOE into a “mini-CFPB,” referring to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which Jones described as “basically just a witch-hunt factory used to investigate organizations people that the administration doesn’t like.” The nonprofit described one DOE attorney general included on the list as “a leading legal advocate for transgender rights in the debate over religious exemptions for certain universities.”

“These people aren’t going to say, you know what, ‘I hated Trump last week, but on January 22nd I’m going to be super excited about implementing his education agenda.’ Unless these people are removed from their positions at the Department of Education, they will continue to work behind the scenes to attack alternatives to traditional four-year institutions,” Jones said.

Others named on the list include a civilian employee within the DOE’s Office of Federal Student Aid (FSA) who the nonprofit says spearheaded “a $6.1 billion student loan forgiveness scheme for art institute students.”

“They call it a relief, but it’s actually a huge boon for people who are looking for college degrees that they just can’t afford,” Jones told Fox News Digital. “And look, it’s totally unacceptable for the federal government to pay off somebody’s student loans and put that burden on the backs of a plumber or a welder, you know, a teacher who takes care of their education or who didn’t go to college, now they have to pay for some guy who has a degree in feminist degree from Columbia and $150,000 in debt. It’s simply, fundamentally unfair and wrong, but look, if you want to get that degree, you should be willing to pay for it.”

The list includes another DOE employee who the nonprofit says helped the Biden administration “weaponize federal student aid policy against faith-based higher education.”

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The nonprofit accuses the man of playing a key role in the DOE fining Grand Canyon University, the nation’s largest Christian college, $37.7 million for allegedly misrepresenting the cost of his doctoral studies, accusing the Biden administration of effectively “abused” the college to erase student debt for them.

All those on the list make six figures, Jones said, adding that some even earn an annual salary of more than $200,000, while the average American teacher’s salary is about $50,000 to $60,000.

“These woke bureaucrats at the Department of Education are pulling $200,000 to attack alternatives to education,” Jones said. “The Office of Enforcement attacks things like career colleges and Christian colleges, and they get rich off of it. And it’s just shameful. So I hope the administration says, look, this is, you know, paying people $200,000 a year to attack opportunities for, you know, welders and nurses and people like that to get a higher education. It’s just unacceptable.”

“At the end of the day, Americans have to understand that the people we’re talking about here are not techies,” Jones said. “They’re not plumbing jobs. This is political work. This is fundamentally an ideological job. And at the end of the day, these people are just like political appointees who can be fired at the start of an administration.”

“I hope that the administration will really take the opportunity to treat them as political employees and ask them to move on, because if they don’t, they will get a left-wing political ideology in the administration for the next four years,” he added. “Unfortunately, we saw some of that happen in the first administration. I’m cautiously optimistic that the administration learned its lesson the hard way, the first time, that they can’t let a bunch of unelected bureaucrats rough-and-tumble their agenda during this administration.”

Jones said he supports President-elect Donald Trump’s candidacy for education secretary, Linda McMahonwhich still faces the confirmation process in the Senate.

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“I’m excited that she’s going to have the ability and the freedom to do the hard work that’s needed to really shake up the Department of Education, because it’s, you know, it’s a Carter administration agency that’s stuck in the 1970s, when the world was moving to different approaches to education. , whether it’s about, you know, high school or whether it’s post-secondary education,” Jones said.

Fox News Digital has reached out to the Department of Education’s press office, as well as the individual employees on the list, for comment.

The AAF has compiled a similar “watch list” of Department of Homeland Security (DHS) employees it has recommended be purged by the Trump administration. In response at the time, DHS Secretary Alejandro N. Mayorkas “condemned in the strongest terms any attempt to harass or intimidate our public servants.”

“What Alejandro Mayorkas did was use the Department of Homeland Security to silence the speech of groups like the American Accountability Foundation,” Jones told Fox News Digital. “There was no instance of anybody feeling threatened, but there was an instance of him ordering departments within the Department of Homeland Security to open investigations into the AAF. That’s, you know, that’s the kind of arming of the U.S. government that we’ve seen in four years under the Biden administration. … So the idea that some people feel targeted is just nonsense and a complete fallacy and really a tool for Mayorka and Biden administration officials to shut down speech that they not only disagree with.”