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      Schools in Puerto Rico are bracing for Trump cuts after gains made during the Biden years

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      Maraida Caraballo Martínez has been an educator in Puerto Rico for 28 years and the principal of the elementary school Escuela de la Comunidad Jaime C Rodriguez for the past seven. She never knows how much money her school in Yabucoa will receive from the government each year because it isn’t based on the number of children enrolled. One year she got $36,000; another year, it was $12,000.But during the Biden administration, Caraballo noticed a big change. Due to an infusion of federal dollars into the island’s education system, Caraballo received a $250,000 grant, an unprecedented amount of money. She used it to buy books and computers for the library, whiteboards and printers for classrooms, to beef up a robotics program and build a multipurpose sports court for her students. “It meant a huge difference for the school,” Caraballo said.Yabucoa, a small town in south-east Puerto Rico, was hard-hit by Hurricane Maria in 2017. And this school community, like hundreds of others in Puerto Rico, has experienced near-constant disruption since then. A series of natural disasters, including hurricanes, earthquakes, floods and landslides, followed by the pandemic, has pounded the island and interrupted learning. There has also been constant churn of local education secretaries – seven in the past eight years. The Puerto Rican education system – the seventh-largest school district in the United States – has been made more vulnerable by the island’s overwhelming debt, mass emigration and a compromised power grid.Under Joe Biden, there were tentative gains, buttressed by billions of dollars and sustained personal attention from top federal education officials, many experts and educators on the island said. Now they worry that it will all be dismantled with the change in the White House and Donald Trump’s plan to eliminate the US Department of Education. Trump has made no secret of his disdain for the US territory, having reportedly said that it was “dirty and the people were poor”. During his first term, he withheld billions of dollars in federal aid after Hurricane Maria and has suggested selling the island or swapping it for Greenland.View image in fullscreenA recent executive order to make English the official language has worried people on the island, where only one in five people speak fluent English, and Spanish is the medium of instruction in schools.Trump has already made massive cuts to the US Department of Education and its staff, which will have widespread implications across the island. Even if federal funds – which last year made up more than two-thirds of funding for the Puerto Rican department of education (PRDE) – were transferred directly to the local government, it would probably lead to worse outcomes for the most vulnerable children, say educators and policymakers. The PRDE has historically been plagued by political interference, widespread bureaucracy and a lack of transparency.And the local education department is not as technologically advanced as other state education departments, nor as able to disseminate best practices. For example, Puerto Rico does not have a “per pupil formula”, a calculation commonly used on the mainland to determine the amount of money each student receives for their education. Robert Mujica is the executive director of the Puerto Rico Financial Oversight and Management Board, first convened under Barack Obama in 2016 to deal with the island’s financial morass. Mujica said Puerto Rico’s current allocation of education funds was opaque. “How the funds are distributed is perceived as a political process,” he said. “There’s no transparency, and there’s no clarity.”In 2021, Miguel Cardona, Biden’s secretary of education, promised “a new day” for Puerto Rico. “For too long, Puerto Rico’s students and educators were abandoned,” he said. During his tenure, Cardona signed off on almost $6bn in federal dollars for the island’s educational system, leading to historic teacher pay increases, funding for after-school tutoring programs, the hiring of hundreds of school mental health professionals and a pilot program to decentralize the PRDE.Cardona also designated a senior adviser, Chris Soto, to be his point person for the island’s education system to underscore the federal commitment. During nearly four years in office, Soto made more than 50 trips to the island. Carlos Rodríguez Silvestre, the executive director of the Flamboyan Foundation, a non-profit that has led children’s literacy efforts on the island, said the level of respect and sustained interest felt like a partnership, not a top-down mandate. “I’ve never seen that kind of attention to education in Puerto Rico,” he said. “Soto practically lived on the island.”Soto also worked closely with Victor Manuel Bonilla Sánchez, the president of the teachers union, Asociación de Maestros de Puerto Rico, or AMPR, which resulted in a deal in which educators received $1,000 more a month than their base salary, a nearly 30% increase for the average teacher. “It was the largest salary increase in the history of teachers in Puerto Rico,” Bonilla said, though even with the increase, teachers here still make far less money than their mainland counterparts.One of the biggest complaints Soto said he heard was how rigid and bureaucratic the Puerto Rico department of education was, despite a 2018 education reform law that allows for more local control. The education agency – the largest unit of government on the island, with the most employees and the biggest budget – was set up so that the central office had to sign off on everything. So Soto created and oversaw a pilot program in Ponce, a region on the island’s southern coast, focusing on decentralization.For the first time, the local community elected an advisory board of education, and superintendent candidates had to apply rather than be appointed, Soto said. The superintendent was given the authority to sign off on budget requests directly rather than sending them through officials in San Juan, as well as the flexibility to spend money in the region based on individual schools’ needs. The pilot project also focused on increasing efficiency. For example, children with disabilities are now evaluated at their schools rather than having to visit a special center.But already there are plans to undo Cardona’s signature effort in Ponce. The island’s newly elected governor, Jenniffer González Colón, is a Republican and a Trump supporter. The popular secretary of education, Eliezer Ramos Parés, returned earlier this year to head the department after leading it from April 2021 to July 2023 when the governor unexpectedly asked him to resign – not an unusual occurrence within the island’s government, where political appointments can end suddenly and with little public debate. He said that the program would not continue in its current form.“The pilot isn’t really effective,” Ramos said, noting that politics can influence spending decisions not only at the central level but at the regional level as well. “We want to have some controls.” He also said expanding the effort across the island would cost tens of millions of dollars. Instead, Ramos said, he was looking at more limited approaches to decentralization, around some human resource and procurement functions. He said he was also exploring a per-pupil funding formula for Puerto Rico and looking at lessons from other large school districts such as New York City and Hawaii.While education has been the largest budget item on the island for years, Puerto Rico still spends far less than any of the 50 states on each student: $9,500 per student, compared with an average of $18,600 in the states.The US Department of Education, which supplements local and state funding for students in poverty and with disabilities, plays an outsized role in Puerto Rico schools. On the island, 55% of children live below the poverty line and 35% of students are in special education. In total, during fiscal year 2024, more than 68% of the education budget on the island came from federal funding, compared with 11% in US states. The department also administers Pell grants for low-income students; about 72% of Puerto Rican students apply.Linda McMahon, Trump’s new education secretary, has reportedly said that the government will continue to meet its “statutory obligations” to students even as the department shuts down or transfers some operations and lays off staff. The US Department of Education did not respond to requests for comment.Some say the Biden administration’s pouring billions of dollars into a troubled education system with little accountability has created unrealistic expectations and there’s no plan for what happens after money is spent. Mujica, the executive director of the oversight board, said the infusion of funds postponed tough decisions by the Puerto Rican government. “When you have so much money, it papers over a lot of problems. You didn’t have to deal with some of the challenges that are fundamental to the system.” And, he said, there was little discussion of what happens when that money runs out. “How are you going to bridge that gap? Either those programs go away, or we’re going to have to find the funding for them,” Mujica said.Puerto Rico is one of the most educationally impoverished regions, with academic outcomes well below the mainland’s. On the math portion of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, a test that US students take, just 2% of fourth-graders in Puerto Rico were proficient, and 0% of eighth-graders were. Puerto Rican students don’t take the NAEP for reading because they learn in Spanish, not English, though results shared by Ramos at a press conference in 2022 showed only 1% of third-graders were reading at grade level.There are some encouraging efforts. Flamboyan Foundation, the non-profit in Puerto Rico, has been leading an islandwide coalition of 70 partners to improve literacy from kindergarten through the third grade (K-3), including through professional development. Teacher training through the territory’s education department has often been spotty or optional.The organization now works closely with the University of Puerto Rico and, as part of that effort, oversees spending of $3m in literacy training. Approximately 1,500 or a third of Puerto Rico’s K-5 teachers have undergone the rigorous training. That effort will continue, according to Ramos, who called it “very effective”.A new reading test for first- through third-graders the non-profit helped design showed that between the 2023 and 2024 school years, most children were below grade level but made growth in every grade. “But we still have a long way to go so that this data can get to teachers in a timely manner and in a way that they can actually act on it,” Silvestre said.Kristin Ehrgood, Flamboyan Foundation’s CEO, said it was too soon to see dramatic gains. “It’s really hard to see a ton of positive outcomes in such a short period of time with significant distrust that has been built over years,” she said. She said they weren’t sure how the Trump administration may work with or fund Puerto Rico’s education system but that the Biden administration had built a lot of goodwill. “There is a lot of opportunity that could be built on, if a new administration chooses to do that,” she said.Another hopeful sign is that the oversight board, which was widely protested against when it was formed, has cut the island’s debt from $73bn to $31bn. And last year board members increased education spending by 3%. Mujica said the board was focused on making sure that any investment translates into improved outcomes for students: “Our view is resources have to go into the classroom,” he said.Ramos said he met McMahon, the new US secretary of education, in Washington DC, and that they had a “pleasant conversation”. “She knows about Puerto Rico, she’s concerned about Puerto Rico, and she demonstrated full support in the Puerto Rico mission,” he said. He said McMahon wanted PRDE to offer more bilingual classes, to expose more students to English. Whether there will be changes in funding or anything else remains to be seen. “We have to look at what happens in the next few weeks and months and how that vision and policy could affect Puerto Rico,” Ramos said.Ramos was well-liked by educators during his first stint as education secretary. He will also have a lot of decisions to make, including whether to expand public charter schools and close down traditional public schools as the island’s public school enrollment continues to decline precipitously. In the past, both those issues led to fierce and widespread protests.Soto says he’s realistic about the incoming administration having “different views, both ideologically and policy-wise”, but he’s hopeful the people of Puerto Rico won’t want to go back to the old way of doing things. “Somebody said: ‘You guys took the genie out of the bottle and it’s going to be hard to put that back’ as it relates to a student-centered school system,” Soto said.Principal Caraballo’s small school of 150 students and 14 teachers has been slated for closure three times already, though each time it has been spared, partly thanks to community support. She’s hopeful that Ramos, with whom she’s worked previously, will turn things around. “He knows the education system,” she said. “He’s a brilliant person, open to listen.”But the long hours of the past several years have taken a toll on her. She is routinely in school from 6.30am to 6.30pm. “You come in when it’s dark and you leave when it’s dark,” she said.She wants to retire but can’t afford to. After pension plans were frozen, Caraballo will receive only 50% of her salary at retirement, $2,195 a month. She is entitled to social security benefits, but it isn’t enough to make up for the lost pension. “Who can live with $2,000 in one month? Nobody. It’s too hard. And my house still needs 12 years more to pay,” she said.This story was produced by Guardian partner the Hechinger Report, a non-profit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education More

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      in UK Politics

      Rachel Reeves ‘doesn’t recognise’ reported cuts to universal free school meals for young children

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      Rachel Reeves has said she “doesn’t recognise” reports suggesting ministers are looking at cutting universal free school meals for the youngest children. The chancellor is expected to announce spending cuts for some government departments in her spring statement to the Commons on Wednesday. Education secretary Bridget Phillipson is reportedly looking to make £500 million in cuts to the schools budget, and has apparently floated cutting universal free school meals as a way to reduce costs. Free school meals at lunchtime are currently available to all infant children (pupils who are in reception and years one and two) in state-funded schools in England. Ms Phillipson has suggested making them means-tested instead, bringing them in line with the policy for older children, The Times reported. The suggested plans were part of negotiations with the Treasury ahead of the spending review, and other proposed cuts included stopping funding for free period products and axing some dance, music and PE schemes, the paper reported. Chancellor Rachel Reeves is looking to make cuts to government budgets More

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      Columbia should have said, ‘see you in court,’ not ‘yes, Mr President.’ | Margaret Sullivan

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      Since early 2024, I’ve been running a journalism ethics center at Columbia University.So perhaps it’s no surprise that I see the university’s capitulation to Trump both in terms of journalism and ethics.I’ve never run a university, but I have run a newsroom. For 13 years (until I moved to New York City in 2012 to be the New York Times public editor), I was the chief editor of the Buffalo News, the regional newspaper in my home town. I had started there as a summer intern. As editor, I made a lot of decisions; the buck stopped at my desk.It’s not a perfect analogy to Columbia’s situation, but I’ve been thinking about what my options might have been if the paper’s biggest and most powerful advertiser – one important to our financial wellbeing – had gotten wind of an investigation they didn’t like the sounds of. Something that would reveal something negative about their business, let’s say.Suppose that advertiser had threatened to withdraw all their advertising unless we dropped the story. In fact, suppose they wanted promises of positive coverage – perhaps a fawning profile of their CEO, and a series about the good things the company was doing in the community.Let’s complicate it more. Let’s say that my boss, the paper’s owner, was on the advertiser’s side, or at least inclined to see their point of view.What would my options be as editor?There really would be only one: to hold fast. To make the case to the owner that if we were a legitimate newspaper, we would have to be brave and not allow ourselves to be bullied. And to refuse to pull the story. Make sure it’s bulletproof – every fact nailed down – and proceed with plans to publish it.What would happen?That’s hard to say. Maybe the advertiser would blink. Maybe the owner would fire me. Maybe I’d feel I had to resign.The point of this imperfect analogy is simply that allowing oneself – or one’s institution – to be bullied or threatened into compliance is never the right answer.And it’s especially important for strong institutions to stand up, to set an example and to insulate those who have fewer resources or are more vulnerable.Columbia has a huge – nearly $15bn – endowment. It could have withstood the withdrawal of federal funds.Columbia’s leadership could have chosen to say “see you in court” rather than “yes, sir”.Some principles are so central to an institution’s purpose that to betray them should be unthinkable. You don’t kill a valid story under pressure. Because journalism, however flawed, is about finding and telling the truth.And a university – which stands for academic freedom, for freedom of thought, speech and expression, including the right to peacefully protest – cannot buckle to demands to undermine those principles.Sadly, that’s what Columbia did, even going so far as to put an entire academic department under highly unusual supervision, and to empower beefed-up campus police to detain, remove or arrest students for various supposed offenses.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThis action stains a great university, which could have recovered from a financial threat but may not recover from this capitulation.Of course, Columbia needs to work against antisemitism and against all forms of hatred and discrimination. But that’s not really – or certainly not fully – what’s at the heart of Trump’s move.“It’s all about intimidation,” as my Guardian colleague Robert Reich, a former labor secretary, wrote this weekend, “not only at Columbia but at every other university in America.”Columbia’s capitulation mirrors that of many institutions in recent weeks. A major law firm (Paul, Weiss), under pressure, struck a deal with the White House to donate $40m in legal work to enable Trump’s causes. ABC News settled a defamation suit it probably could have won. And newspaper owners, including Jeff Bezos at the Washington Post, have been cozying up to Trump in many ways that harm credibility and mission.Yet some organizations have decided not to cave, but to be true to their stated and long-held principles.The Associated Press is suing, after the Trump administration severely limited its journalists’ access, punishing them for an editorial decision to continue using the term “Gulf of Mexico” on first reference in their stories, not “Gulf of America”. Another large law firm, Perkins Coie, is fighting in court after Trump’s executive order stripped their lawyers of their security clearances and denyed them access to government buildings.Take this to the bank: there is no satisfying the Trumpian demands. The goalposts will always be moved and then moved again.With its huge endowment and sea of rich alumni – some of whom, surely, would be in sympathy – Columbia had other choices. Smaller universities may not.Institutions with resources must resist thuggish bullying, not just for their own sakes, but to protect others who will find it much harder. And for another reason: at an extremely dangerous time in the US and in the world, it’s the right thing to do.

      Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture More

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      in US Politics

      What is the US Department of Education and what does it do?

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      Donald Trump has taken the overwhelming step of undoing the Department of Education on Thursday by signing an executive order to dismantle the agency in charge of the country’s national education policy.With the stroke of a pen, Trump fulfills a campaign promise he made all the way back in 2016.What is the Department of Education?The Department of Education is a cabinet-level agency created by Jimmy Carter in 1979 to oversee national education policy and administer federal assistance programs for schools across the country.The department manages a budget of approximately $268bn and employs about 4,400 staff members. Its core responsibilities have included distributing federal financial aid for education, collecting data on the US’s schools, identifying major educational issues and enforcing federal education laws prohibiting discrimination and implementing congressional education legislation.Among its most significant functions is administering federal student aid programs, providing billions in grants, work-study funds and loans to more than 13 million students. The agency also oversees programs addressing special education, English-language acquisition and education for disadvantaged students.Critics have long questioned the need for the department, arguing education should remain entirely under state and local control, while its supporters maintain it plays a crucial role in protecting educational equity and providing much-needed federal backing to schools serving vulnerable populations.Can Trump legally eliminate a government agency?Scrapping an entire department would require congressional approval – something that conservatives seeking to get rid of the education department have failed to do for decades.No president has ever successfully closed a cabinet-level agency enshrined in law before. And the constitutional separation of powers means the president’s executive authority alone isn’t sufficient to close the agency by the stroke of his pen.The White House has acknowledged this limitation, with administration officials confirming they don’t have the necessary votes in Congress to eliminate the department completely.So instead, Trump’s executive order would essentially direct the education secretary, Linda McMahon, to “take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure”, according to administration officials, while working within existing executive branch powers. This could include reorganizing certain functions, appointing leadership aligned with the aggressive drawing-down goal and potentially returning specific authorities to states where federal law permits.What does the executive order mean for American students?The mass weakening of the agency will undoubtedly create significant uncertainty for America’s 50 million public school students and their families, with impacts varying widely depending on how the directive is implemented.In the immediate term, most students will probably see little change to their daily educational experience, as schools primarily operate under state and local control and budgets for the year are already set. However, the long-term implications could be substantial if federal education programs are modified or reduced.Shuttering the department puts marginalized students most at risk, experts say. Since federal programs support special education, English-language learners and disadvantaged students, they face the brunt of the impact. The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (Idea), which provides protections for students with disabilities, is federally enforced through the department.What happens to student loans?There is significant uncertainty for the federal student loan system, which currently manages approximately $1.69tn in outstanding debt for more than 43 million Americans.While the White House has indicated functions such as student loans will continue, any disruption to the department’s distribution of grants, work-study funds and loans could affect the more than 19 million college students in the United States.There are questions about which department might oversee these operations, but earlier this month, Trump suggested transferring loan management to either the treasury department, commerce department or the small business administration next. The treasury department may be the most likely choice.Borrowers currently in repayment are unlikely to see immediate changes to their payment requirements or loan terms, but may face uncertainty about where to direct questions and how to navigate repayment options if administrative responsibilities shift. But the executive order’s impact on new student loans and financial aid processing for incoming college students remains unclear. More

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      in US Politics

      Trump signs executive order to dismantle US Department of Education

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      Donald Trump signed an executive order on Thursday that instructs the US education secretary, Linda McMahon, to start dismantling the Department of Education, seemingly attempting to circumvent the need to obtain congressional approval to formally close a federal department.The administration may eventually pursue an effort to get Congress to shut down the agency, Trump said at a signing ceremony at the White House on Thursday, because its budget had more than doubled in size in recent years but national test scores had not improved.The federal government does not mandate curriculum in schools; that has been the responsibility of state and local governments, which provide 90% of the funding to schools. Nevertheless, at the White House, Trump repeated his campaign promise to “send education back to the states”.The executive order targeting the education department, which has been expected for weeks, directed McMahon to take all necessary steps to shut down key functionalities. Trump added at the signing ceremony that he hoped McMahon would be the last education secretary.“My administration will take all lawful steps to shut down the department. We’re going to shut it down and shut it down as quickly as possible. It’s doing us no good,” Trump said.McMahon appeared to smile in acknowledgment as she sat in the front row at the signing event in the East Room. Trump spoke from a stage in front of a row of state flags, and flanked on each side by a group of schoolchildren sitting at small desks.The bulk of the education department’s budget is made up of federal grant and loan programs, including the $18.4bn Title I program that provides funding to high-poverty K-12 schools and the $15.5bn Idea program that helps cover the education costs for students with disabilities.The White House said those programs, as well as the $1.6tn federal student loan program, would not be affected by the order. It was not immediately clear what spending cuts the administration would be able to achieve without cutting those initiatives.The move comes after the administration has already taken steps to undercut the department’s authority by instituting a round of layoffs that has reduced its workforce by nearly half and cancelled dozens of grants and contracts.The idea of shutting down the education department dates back to efforts by Republicans in the 1980s. But the push has become increasingly mainstream in recent years as pro-Trump grassroots activists took aim at agendas that promoted education standards and more inclusive policies.Representative Thomas Massie, a Republican from Kentucky, has separately introduced a one-sentence bill on Friday that would terminate the education department at the end of 2026. Similar efforts have failed to get enough votes to pass in previous years.The Trump administration’s efforts to shutter the education department have largely followed the playbook in Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s rightwing manifesto to remake the federal government, which envisions the department as a “statistics-gathering agency that disseminates information to the states”.Democrats on Capitol Hill denounced the executive order and warned it could leave in jeopardy millions of low-income families, who rely on federal funding in schools.“Shutting down the Department of Education will harm millions of children in our nation’s public schools, their families and hardworking teachers. Class sizes will soar, educators will be fired, special education programs will be cut and college will get even more expensive,” Hakeem Jeffries, the US House minority leader, said in a statement.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe progressive wing of the House Democratic caucus also denounced Trump’s order as an unconstitutional attempt to evade seeking congressional approval to implement his political agenda.“The reality is that the Trump administration does not have the constitutional power to eliminate the Department of Education without the approval of Congress – however, what they will do is defund and destabilize the agency to manufacture chaos and push their extremist agenda,” said the Democratic congressman Maxwell Frost.But without cutting out the department itself, the incoming Trump administration, buoyed by a rightwing backlash to public schools that intensified after the Covid-19 pandemic, could alter key parts of the department’s budget and policies in ways that would be felt in schools nationwide.Some Republicans support the idea of sending block grants to states that aren’t earmarked for specific programs, letting states decide whether to fund low-income students or students with disabilities instead of requiring them to fund the programs for those students. Programs that don’t affect students directly, such as those that go toward teacher training, could also be on the chopping block. Expanding the use and promotion of school vouchers and installing “parents’ rights” policies are also likely.In late January, Trump signed executive orders to promote school choice, or the use of public dollars for private education, and to remove funding from schools accused of “radical indoctrination”. Trump also revived a “1776 commission” to “promote patriotic education”.The education department boasted that in the first week of the Trump administration it had “dismantled” diversity, equity and inclusion programs.Soon after Trump took over, the department was loaded with key staffers tied to a rightwing thinktank, the America First Policy Institute, often referred to as a “White House in waiting”. The thinktank has supported driving out diversity programs and banning books, which the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism documented in a report on the institute’s ties to the education department. The policy institute has promoted installing Christianity in government, including in schools.The department ended investigations into book banning and got rid of a book-ban coordinator position last month in a move announced by Craig Trainor, the acting assistant secretary for civil rights, who previously held a role at the thinktank. More

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      I’m a recent Stem grad. Here’s why the right is winning us over

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      When my friends and I graduated with our math degrees this past May, we felt like we could do anything.After long nights spent on problem sets, the most aimless and ambitious of us will forgo grad school and become interns and employees at the shiniest, slimiest corporations in America – big banks, the military industrial complex, big tech, big pharma – where we will solve interesting, difficult problems on cushy salaries.Working at the “department of government efficiency” (Doge) seems to require the same skillset. Fueled by unbridled techno-optimism and edgy cultural capital, Doge seems less like a government agency and more like another one of Elon Musk’s shaky startups. While bewildered pundits including Fareed Zakaria struggle to diagnose and process the new technocracy in DC, our new Doge overlords are infinitely familiar to my classmates and me: they might as well be guys we knew from school.This is the new generation of young technocrats who helped lift Trump into office: they are the crypto-obsessed love-children of Musk and Donald Trump, of Silicon Valley and the Heritage Foundation, of “effective altruism” and “effective accelerationism”. Meanwhile, graduates who lean left are simply out of luck: outside of academia, it can feel nearly impossible to find a progressive job in tech. Progressive Data Jobs, a major hub for jobs in this space, currently lists 96 open positions across all experience levels. By contrast, the careers portal at Goldman Sachs alone boasts 1,943 open jobs.That’s because, for decades, the progressive movement worldwide has failed to organize technical talent for its own interests.Upon graduation, an average science, technology, engineering and mathematics (Stem) student often faces a binary choice between industry and academia: BlackRock or grad school. Sure, there’s a handful of research non-profits out there, like Radical Data or the inactive Algorithmic Justice League; but they mostly focus on advocacy instead of governance. While there is excellent progressive work in data science being done by organizations such as OpenSecrets, Split Ticket, ProPublica’s Data Store, and even Twitter accounts such as Stats for Lefties, there is no systematic effort by progressives to recruit technical talent at scale.Meanwhile, financial and tech industries begin targeting Stem students with aggressive recruitment tactics as early as freshman year: over time, these industries become the only careers students can imagine outside of grad school. It’s no wonder that Stem students are more conservative than humanities and social science students, even though scientists tend to be more liberal. There are really only two things you can do with a Stem degree: stay in the ivory tower, or – to paraphrase Audre Lorde – go build the master’s house.In an interview with Ross Douthat, the tech investor Marc Andreessen claims that the left alienated Silicon Valley because “companies are being hijacked as engines of social change”: gone are the days of the agitprop 1984 Apple ads, or the naive “coding for good” movements of the 2010s. After the term “Stem” was coined in 2001, the next two decades saw the further division of science and the humanities into two opposing, irreconcilable systems of knowledge at the institutional level. While educational policy-makers obsess over Stem enrollments, funding and research as metrics to assess an education’s worth, students were incentivized to concentrate on one discipline, all while a liberal arts education diminished in appeal and practical utility.This made a generation of Stem students into technical ideologues. Starting from high school olympiads, they learn to worship technical capability above all else – and value the acquisition of technical skills above everything else. In college, they are never taught problem-solving frameworks outside those offered by programming or economics courses: game theory, homo economicus, Pareto efficiency. Crucially, these approaches always attempt to simplify the world instead of tackling society’s complexities head on: simplifying, as an impulse, has given rise to neoliberal, Silicon Valley-funded social movements such as “effective altruism” that do nothing to tackle crucial inequalities. Without alternative paradigms, these theories become real and universal ways to see the world and solve its problems.And so, empowered by Trump and Musk, it is the rightist technocrats who get to change the world today. With flashy tech stacks and a blind confidence to code up a solution to any and every problem, they set out to fix our government once and for all, armed with only three principles – simplify, automate, optimize. And so Doge runs the government as if solving an optimization problem: cut employees, retain key workers, minimize losses, simplify the structure. But already, Doge is reinstating fired federal workers who were working on crucial issues. Classic tech bro blunder: what else did they expect from trying to solve the problems of society without even bothering to understand their nuances?As the technocrat right rises into power, a luddite left also emerges in America – a narrowing base of grassroots organizers, local politicians, activists, academics and non-profits, that increasingly disaffiliate from technology with fear and distrust. As technical industries become more explicitly aligned with the agendas of the new American right in the post-Covid years, there has been little effort from progressive political organizations to recruit self-starting hackers and radical technologists, who exist in abundance on the decentralized internet. Did anyone even try to scoop up the workers who walked out of Google in 2018? Now, in 2025, we realize that a generation of politically naive engineers have already built a singular matrix of algorithmic oppression and universal surveillance that we cannot opt out of. Today’s progressives not only do not understand technology; worse, we have completely ceded technological power to the right.The dearth of efforts to recruit technical talent on the left essentially create a failure of imagination. Talented young engineers fail to imagine how their skills can be used to challenge existing power structures, and movements fail to imagine how technology can be used as a tactic to seize power. As Justin Joque argued in Revolutionary Mathematics, progressive movements need technical people who “understand the current metaphysics of capitalism – not in order to de-reify them, but rather to understand how they can be replaced”. One wonders whether more sophisticated data scientists could have made past Democratic campaigns more effective, or whether a collaboration between engineers and progressive thinkers could have led to more online platforms such as Bluesky.In order to hack and dismantle the technocrat right, American progressives must teach the engineers to dream again. Today’s engineers may be hard at work building the master’s house, but with the right organization and renewed senses of purpose, they, too, can learn to turn the master’s tools against him.

      Jaye Chen is a writer based in New York City More

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      in US Politics

      Trump’s student loan changes leave borrowers facing soaring repayments

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      Many of the nearly 43 million Americans who have federal student loan debt are seeing their carefully budgeted monthly payments soar amid Donald Trump’s overhaul of education in the United States.In the last few weeks, the Trump administration closed applications for all income-driven repayment plans (even ones not blocked by courts) and limited those eligible for public service loan forgiveness (PSLF). That program forgives the loans of government and select nonprofit workers after completing 10 years of service and making 10 years of minimum payments.“The student loan system was broken when President Biden was responsible for it. All we’ve seen since President Trump has come in as an effort to provide fewer rights and fewer resources for working people that have student debt, making the cost of living go up,” said Mike Pierce, executive director of the Student Borrower Protection Center.“Things are worse now than they’ve ever been, and nothing is on the table that will make life better for people with student loans.”Jordan, a public high-school English teacher in Redding, California, and his wife, who also works in public education, have student loans totaling $200,000. The couple, who recently welcomed a second child, just bought a house to accommodate their growing family. An even higher student loan payment each month wasn’t a consideration when they took out a mortgage, he said.“We’re going from making $600 in payments – that’s what Save (saving on a valuable education) is supposed to do, which we can absorb to an extent. But if we go off of income-based payments, I don’t know what’s going to happen,” Jordan, 37, said.“Today I tried to calculate what’s going to happen, and the calculators don’t work on the webpage. I couldn’t even tell you real numbers if I wanted.”With a new mortgage and childcare exceeding $15,000 on a teacher’s salary, Jordan and his family are stretched thin.He said: “It’s been alarming, but I’ve tried to enter into zen mode. I’ll just move my money and I guess wait until they figure out how to garnish my wages, if I even have money. I don’t know. What am I supposed to do?”Aaron, a pharmacist in Ohio, started looking for a second job when Trump got elected in preparation for higher monthly payments.“I’m nervous about it. I basically knew on election night what was going to happen to the Save Plan. It was going to go away. I did a second pharmacist job filling in some [pro re nata] hours,” Aaron, 47, said. “I’m still looking for additional hours to try to pick up.”Aaron took out around $180,000 in loans to cover pharmacy school tuition and living expenses for him and his family. With the Save plan and PSLF, he expected to pay $700 a month and have his loan forgiven after 10 years since he works for the state. Without an income driven repayment plan as an option, he fears a possible monthly payment of $1,800 for the next 30 years on a standard extended repayment plan with no chance of forgiveness.“The more that you go to school, have an advanced degree, you earn more over your lifetime. You pay more in taxes. Not just income taxes, but property taxes, sales taxes, everything else. So it’s actually a pretty good deal to invest in somebody to go to school,” he said. “I don’t see [loan forgiveness] as a handout, which is what people try to say ‘well, you know, I didn’t go to school, so I shouldn’t pay for anything.’ Yeah, but if I told you about all the stuff that I shouldn’t be paying for, you could play that game all day.”Reina Chilton-Mayer is a homemaker and caregiver for her disabled teenage son. Despite her husband having a master’s degree and stable income for many years, the unstable rental market alongside the cost of caretaking has left them with few choices, she said. She and her husband’s combined $140,000 worth of student loans has left them so burdened that they are considering defaulting on their debt for the first time.“I hate defaulting on something. It could have career impacts for my husband,” Chilton-Mayer, 44, said. “If you wanted to change jobs, of course there are going to be financial background checks. So we’re not 100% on whether or not we’re going to do that, but at the end of the day, it just comes down to making ends meet every month.”Ebrahim Ghazali, the chief of pediatrics at a clinic in Springfield, Massachusetts, has just one year left of payments until the rest of his loans would be forgiven under PSLF. The recent changes to federal student loans have paused his payments and left him unsure about the future of his debt.“With these giant student loans, my payments were initially close to $2,000 a month. When I got on the Save plan, it brought it down to between $600 and $700 a month, which I can budget a lot better,” Ghazali, 41, said.But now, with the application websites down, he said he is “unable to progress towards forgiveness and with the application site down. I can’t restart them on a different repayment plan. I’m not even sure if my current employment is going to count towards repayment at this point.”As the potential shuttering of the department of education looms, Pierce noted that “the worst things that could happen are already happening right now, and we don’t need to wait for the education department to shuffle the deck chairs around on the Titanic”.“Borrowers have a right to make payments based on their income,” he said. “They have a right to have their debt canceled that they work in public service, and those rights have been shut down by President Trump.” More

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      in US Politics

      Education department slashed in half after Trump administration mass firings

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      The Trump administration has decimated the US Department of Education, firing more than 1,300 employees in a single day in what looks to be the first step toward abolishing the agency entirely.The mass dismissal – delivered by email after most staff had left for the day on Tuesday – has slashed the department’s workforce by half. Along with voluntary departures and probationary firings, the agency that started 2025 with 4,133 staff now operates with an estimated 2,100 employees two months into Donald Trump’s presidency.“Today’s reduction in force reflects our commitment to efficiency,” Linda McMahon, the US education secretary, said in a statement on Tuesday, insisting that student loans, Pell grants and special education funding would continue uninterrupted. Department officials characterized the eliminated positions as unnecessary administrative roles.Civil rights enforcement has been particularly devastated, with regional offices in New York, San Francisco and Boston either closed entirely or stripped to minimal staffing. These units were already buried under backlogged discrimination investigations following campus protests last year.The cuts came just one day after the department warned 60 universities they face “potential enforcement actions” for alleged violations of federal civil rights laws protecting students from antisemitic discrimination – part of a broader push that recently saw the administration cancel $400m in funding to Columbia University over what it called “continued inaction” on harassment of Jewish students. A prominent Columbia student activist with a green card, Mahmoud Khalil, was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) without charge over the weekend and now faces deportation for his role in last year’s pro-Palestinian demonstrations.“We will not stand by while this regime pulls the wool over the eyes of the American people,” Sheria Smith, the president of the government employees’ union representing department workers, said in a statement.Some school leaders across the country are also alarmed by the implications of the department’s downsizing. Alberto Carvalho, the Los Angeles unified school district superintendent, warned of “catastrophic harm” if the cuts affect federal funding streams.“We receive in excess of $750m earmarked for poor students, English-language learners, students with disabilities and connectivity investments,” Carvalho said in a video statement. The LA unified school district is estimated to be the second-largest in the country.Greg Casar, the Congressional Progressive caucus chair from Texas, meanwhile accused the administration of blatant class warfare.He told reporters: “Trump and Musk are stealing from our children to pay for tax cuts for billionaires.” He called for Senate Democrats to reject the government funding bill that they’ll be voting on this week.Responding to reporter questions on Wednesday, Trump attacked Department of Education employees. “Many of them don’t work at all. Many of them never showed up to work,” the president said in the Oval Office. “We want to cut, but we want to cut the people that aren’t working or not doing a good job. We’re keeping the best people.”The purge aligns with Trump’s campaign pledge to abolish the department entirely – a promise that resonated with the parents’ rights movement that emerged during pandemic school closures. Constitutional experts note that while Trump cannot unilaterally dissolve the agency without congressional approval, his administration appears to be rendering it functionally obsolete.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionJust last week, McMahon confirmed on Fox News that Trump plans to sign an executive order targeting the department’s closure, despite polls showing roughly two-thirds of Americans oppose such a move.The administration is already preparing to scatter the department’s functions across the federal government. The New York Times reports that officials visited the treasury department on Monday to discuss transferring student loan operations, while McMahon has floated moving civil rights enforcement to the Department of Justice and disability services to the Department of Health and Human Services – mirroring recommendations from the conservative Project 2025 blueprint.The cuts bear the unmistakable influence of the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, who leads Trump’s so-called government efficiency initiative. McMahon acknowledged “regular meetings” with Musk’s team, praising them for identifying “waste” in the department.Department headquarters remained closed on Wednesday following the mass terminations, with officials citing security concerns. More