Trump picks for FBI director, defense secretary and more face pointed questions on Capitol Hill

(WASHINGTON) — South Dakota Sen. Mike Rounds introduced the “Returning Education Back to Our States Act” on Thursday, signaling a commitment to deliver on President-elect Donald Trump’s vow to dismantle the Department of Education.

In the conservative movement to return education back to local control, Rounds said the legislation would “eliminate” the department while redistributing all critical federal programs to other agencies.

Rounds’ announcement was first reported by Fox News.

“For years, I’ve worked toward removing the federal Department of Education,” the Republican senator wrote in a statement, adding “I’m pleased that President-elect Trump shares this vision, and I’m excited to work with him and Republican majorities in the Senate and House to make this a reality. This legislation is a roadmap to eliminating the federal Department of Education by practically rehoming these federal programs in the departments where they belong, which will be critical as we move into next year.”

In his statement, Rounds said the United States spends too much on education for students’ test scores to be lagging behind other countries in standardized assessments. He called the DOE ineffective and earmarked the department’s responsibilities for the Departments of Interior, Treasury, Health and Human Services, Labor and State, according to the bill text.

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) and aid programs under Title VIII of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act will be transferred to the Department of Health and Human Services, the Office of Indian Education of the Department of Education will be transferred to the Department of the Interior, the Federal Pell Grant and other higher education loan programs will be transferred to the Department of the Treasury.

According to the bill, the treasury department will allocate Block grants to states for K-12 and postsecondary education. The treasury secretary also has the power to withhold these funds if they are mishandled by the states. The Justice Department will oversee federal civil rights laws that were previously under Title VI.

Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie told ABC News Thursday morning that he would also bring forward legislation to abolish the DOE within the “first few weeks” of the 119th Congress.

“There’ll be one sentence – only thing that will change is the date: The Department of Education shall terminate on December 31, 2026,” Massie told ABC News.

Massie has been pushing to defund the U.S. Department of Education since the start of 2023 when he introduced H.R. 899. Massie’s bill wasn’t voted on in the House last year.

However, education analyst Neal McCluskey at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, argued Massie’s one-sentence bill was not realistic.

“You’ve got to figure out what to do with all the legislation that feeds into the Department of Education,” McCluskey said.

“If Congress were to pass that law that says, abolish the Department of Education, technically the department would go away, but then you’d have all sorts of questions, well, who’s going to administrate or be administrator for all these programs,” he said.

In March 2023, Massie wrote an amendment H.Amendment 124 in H.R. 5, the “Parents Bill of Rights Act” – the House’s signature K-12 education policy – to abolish the department. That amendment failed as all Democrats and 60 House Republicans voted against it.

Here are ways to gut the department

Even as Republicans hold majorities in both chambers next Congress, the Senate typically needs 60 votes to do anything, according to McCluskey. McCluskey said, “There’s no chance they’re going to be at 60, and so it’s going to be tough [to abolish the department legislatively].”

“The Department of Education administers a whole lot of laws, and then those laws have to be changed about who runs student aid and who is tasked with making decisions about canceling student debt, and who decides or who administers Title I and lots of these other federal programs,” McCluskey told ABC News.

“He [President-elect Trump] can certainly use the bully pulpit to drive this a lot. He could provide legislative blueprints if he wanted to. But ultimately this has to come through Congress,” McCluskey underscored.

Meanwhile, Augustus Mays, vice president for partnerships and engagement at the advocacy group The Education Trust, told ABC News that the president-elect could also ask Congress to gut federal programs like Title 1, the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), and others, in his congressional budget request.

Public education, particularly in high-need districts, would effectively be drained of millions of dollars, according to Mays.

“It would really cripple the ability to function and aid the support that these students need to really succeed from an academic standpoint,” Mays said.

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(WASHINGTON) — Former President Donald Trump on Tuesday evening returned to a Hispanic-majority town in eastern Pennsylvania after a comedian at Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden over the weekend sparked controversy by making racist jokes about Latinos, including calling Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage.”

Trump did not address the comedian’s controversial remarks — but did seize on comments President Joe Biden made on Tuesday when, criticizing the remarks about Puerto Rico, Biden used wording that seemed to refer to Trump supporters as “garbage.”

Toward the end of the rally, Trump invited Sen. Marco Rubio to the stage, who broke the news of Biden’s comments to Trump and the crowd.

Trump recalled Hillary Clinton’s controversial “basket of deplorables” line in 2016.

“She said ‘deplorable.’ That didn’t work out,” Trump said. “‘Garbage,’ I think is worse.”

Trump’s rally took place in Allentown, Pennsylvania, a city of more than 125,000 people where the Hispanic population makes up 55% of the total, according to the U.S. Census data, with much of that number being Puerto Ricans.

His second campaign stop of the day in Pennsylvania — after a roundtable in Drexel Hill, where the population is overwhelmingly white — the Allentown visit was an opportunity for the former president to court Hispanics, and more specifically Puerto Ricans, after Hispanic groups on both sides of the aisle called the racist jokes made at the New York rally “derogatory,” “offensive,” and “disrespectful.”

Early on in his remarks, Trump made no mention of the controversy but did refer to his Madison Square Garden rally, calling it “the greatest evening anyone has seen politically,” adding, “The love was unbelievable.”

During his Pennsylvania event, Trump touted his support from Latinos, including an endorsement from Puerto Rico’s “Shadow Senator” Zoraida Buxo, who holds a position that advocates for statehood for the territory.

“Nobody loves our Latino community and our Puerto Rican community more than I do,” Trump said.

Cheers for mass deportation plan

Trump’s rally in Allentown came at the same time Vice President Kamala Harris was giving a speech from the Ellipse in Washington, D.C., making what her campaign has characterized as her “closing argument” in the race.

Trump received his largest applause of the evening when he said, if elected, he would carry out mass deportations of people in the U.S. illegally beginning on the first day of his administration.

“On day one, I will launch the largest deportation program in American history,” he said. “We’re going to get them out. I will rescue every city and town that has been invaded and conquered, and we will put these vicious and bloodthirsty criminals in jail or kick them the hell out of our country.”

As the crowd gave an overwhelming ovation, Trump said “I am hereby calling for the death penalty for any migrant that kills an American citizen or a law enforcement officer.”

The crowd then chanted, “USA!”

Controversial ‘garbage’ remarks

The comments at the Madison Square Garden rally on Sunday were made by controversial comedian Tony Hinchcliffe during pre-programming earlier Sunday afternoon, including explicit comments about how Latinos “love making babies.”

“I don’t know if you guys know this, but there’s literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. I think it’s called Puerto Rico,” Hinchcliffe said on stage to a crowd of nearly 20,000 Sunday night, after the former president himself the previous day called the United States a “garbage can for the world.”

Hinchcliffe, instead of apologizing for his comments, attacked his critics as lacking a sense of humor and accused them of taking the joke out of context to “make it seem racist.”

The former president denied knowing the comedian on Tuesday, telling ABC News Senior Congressional Correspondent Rachel Scott: “I don’t know him, someone put him up there. I don’t know who he is.”

Trump also insisted he didn’t hear any of the comments, even as they’ve been played on television and written about extensively. When asked what he made of them, he did not take the opportunity to denounce them, repeating that he didn’t hear the comments.

Trump’s campaign has also tried to distance itself from comedian Hinchcliffe’s comments, saying they don’t reflect their views.

Several Republicans have come out against the jokes, including the chair Republican Party of Puerto Rico, Angel Cintrón, who called Hinchcliffe’s comments “unfortunate, ignorant, and entirely reprehensible,” as well as “racist.”

Residents of Puerto Rico, as a U.S. territory, do not vote for president in the general election, but the Republican Party of Puerto Rico held a primary in April as part of the Republican presidential nominating process. Donald Trump won the primary and netted the territory’s delegates.

Puerto Ricans living in the United States, however, make up the largest Hispanic group in seven states across the country, including in the critical battleground state of Pennsylvania, according to the U.S. Census data.

In Pennsylvania, where President Joe Biden won in 2020 by just over 81,000 votes, 3.7% of the state’s total population, or roughly 486,000 people, were of Puerto Rican origin. Pennsylvania is again expected to be an extremely tight race between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, with Trump ahead of Harris by just 0.2% according to 538’s polling average as of Oct. 29.

Overall, Pennsylvania’s eligible Latino voter population has more than doubled since 2000, from 206,000 to 620,000 in 2023, according to WNTM’s analysis of U.S. Census Bureau figures.

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(NEW YORK) — Former President Barack Obama will hit the campaign trail for Vice President Harris and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz starting next Thursday, Oct. 10, through election day, according to a senior campaign official.

The first stop will be in Pennsylvania in the Pittsburgh area before Obama embarks on a campaign blitz across the battleground states in the final 27 days.

Obama held a Los Angeles fundraiser for Harris in September and — along with former first lady Michelle Obama — gave a speech at the Democratic National Convention in August.

Meanwhile, Harris recently enlisted the help of former Republican Rep. Liz Cheney on Thursday at a rally in Wisconsin.

Cheney, the former co-chair of the House committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the Capitol, laid out former President Donald Trump’s actions on that day before telling the crowd, “I don’t care if you are a Democrat or a Republican or an independent. That is depravity, and we must never become numb to it. Any person who would do these things can never be trusted with power again.”

Cheney is among a handful of prominent Republicans, including her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney, who have pledged to support Harris’ bid, but her endorsement, as one of former President Donald Trump’s most outspoken critics within the party, is one that Harris hopes to leverage in crucial states like Wisconsin, whose margins are expected to be razor thin.

In August, Obama delivered the closing speech on night two of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

“We do not need four more years of bluster and bumbling and chaos,” he told delegates. “We have seen that movie before and we all know that the sequel is usually worse. America is ready for a new chapter. America is ready for a better story. We are ready for a President Kamala Harris.”

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