When state education departments heard that the federal DOE might reduce overhead and pass funds through to the states, the news was met at the state level with both elation and concern.

“Of course we’re ecstatic,” Oregon Education Department spokesperson Ed Grifter said. “Even though we get bigger budgets every year, we just can’t seem to get our students up to grade level standards. More money should do it.”

Grifter was supportive of the cuts at the federal level.

“They take 40% off the top for administration,” Grifter said. “So, after DOGE cuts the states should get more.”

When asked about administrative overhead at the state level, Grifter put it in a positive light.

“Half of our funding goes to putting teachers into classrooms,” Grifter said. “Almost half.”

When asked if cutting state administrative overhead might have a similar benefit to cutting the federal education budget, Grifter did not agree.

“How are teachers going to know what works and doesn’t work without us administrators telling them? I mean if our K-12 teachers had their way they would still be teaching reading with phonics and go back to teaching basic arithmetic. So sad.”

Grifter also had a concern.

“The federal cuts are happening so fast we have little time to hire more administrators to handle the extra money we’re going to get. We’re hoping to just hire the fired federal DOE employees and put them right to work.”

When asked for an example of what the former federal DOE employees will do, Grifter focussed on elementary education.

“Most of our teachers are woefully undertrained in modern bulletin board design. We desperately need specialists with an Ed.D. in that area to run best-practices conferences. Oh, and we could use some help coming up with different names for DEI since we have to hide that better now.”

Meanwhile, School Districts across the country are looking forward to increased funding from state DOEs so they can add more Central Office Specialists and vice principals to schools.

While at the school level, teachers are wondering if there will be enough trickle down to hire more teachers and get class sizes below 40.

At publication time, all savings were being absorbed by lawsuits to prevent downsizing.