Education
Trump’s Mantra from Schools to FEMA: ‘Move it Back to the States’
President Trump’s interest in closing down the Education Department was never front and center to any of his three White House campaigns, but his explanation for shuttering the agency has always remained consistent.
“Move it back to the states,” Mr. Trump said in his third month as a candidate in 2015. In the final days of the 2024 race, he told supporters, “Your state is going to control your children’s education.”
Very little control over education has ever resided with the federal government, which is mainly in charge of administering college loans and enforcing civil rights in schools. Even so, Mr. Trump deployed the back-to-the-states mantra again when signing an executive order on March 20 to close the department. The title of the order was: “Improving Education Outcomes by Empowering Parents, States, and Communities.”
The maneuver has long been a calling card of politicians from the conservative establishment advocating a smaller federal government and more local control, and is now a central tenet of the second Trump administration when it comes to a host of issues, from abortion and cutting regulations to hiking tariffs. But states are not necessarily positioned to replicate the oversight functions that the federal government has played, particularly on education matters.
Mr. Trump used the tactic during the 2024 presidential race to sidestep questions about abortion rights by saying that states should decide the issue — a particularly brazen move after he stacked the Supreme Court with conservative judges to overturn Roe v. Wade.
More recently, Mr. Trump and others in his administration have pushed to eliminate the Federal Emergency Management Agency, saying states would do a better job. The move appears to ignore the agency’s core principle that the best practice for disaster relief is “locally executed, state managed, and federally supported.”
The push rings familiar for conservatives who have worked to trim the federal government since the 1970s under the umbrella of “New Federalism” promoted by the Nixon administration. That initiative, which the Reagan administration expanded on, transferred many social and civic programs to the states, a move that scholars have said was often rooted in an attempt to disrupt a Civil Rights-era alliance between the federal government and Black communities that threatened conservative power.
But Mr. Trump’s boldest attempt to use states as a political heat shield is his bid to close down the Education Department, potentially the most significant shift in the federal government’s role in the nation’s schools since the Civil Rights era.
The federal department’s predominant role, since it was established in 1979, has been to administer college financial aid, oversee education research, enforce civil rights in schools and help support low-income students and students with disabilities. The Trump administration has proposed shifting some of these functions to other federal agencies — for instance, moving student loans to the Small Business Administration, and support for students with disabilities to the Department of Health and Human Services.
Other functions, like research, have been basically disbanded as the government lays off workers. A right-wing blueprint for the Trump administration, known as Project 2025, has called for allowing some federal funding for low-income students to be spent on private schools, although it is unclear if Mr. Trump will follow that playbook.
As Mr. Trump looks to shed responsibility for some of the nation’s most pressing and challenging issues, state officials are deeply divided over the changes.
“This is a total shell game,” Gov. Maura Healey of Massachusetts, a Democrat, said. “It’s all about shifting responsibility and costs from the federal government onto states that are not in any way positioned to bear those costs.”
Republican governors, on the other hand, have generally aligned themselves behind the president in support of the move, including Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, Gov. Kim Reynolds of Iowa and Gov. Mike DeWine of Ohio. All three traveled to Washington to watch Mr. Trump sign an executive order on March 20 to begin dismantling the department.
“Every student, family, and community is different,” Mr. DeWine said in a statement. “By giving states more authority over education, we will have the flexibility to focus our efforts on tailoring an educational experience that is best for our children.”
In Virginia, Gov. Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, has also remained supportive of Mr. Trump. But he asked lawmakers to double the size of the state’s contingency fund to nearly $600 million to brace for a potential economic downturn after the Trump administration moved to slash tens of thousands of jobs from the federal work force.
The justification appeals to some of the Republicans’ key voters. During Mr. Trump’s last campaign, he turned the department into a political punching bag to appease the growing “parents’ rights” movement in his conservative base.
Mr. Trump’s ambition to abolish the department has also become intricately linked with his broader political agenda to dismantle diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives within the federal government.
How much power and decision making he will be able to deliver to communities remain unclear.
Control over public education already rests predominately with states and local districts, which generate roughly 90 percent of all school funding. State and local officials set teacher salaries and pick out which textbooks to use. States also administer standardized tests, set academic standards and determine what can and cannot be taught. In Florida, for example, the state’s “Stop W.O.K.E. Act” prohibited teaching certain aspects of history.
Decisions on how much money to spend on education, what those funds can be spent on and whether families can use those dollars for private school or home-schooling are all determined by states.
Federal law also expressly prohibits Washington from prescribing curriculum standards, library resources, textbooks and other measures of influence. That law existed before Mr. Trump first assumed control of the White House in 2017.
Even Mr. Trump’s description of the Education Department as a “massive behemoth” is misleading.
The department’s work force of 4,133 men and women at the start of the year ranked last among 15 cabinet-level executive agencies. Some public high schools have more enrolled students than the Education Department had employees.
Mr. Trump has denounced it as a failed experiment by pointing to declining math and reading scores that even the previous Democratic administration bemoaned as “appalling and unacceptable.” He has not explained how ending the federal government’s role in public education would increase student proficiency.
Instead, even as he moves to close the department, new Trump administration policies appear to have eclipsed the importance of the president’s mantra of returning power to the states.
The Trump administration this week opened investigations into entire state school systems in California and Maine, both states that are run by Democratic governors who have been openly critical of Mr. Trump’s policies. The investigations take aim at policies aimed at protecting the safety of transgender students over requirements from unwanted disclosures to their parents.
The probes were launched just days after Mr. Trump signed an executive order during a made-for-TV event in the White House, where he repeated five times his abiding interest in empowering states to make the best decisions for their students.
“We’re going to be returning education, very simply, back to the states where it belongs,” he said.
Sarah Mervosh contributed reporting.
The president of Bard College, who has run the unorthodox liberal-arts school for more than a half century, announced his retirement on Friday, after the release of documents that showed he had a closer relationship with Jeffrey Epstein than previously known.
The president, Leon Botstein, was known for his fund-raising prowess and outsize personality, but came under scrutiny after the release of a trove of documents collected by the Justice Department related to Mr. Epstein. The files showed Dr. Botstein had exchanged messages and visits with Mr. Epstein for years, including after Mr. Epstein’s conviction on solicitation of a minor for prostitution.
In one 2013 note, Dr. Botstein signed off with “Miss you.” He spoke of his cherished “new friendship” with the financier, and wished him well after the publication of news article that detailed his abuse.
The college commissioned an independent review, conducted by the law firm WilmerHale, and the findings were released on Friday.
The review found that Dr. Botstein had done nothing illegal but that his relationship with Mr. Epstein raised concerns about his leadership. The review said that Dr. Botstein had ignored the concerns of a senior faculty member who advised him that Bard should avoid Mr. Epstein.
“President Botstein forcefully argues that Bard’s need for funds was paramount,” the review concluded. “His view was, ‘I would take money from Satan if it permitted me to do God’s work.’”
The review noted that Mr. Botstein had visited Mr. Epstein’s island, invited Mr. Epstein to stay at Bard and to visit a high school affiliated with Bard, and had taken payments from Mr. Epstein. Mr. Botstein said he had in turn funneled those payments to Bard under his own name.
Dr. Botstein has long maintained that his relationship with Mr. Epstein was entirely about coaxing him to give money to the school, which is about 100 miles north of New York City.
Dr. Botstein became president of Bard in 1975, when he was only 28 years old and the college was in dire financial shape. He earned a reputation as a talented fund-raiser, and is credited by his supporters with keeping Bard afloat at a time when many colleges are facing difficulties and some have closed.
In 2021, the billionaire George Soros pledged to donate $500 million to Bard’s endowment, which now tops $1 billion.
The new documents did not show any criminal wrongdoing on Dr. Botstein’s part, but Dr. Botstein is the latest powerful person to leave a top position after their communications with Mr. Epstein were revealed.
Dr. Botstein said in a statement Friday that he believed it was in the “best interest of Bard” to wait until the review was complete before he announced his retirement.
In the statement, he said that he would continue working as a professor and participating in music programs connected to Bard. Since 1992, Dr. Botstein has been the principal conductor and music director of the American Symphony Orchestra. In his statement, he said he would also live at Finberg House, an on-campus residence hall.
Billing itself as “a private college in the public interest,” Bard has long prided itself on bucking the conventions of higher education. The college doubled down on its bohemian sensibility under Dr. Botstein’s leadership.
The out-of-the-box thinking extended to college admissions. Bard applicants, for example, can skip the traditional process and instead submit three lengthy essays.
And Dr. Botstein has lampooned the U.S. News and World Report rankings, which many college leaders swear by.
He has also been a strong advocate for early college, creating some of the first programs that allow teenagers, often from underrepresented backgrounds, to earn college credit tuition-free while still in high school.
But when it came to another convention of modern higher education — the need to raise private money — Bard embraced the practice. Dr. Botstein said he hated raising money from the wealthy, describing it as a humiliating experience.
Still, in his statement Friday, he said that the college under his watch had secured nearly $3 billion in philanthropy. He said he would stay as president until the end of this academic year, June 30.
It was fund-raising that brought Dr. Botstein into contact with Mr. Epstein. Dr. Botstein has said that the relationship with Mr. Epstein began with a small, unsolicited donation by the sex offender in 2011. “A guy sent us money and we followed up,” Dr. Botstein told The New York Times in 2023. “It’s a simple story.”
But after the latest release of documents, Dr. Botstein’s explanations for various interactions with Mr. Epstein often left community members with even more questions.
For instance, after the documents showed that Dr. Botstein’s office had planned a trip to Mr. Epstein’s island in 2012, Dr. Botstein said he had become sick during the trip and wasn’t sure whether he actually stayed on the island. When The Times reported an email from Dr. Botstein from the day after that 2012 trip, in which the president thanked Mr. Epstein and wrote “the place is great,” Dr. Botstein, through a spokesman, said he was referring to “the overall environment of St. Thomas.”
The WilmerHale report said Dr. Botstein was not “fully accurate” in describing his relationship with Mr. Epstein in public statements.
The documents also showed that the two had worked together to buy an expensive watch. Dr. Botstein, a watch collector, explained that he was helping Mr. Epstein, who had expressed interest in a watch, buy one.
Dr. Botstein kept the timepiece for about a year before Mr. Epstein demanded Dr. Botstein return it or begin making payments to cover the $56,000 cost.
In one email, Mr. Epstein even excoriated Dr. Botstein, describing his purchase of the watch as “careless.”
The initial response to the news was subdued on the Bard campus, and it appeared many, including board members, were willing to stand by a leader viewed by some as central to the college’s success over the decades. But the pressure mounted after a slow drip of news coverage.
This spring, the board of trustees, headed by the billionaire James Cox Chambers, announced it had hired WilmerHale to investigate Mr. Epstein’s relationship with the president and Bard.
The faculty senate eventually weighed in on the matter, urging trustees to “plan for a transition in leadership.” The faculty statement also called for envisioning a Bard after the man who had led it for more than half a century.
The board on Friday thanked Dr. Botstein for “his countless accomplishments and the lasting impact of his leadership.” It said it will soon announce an interim leader and the details of a national search for the next president.
Students at Cornell University had gathered on Thursday for an evening of debate over the war in Gaza and the long-running conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. The debate rapidly escalated after the event, during a walk with the university president to the parking lot.
As students posed critical questions and surrounded his car, the university’s president, Michael Kotlikoff, said that the students banged on his vehicle when he tried to drive away, an accusation they deny and that video provided by the students does not show.
The confrontation on the Ithaca, N.Y., campus was a reminder of the lingering tensions over the war between Israel and Hamas and how universities responded to student protests, even as on-campus demonstrations have largely subsided.
The evening had been billed as a civil dialogue between supporters of Israel and backers of the Palestinian cause.
As night fell and the debate ended, Dr. Kotlikoff, who had spoken at the event, walked to his vehicle, a black Cadillac SUV. The video shows it slowly reversing, as a handful of students stand behind and around the vehicle recording the incident. The car stops in front of one student, brushing him. It then accelerates and bumps into the student, causing him to stumble.
A second student screamed that the car had run over his foot, though video does not show a clear angle of that happening.
“You’re running a student over? Am I allowed to stand here?” Hudson Athas, 21, the student who was bumped, said before the car lurched.
Dr. Kotlikoff continued backing up and left the parking lot. Emergency medical technicians arrived and checked the foot of the second student, Aiden Vallecillo, a 22-year-old senior, who was not seriously injured.
The students’ campus organization, Students for a Democratic Cornell, described Dr. Kotlikoff’s behavior as “reckless.” In a statement released by the university, Dr. Kotlikoff described himself as the victim of the incident, saying he had experienced “harassment and intimidation” that was aimed at “silencing speech.”
Dr. Kotlikoff said that he had been followed to his car by a group of students who were “loudly shouting questions” at him. In his telling, the students had been “banging on the windows” of his car and blocked his exit. The video does not show the students hitting his car.
The students who confronted Dr. Kotlikoff on Thursday said they were objecting to the suspension of student demonstrators and measures that they said stifle free speech on campus. Those include restrictions on protest, as part of the school’s “expressive activity policy,” which was adopted in March 2025.
It was not their intention to block his car, they said.
Dr. Kotlikoff said that he waited to back out until he saw space behind his car and was able to “slowly maneuver my car from the parking space.”
Like many universities in the United States, Cornell erupted with student protests in the spring of 2024 over the Israel-Hamas war. And since October 2023, when that war began, the university has issued more than 80 disciplinary actions, including suspensions, against students that it says have infringed on “the rights of others.”
The suspended students include the leader of the campus encampments movement, Momodou Taal, a Ph.D. student in Africana studies whom the Trump administration sought to deport. Immigration officials had taken similar action against students at other universities whom they had accused of antisemitism.
Mr. Taal and other Cornell students shut down a campus career fair in 2024 that included weapons manufacturers. Facing removal by immigration authorities, Mr. Taal left the United States last year.
The school says that its policies surrounding demonstrations was enacted to combat “harassment, intimidation, shutting down events and threats of violence.”
Dr. Kotlikoff, who is a veterinarian, was appointed president of Cornell in March 2025 after an eight-month interim appointment. He had been the university’s provost from 2015 to 2024.
Thursday’s roughly two-hour event was an installment in an ongoing Israel-Palestine debate series and began ordinarily enough, with Dr. Kotlikoff introducing the discussion, which featured Norman Finkelstein, an author and political scientist.
Dr. Finkelstein’s remarks centered around Israel’s response to the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks. Pro-Palestinian and pro-Israel students also debated over the university’s policies on free speech and expression.
As he was leaving Cornell’s Goldwin Smith Hall, where the debate took place, Mr. Vallecillo and another student, Sophia Arnold, also a senior, asked Dr. Kotlikoff how the university could be reporting some students for misconduct while also deciding the outcome of the disciplinary actions against them.
In one of the videos that were provided to The New York Times by the students, Dr. Kotlikoff said that the university “has the responsibility and the accountability to make sure everyone in this community is protected.”
In an interview, Mr. Athas, who is a junior, said that Dr. Kotlikoff had not given him enough warning that he was backing up. He was unsatisfied with the president’s responses to their questions.
“We want to see the reversal of these draconian policies,” Mr. Athas said.
Stephanie Saul contributed reporting.
U.S.A. at 250
Yale’s Bicentennial Schlock collection offers a window into the star-spangled commercialism that swept the country 50 years ago.
The Beinecke Library at Yale is home to countless treasures, including a Gutenberg Bible, an original printing of the Declaration of Independence and hand-drawn maps from the Lewis and Clark expedition.
But on a recent afternoon, in the basement reading room, Joshua Cochran, the library’s curator of American history, reached into one of a dozen archival boxes loaded on a cart and carefully unwrapped a humbler item — a paper cup imprinted with the image of Paul Revere’s lantern.
Also in the boxes were sugar packets with presidential portraits, a Bicentennial burger wrapper and, taped to an index card, a withered “all-American novelty condom,” emblazoned with the slogan “One Time for Old Glory.”
And then there was a rumpled piece of plastic, which on closer inspection turned out to be a “Ben Franklin kite” stamped with the words of the Declaration.
“History is not just about presidents and kings and diplomats, but a lived daily experience for people,” Cochran said. “Looking at this collection, it really reminds you of the everydayness of history.”
The Bicentennial Schlock collection, totaling just over 100 artifacts, is one of Yale’s quirkier holdings. Assembled in 1976 by the historian Jesse Lemisch, it endures as a lively (if a bit grungy) testament to the star-spangled commercialism that swept across the country in the run-up to the 200th anniversary of American independence.
Today, it can be hard to grasp the scale of the swag. By the time the confetti stopped falling, according to one estimate, more than 25,000 items had been produced, from a limited-edition replica of George Washington’s sword to independence-themed toilet paper.
This being the 1970s, the commercialism prompted a countercultural pushback, along with charges that “Buy-centennial” huckersterism had sold out the true radical spirit of ’76.
“You know damn well that we’re going to be inundated for two years with an attempt to sell a plastic image of America to sell cars and cornflakes,” the activist Jeremy Rifkin, a founder of the People’s Bicentennial Commission, an anti-corporate group, told The New York Times in 1974. “To me that’s treason.”
Lemisch, as a lifelong man of the left, was politically sympathetic. But as both a scholar and a self-described “terminal Bicentennial freak,” he also saw an opportunity.
“How many of us,” he wrote in The New Republic in 1976, “are lucky enough to see the central passion of our creative lives translated into the Disney version, and for sale, in this translation, in every supermarket?”
Lemisch, who died in 2018, was not the only one cataloging the goofier manifestations of the Bicentennial. The Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library and Museum in Grand Rapids, Mich., has a trove of memorabilia, including a can of “Bicentennial air.” And the University of Central Florida has a “Bicentennial Junk” collection. But Lemisch’s comes with an intellectual pedigree forged in the history wars of the ’60s and ’70s.
Lemisch, who got his doctorate from Yale in 1963, was part of a generation of social historians who challenged both the conservative bent of scholarship on early America and what they saw as the historical profession’s complacent, complicit relationship with American power.
In his influential 1967 essay “The American Revolution Seen From the Bottom Up,” he argued that the Revolution wasn’t just a top-down affair but also a genuinely democratic uprising driven by the aspirations of the artisan and working classes, which were ultimately thwarted by wealthy elites.
He also pushed for democratization of the archival record. In a 1971 essay called “The American Revolution Bicentennial and the Papers of Great White Men,” Lemisch lamented that the ambitious and well-funded scholarly editing projects undertaken for the anniversary neglected rabble-rousers like Thomas Paine and Sam Adams, to say nothing of women, Black Americans and Native Americans.
Those projects, he argued, reflected the “arrogant nationalism and elitism” of the 1950s that historians, like the nation itself, were already leaving behind.
The schlock collection had its origins in an undergraduate class Lemisch taught at the State University of New York, Buffalo, in the spring of 1976. The course included scholarly reading, but Lemisch also instructed the students to gather as much Bicentennial junk as they could find.
“We owe it to Those Who Will Come After Us to preserve and interpret these priceless relics,” he wrote in his syllabus. “Let us fill a time capsule with a deeply embarrassing heritage for 2076.”
Forget the quality commemorative items from the Franklin Mint and Colonial Williamsburg. He wanted “real schlock, available schlock, cheap schlock,” ideally costing less than a dollar. And it needed to be properly documented.
“Please,” he wrote, “do not bury me in unannotated schlock!”
Lemisch and his students organized a museum-style exhibition in Buffalo in October 1976. As news stories about this unlikely “Schlock Czar” spread, he started getting fan letters from people across the country, along with additional specimens.
A woman from Brooklyn sent “a piece of Bicentennial Patriotism good enough to eat.” A woman from Muncie, Ind., contributed stars-and-stripes paper surgical caps worn, to her surprise, by the team that had recently operated on her.
Two correspondents sent Lemisch the identical sanitary disposal bags, printed with the Liberty Bell, that had suddenly appeared in the women’s bathroom in their campus library.
“Although the Bicentennial has passed, I can still remember my amazement at being confronted with ‘200 Years of Freedom’ upon entering the toilet,” a student at Rutgers wrote.
At first Lemisch reveled in the public interest. But the attention — someone in San Jose, Calif., he claimed, had even named an omelet after him — left him feeling ambivalent.
“By the time I cut off the interviews,” he wrote in The New Republic that November, “I had become Bicentennial Schlock.”
Still, he staged a revival of the exhibition in New York City in August 1977, at the headquarters of a union. In 1981, he donated the collection to Yale.
“I believe that future researchers will find the material a distinctive collection for reconstructing Americans’ views of the past in 1976,” he wrote at the time.
Since then, Cochran said, it has seen use by classes and researchers. And an Uncle Sam Pez dispenser is currently on view in the Beinecke’s new exhibition, “Unfurling the Flag: Reflections on Patriotism,” alongside non-schlock like Yale’s first printing of the Declaration and a typescript draft of Langston Hughes’s poem “Let America Be America Again.”
“We want to prompt people to think about where their ideas about patriotism come from,” Cochran said. “The Bicentennial was a formative moment for a lot of people, when the iconography was inescapable.”
Today, you can find the same Pez dispenser on eBay, along with tens of thousands of Bicentennial listings running heavily to coins, stamps, plates and ersatz Paul Revere pewter. But Lemisch’s collection includes many items so lowly — wet wipes, dry-cleaning bags, plastic straws in patriotic sleeves — that they may survive nowhere else.
Patriotic Dixie cups and cereal boxes might seem to epitomize the kind of populist “history from below” that Lemisch championed. But he saw things differently.
Bicentennial schlock, Lemisch wrote in The New Republic, had “floated down from above, and responded to no popular longing to celebrate the Bicentennial.” It was “the Watergate of patriotism” — a “healthy demystification” that made Americans “wisely cynical” about the official history they were peddled.
“Since Schlock was the Bicentennial’s most pervasive manifestation and perhaps its most enduring heritage,” he wrote, “it almost seems, emotionally speaking, as if there was no Bicentennial at all.”
Today, historians take a more sanguine view. For all its tensions and contradictions, they argue, the Bicentennial added up a powerful cultural moment. It spawned both new scholarship and a boom in popular history, powered by a more emotional, personal way of relating to the past. And Lemisch’s deadpan museum — along with the delighted public response to it — was very much a part of it.
And this year’s Semiquincentennial? Then, as now, there has been debate over its focus and political meaning, which has intensified as President Trump has moved to put his own stamp on the anniversary. And while there are plenty of exhibitions and events on tap across the country, there has been much less investment and enthusiasm overall.
Which isn’t to say there is no merch. The websites for both America250, the nonpartisan federal planning group created by Congress in 2016, and Freedom 250, an alternate effort backed by President Trump, offer tasteful hats, mugs, playing cards and pickleball paddles. But so far, unapologetic 1976-style schlock appears thin on the ground.
You could chalk the schlock gap up to shifts in consumer culture, growing political polarization or the fact that schlock — or slop? — has moved online. But even back in 1976, Professor Lemisch struggled to draw definitive conclusions.
“What does Bicentennial Schlock mean?” he wrote. “I don’t exactly know. I find that deeply embarrassing.”
“More research,” he added, “is needed.”
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