by Dick Hall-Sizemore

Governor Youngkin is again showing that he’s “all hat and no cattle.”

The latest example is his fawning response to the President’s actions to gut the U.S. Dept. of Education. In it, he declares, “Virginia is ready to take full responsibility for K-12 education.” That sounds impressive, but I thought that Virginia has always had full responsibility for operating public education. What will Virginia be able to do that it could not do before the President’s executive order?

Perhaps I should give Youngkin a little more credit. Perhaps, when he said, “full responsibility,” he meant “full” in the literal sense of the word. We are ready to go it alone, without any federal assistance. We are taking full responsibility, which includes paying for it all.

But, no. That couldn’t be what he meant, because in the next paragraph of the news release, Secretary of Education Aimee Rogstad Guidera is talking about federal dollars the state will be receiving. So, it looks like the state will not be taking full responsibility after all. We still expect the federal government to pay part of the costs of our educational system.

Secretary Guidera seems really excited that “the President’s Executive Order ensures that federal dollars will arrive in Virginia with less red tape and bureaucracy and allow” the state and localities to spend all that federal money however it deems best. She might want to read that order again. Nowhere in that order does Trump address the issue of how federal funding, if there is to be any, will be allocated to states and localities, except to say that none will go to any entity that has programs “under the label ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ or similar terms and programs promoting gender ideology.”

Despite his declaration that “waste, fraud and abuse is stunning and shocking, and everybody sees it,” Youngkin seems to be assuming that Virginia will still be getting federal dollars to help pay for its schools. It seems that the “waste, fraud and abuse” is somewhere else and not in Virginia.