Conservative nonprofit names top education department bureaucrats Trump should fire

FIRST ON FOX – The American Accountability Foundation, a conservative nonprofit government research organization, assembled a “watch list” of top bureaucrats in the Department of Education who President-elect Donald Trump recommends firing.

The AAF, which has received funding in the past from the conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation, published a list on their website of 19 “dossiers” they call “America’s Most Subversive Education Bureaucrats.”

AAF President Tom Jones, a former Republican congressional staffer, told Fox News Digital that the “public-facing” list 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 officials within the federal government, and particularly within the Department of Education, who are not impartial technicians who execute the president’s agenda, but who are ideologues who have an agenda. which they are willing to implement despite the clear direction from 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 implementing their agenda over and above what the American people said was their will at the Nov. at the end of the day, what it means is that you have a left-wing approach to 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 that could be a wake-up call for this administration.”

Jones said those on the list include people who are “serial donors” to Pete Buttigieg, Elizabeth Warren and President Biden, as well as other “hard-core ideologues” who will prioritize their own progressive agendas, such as promoting the Biden’s “student loan bailouts,” “increasing regulations on successful online classroom collaborations, and conducting a “witch hunt” against Christian and vocational colleges through the Executive Student Financial Aid Office.

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Jones identified an individual in the Office of Enforcement who “had spent his career in the Maryland Attorney General’s Office investigating professional colleges and Christian colleges.” He pointed to another person who said he would work to turn the DOE into a “mini-CFPB,” a reference to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which Jones described as “essentially just a witch-hunt factory that ‘used to investigate organizations of people that the administration does not like’. The nonprofit described a DOE general counsel listed 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 very excited to implement his education agenda.'” Unless these people are moved 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 of the DOE’s Office of Federal Student Aid (FSA) who, according to the nonprofit, spearheaded a “$6.1 billion student loan forgiveness scheme to students of art institutes”.

“They call it relief, but it’s really a great gift for people who are pursuing unaffordable college degrees,” Jones told Fox News Digital. “And look, that’s completely unacceptable for the federal government to essentially pay off the student loans for somebody and put that burden on the back of a plumber or a welder, you know, a teacher who takes care of their education or that he didn’t go to college, now they have to pay for a guy who has a feminist studies degree from columbia and $150,000 in debt that’s unfair and wrong, but look, if you want get that degree, you should be prepared to pay for it.”

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

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The nonprofit accuses the person of playing a key role in the DOE’s imposition of a $37.7 million fine on Grand Canyon University, the nation’s largest Christian university, for alleged cost misrepresentation of their doctoral programs, accusing the Biden administration of “bullying.” “the university to eliminate their student debt.

All those named to 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 between $50,000 and $60,000 dollars

“These woke bureaucrats at the Department of Education are cutting $200,000 to attack alternatives to education,” Jones said. “The Office of Enforcement is attacking things like career schools and Christian colleges, and they’re getting rich doing it. And that’s shameful. So I hope the administration says, look, this is , you know, pay people $200,000 a year to attack the opportunities of, you know, soldiers and nurses and people like that to get a higher education.

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

“I hope the administration really takes the opportunity to treat them as political appointees and ask them to stay because if they don’t, they’re going to have a left-wing political ideology in the administration for the next four years.” has added “And unfortunately, we saw 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 screw up the his agenda during this administration”.

Jones said he was supporting President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee to become Secretary of Education. Linda McMahonwhich still faces a confirmation process in the Senate.

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“I’m excited that she has the ability and the latitude to do the hard work that’s needed to really shake up the Department of Education, because it’s, you know, a Carter administration agency that’s stuck in the 1970s, when the world has moved to different approaches to education, whether it’s in, you know, institutes or either in post-secondary education,” Jones said.

Fox News Digital reached out to the Department of Education press office, as well as the individual employees listed, for comment.

The AAF put together a similar “watch list” of Department of Homeland Security (DHS) employees that it recommended the Trump administration remove. In response at the time, DHS Secretary Alejandro N. Mayorkas condemned “in the strongest terms any effort to harass or intimidate our public servants.”

“What Alejandro Mayorkas did was use the force of the Department of Homeland Security to silence the speech of groups like the American Accountability Foundation,” Jones told Fox News Digital. “There were no examples of anyone feeling threatened, but what there was was that he directed departments within the Department of Homeland Security to open investigations into AAF. This is, you know, this is the type of weaponry of the US government that we saw for four years under the Biden administration… So the idea that some people feel attacked is just nonsense and a complete red herring and really a tool for Mayorkas administration officials and Biden close a discourse with which they do not simply disagree.”