RIGHT OUT OF THE BILLIONAIRES' PLAYBOOK ON DESTROYING THE COMMONS
Chapter 4: Defunding for Fun and Profit
"The best way to prove government doesn't work is to make sure it doesn't work." — Anonymous, but suspiciously familiar
The Setup: A Recipe Handed Down Through Generations of Yacht Clubs
Gather 'round, aspiring oligarchs. Pull up a chair — preferably one made from the mahogany of a defunded public library. Today's lesson is elegant in its simplicity, breathtaking in its cynicism, and, frankly, so well-worn it has its own Wikipedia page — though not for long, because we're defunding that too.
The playbook is this: You don't need to prove government is bad. You just need to make it bad enough that people believe you.
Here's the four-step formula, refined over decades of think-tank lunches and offshore tax planning:
Step One: Starve the Beast (But Smile While Doing It)
First, cut the funding. Not all at once — that's too obvious. Do it incrementally, strategically, and always with a press release about fiscal responsibility and eliminating waste.
- Freeze hiring so that when people retire, nobody replaces them.
- Offer "voluntary" early retirement packages that aren't really voluntary.
- Slash IT budgets so the website that processes 43 million student loan applications runs on what appears to be a server held together by electrical tape and institutional memory.
The U.S. Department of Education, once staffed by roughly 4,000 career professionals, was cut to approximately half that number — people who managed $1.6 trillion in student loan portfolios, enforced civil rights compliance in 50 states, and oversaw special education mandates for 7.5 million children with disabilities.
Half the staff. Same legal obligations. Same congressional mandates. Same 43 million borrowers calling on hold.
But remember: the hold music is critical. The longer the queue, the better the argument.
Step Two: Scatter the Pieces (Call It "Decentralization")
Once you've thinned the herd, the next move is elegant chaos. Take a coherent agency and distribute its functions across departments that have absolutely no institutional muscle memory for the work.
The Department of Education's reorganization is a masterclass in this technique:
| Function | Where It Went | Why It's Hilarious |
|---|---|---|
| Student Loan Oversight | Department of Treasury | Treasury's core competency is monetary policy, not calling Sallie Mae |
| Foreign Funding Disclosures | Department of State | Because nothing says "streamlined" like diplomatic cables about school grants |
| School Safety & Mental Health | HHS | A department already managing a national health crisis, now also doing school counseling |
| Special Education Compliance | Scattered to the winds | Legally mandated. Operationally orphaned. |
The result? Staff now navigate split IT infrastructure, redundant reporting pathways, and cross-agency coordination meetings that would make a Byzantine emperor weep with admiration.
Interagency fragmentation isn't decentralization. It's organizational origami — folding something functional into a shape that looks interesting but no longer holds water.
Step Three: Watch the Queues Grow (This Is the Fun Part)
Here's where the playbook gets genuinely diabolical — and where the billionaire class earns its standing ovation in the private box seats.
When you've halved the staff, scattered the functions, fragmented the IT systems, and physically displaced teams into offices borrowed from other agencies across Washington D.C. — the service gets worse. Shockingly. Inevitably. By design.
- Student loan processing slows to a crawl.
- Civil rights complaints pile up in inboxes nobody is staffed to monitor.
- Schools waiting on federal guidance get silence, then a form letter, then another form letter asking them to re-submit the first form letter.
- Parents of children with disabilities call compliance offices that are now, technically, three agencies away from where they used to be.
And here's the pièce de résistance: Congress never voted to abolish the Department of Education. It still exists, legally. The statutory obligations are still there, in black and white federal law. Career staff are legally required to fulfill mandates they no longer have the resources, authority, or organizational coherence to fulfill.
It's like requiring a surgeon to perform open-heart surgery after removing half their instruments, relocating the operating room to a broom closet in a different building, and reassigning the anesthesiologist to dermatology — then blaming the surgeon when the patient doesn't do well.
Step Four: Drop the Mic (And the Privatization Pitch)
Now — now — comes the moment the whole production was building toward.
You survey the wreckage you engineered. You gesture broadly at the confusion, the delays, the frustrated parents, the overwhelmed remaining staff, the students whose loan forgiveness applications have been sitting in a queue since the last administration. You furrow your brow with practiced concern. And you say:
"See? This is exactly what we've been saying. Government is fundamentally incapable of doing this job. The Department of Education is broken. It doesn't work. It never worked. The free market, competition, and private enterprise will do this better, faster, and cheaper."
And just like that, the arsonist is selling fire insurance.
The pitch arrives on cue: privatize student loans (banks will love that), voucher programs (hedge funds already have the charter school portfolios ready), market-based education metrics (because nothing calibrates childhood development like a quarterly earnings call).
The beauty of the scheme — and it is a scheme, let's be honest about that — is that the proof of failure was manufactured. The dysfunction was installed, not discovered. The red tape wasn't bureaucratic inertia; it was deliberately woven into the reorganization plan like a feature, not a bug.
What's Actually at Stake
Strip away the satire for a moment, because the underlying reality deserves plain language.
The Department of Education isn't an abstraction. It is the legal backstop for:
- 7.5 million students with disabilities whose rights under IDEA are federally enforced
- 43 million student loan borrowers navigating a system now split across agencies with no unified oversight
- Civil rights compliance in every public school in America
- Title I funding for schools in low-income communities that cannot survive without it
- Pell Grants for first-generation college students for whom higher education is otherwise financially impossible
When the operational capacity to deliver these services is deliberately degraded, the people who suffer are not the people who designed the degradation. They are, almost exclusively, people who cannot afford the private alternative that will be offered once the public option has been sufficiently discredited.
That is not a side effect. In the playbook, that is the point.
The Closing Argument the Playbook Doesn't Want You to Notice
There is a telling detail buried in the reporting on the Department of Education's reorganization: Congress never voted to abolish it. The statutory authority remains. The legal mandates remain. The obligations to millions of Americans remain.
What changed was the will to fulfill them — replaced by the will to demonstrate that they couldn't be fulfilled.
Chapter 4 of the Billionaires' Playbook on Destroying the Commons is not really about efficiency, or streamlining, or returning power to the states. It is about converting public goods into private markets by first making the public goods fail — and making sure the failure is loud, visible, and politically useful.
The playbook is old. The tactic is transparent. And the people left holding the consequences are, as always, the ones who never got an invitation to the yacht club in the first place.
Next chapter preview — Chapter 5: "Regulatory Capture, or: How to Become the Referee of Your Own Game."
Sources & Further Reading
Chapter 4: Defunding for Fun and Profit — The Department of Education
🗞️ Primary News Reporting
These outlets have published the most detailed investigative and news coverage of the Department of Education restructuring:
NPR Education
- Search: "Department of Education layoffs 2025 NPR"
- 🔗 Direct: npr.org/sections/education
- NPR has covered staff reductions, IDEA compliance concerns, and the Federal Student Aid disruption extensively.
The New York Times — Education Section
- Search: "New York Times Department of Education dismantling 2025"
- 🔗 Direct: nytimes.com/section/education
- Key reporting on workforce reductions, interagency fragmentation, and legal conflicts.
The Washington Post — Education
- Search: "Washington Post Department of Education restructuring DOGE 2025"
- 🔗 Direct: washingtonpost.com/education
- Deep reporting on physical displacement of staff, IT fragmentation, and career employee accounts.
Politico — Education Policy
- Search: "Politico Education Department reorganization student loans Treasury 2025"
- 🔗 Direct: politico.com/education
- Strong policy-focused reporting on the statutory conflicts and congressional response.
ProPublica
- Search: "ProPublica Department of Education civil rights compliance 2025"
- 🔗 Direct: propublica.org
- Investigative reporting on civil rights enforcement backlogs and special education compliance gaps.
🏛️ Policy & Research Organizations
Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP)
- 🔗 cbpp.org
- Analysis of Title I funding impacts and low-income school consequences of restructuring.
Brookings Institution — Education Policy
- 🔗 brookings.edu/topic/education
- Nonpartisan policy analysis on decentralization, privatization, and market-based education reform.
National Education Policy Center (NEPC)
- 🔗 nepc.colorado.edu
- University of Colorado-based research center tracking privatization trends and voucher program outcomes.
Economic Policy Institute (EPI) — Education
- 🔗 epi.org/issues/education
- Labor and workforce analysis of federal education staff reductions and their downstream effects.
National School Boards Association (NSBA)
- 🔗 nsba.org
- Direct reporting from school districts on federal guidance delays and compliance confusion.
⚖️ Legal & Statutory Sources
U.S. Department of Education — Official (for statutory reference)
- 🔗 ed.gov
- The Department of Education Organization Act (20 U.S.C. § 3401 et seq.) — the law Congress passed that only Congress can repeal.
Government Accountability Office (GAO)
- 🔗 gao.gov
- Search: "GAO Department of Education reorganization 2025"
- Independent federal watchdog reports on agency restructuring and compliance capacity.
Congressional Research Service (CRS)
- 🔗 crsreports.congress.gov
- Nonpartisan legal analysis on whether executive reorganization of the Department of Education is lawful without congressional action.
📖 Historical Context & The "Starve the Beast" Doctrine
"The Shock Doctrine" — Naomi Klein (Book)
- Publisher: Metropolitan Books, 2007
- The foundational text on manufactured crisis as a tool for privatization — eerily applicable here.
"Dark Money" — Jane Mayer (Book)
- Publisher: Doubleday, 2016
- Documents the decades-long billionaire-funded campaign to defund public institutions, including education.
Cato Institute & Heritage Foundation (For the opposing viewpoint)
- 🔗 cato.org | heritage.org
- These are the primary think tanks that have advocated for abolishing the Department of Education — useful for understanding the ideological architecture of the playbook itself.
🔍 Recommended Search Strings
If you want to do your own deep dive, these search queries will surface the most relevant current reporting:
⚠️ A note on live links: Because this story is actively developing as of September 2026, some URLs may have updated or been archived. The outlet homepages and search strings above will reliably surface the most current versions of each story.
