AFT’s Randi Weingarten Flips Out…Over Nothing

When it comes to how COVID was handled at the national level, it’s pretty easy to come up with a top five list of controversial figures that in their own way destroyed the credibility of the government’s health care agencies for at least a generation. Those figures include Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, his boss at the National Institute of Health, Dr. Francis Collins, Center of Disease Control Director Rachel Wolensky, White House COVID Response Coordinator Deborah Birx, and Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers.

In case you missed it, on Friday on the Mall in the Nation’s Capital, the Stand Up For Science (or another group of people who really hate Trump) rally took place. Collins, who for years as director of NIH fiercely held onto his claim that he was non-partisan, showed up, with his guitar, and threw his former independence into the Reflecting Pool. 

While four of the five were in government, Weingarten, running one of the country’s largest teacher unions, inserted herself into the role of government advisor and policy ghostwriter during the Biden Administration in 2021. Quite simply, the fact that an entire cohort of kids nationally were locked out of in-person learning for an extended period of time when the science indicated kids were never susceptible to catching or transmitting the virus as much as the elderly and those with co-morbidities, falls directly into the diminutive lap of Weingarten. 

Over the weekend, she appeared on MSNBC, and lost her ever-loving mind. 

Randi Weingarten just had a total MELTDOWN on MSNBC over Trump’s plan to abolish the Department of Education.

“I’M REALLY ANGRY ABOUT THIS!”
“I’M REALLY ANGRY!” pic.twitter.com/mURCCZiGtw

— Corey A. DeAngelis, school choice evangelist (@DeAngelisCorey) March 10, 2025

She angry. Angry, I tell you, angry. Maybe not quite as angry as the parents who couldn’t send their kids back to school because Weingarten wanted to extend remote learning indefinitely because a bunch of the teachers in her union liked working from home a lot better. And certainly not as angry as those same parents that discovered a year later how far behind in learning their kids were. 

So why is she so angry? This is why. 

BREAKING: Randi Weingarten REVEALS why she doesn’t want to abolish the Department of Education and send the money back to the states 🚨

She’s AFRAID states will decide to give the money to PARENTS for school choice.

“We know what Texas would do: THEY’LL USE IT FOR VOUCHERS!” pic.twitter.com/lV4HaYCxEl

— Corey A. DeAngelis, school choice evangelist (@DeAngelisCorey) March 10, 2025

Vouchers. School choice. The death knell of teachers unions. Since COVID, largely due to how mismanaged the virus was at the national level and the impact it had on schools, along with the woke/DEI/LGBTQ agenda invading the curriculum, parents all over the country demanded a way out for their kids, and a pathway into charters, religious, or private academies. This is a map of states that have implemented universal school choice legislation just in the last four years.

New Hampshire will join this universal school choice map soon.

— Corey A. DeAngelis, school choice evangelist (@DeAngelisCorey) March 5, 2025

New Hampshire will very soon join that list. And Georgia, Kansas, Missouri, Montana, and South Carolina have passed more limited school choice bills, or with longer phase-in language. In short, half the states now have at least some form of school choice options for parents who wish to pull their child out of failing public schools, and that child’s national funding, into the school of their choice. Weingarten very much was one of the catalysts that helped make this state-level education revolution a lot faster. 

One of Donald Trump’s campaign promises was to close down the Department of Education and bloc grant the money directly to the states, bypassing the need for a federal agency. In the early days of his administration, even before Education Secretary Linda McMahon was confirmed, Trump signaled he might be willing to put a little carrot out there and prioritize the distribution of all those bloc grants by weighting them more to states that have school choice legislation. This is why Weingarten is flipping out. 

In 2021, Weingarten was paid a little over half a million dollars in salary. At the height of COVID, when reopening plans were being discussed and policy was literally being written at the CDC, Weingarten was on the phone with Dr. Wolensky several times a week, helping write the policy to favor her union’s teachers. 

In 2024 alone, AFT spent $820,000 dollars lobbying the federal government, including the Department of Education. If the Department were to close down and all of the money was passed through directly to all 50 states, the Weingarten gravy train comes to the end of the track, because it’s a lot harder to lobby every states capital than it is waiting for the next Democrat to win the White House. 

Here’s the problem. Donald Trump, who does want to close the department, can’t do it. He knows it. And Weingarten knows it. It doesn’t mean resistance media won’t just make invent stories out of whole cloth in order to get people worked up. 

Over the past week, NBC, NPR, New York Times, Reuters, and many other outlets all reported that a March 6th Executive Order was coming out of the Oval Office to shutter the Department. It didn’t happen. Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt called it fake news. 

🚨More Fake News! President Trump is NOT signing an Executive Order on the Department of Education today. https://t.co/oicgkJw3uI

— Karoline Leavitt (@PressSec) March 6, 2025

Here’s the problem. The 1979 Department of Education Organization Act, passed by a duly-elected Congress and signed into law by President James Earl Carter, just one of many of his huge mistakes, is a pretty big hurdle to overcome. Trump cannot shut the department down via executive order. In a press gaggle on February 4th, Trump acknowledged as much, saying he’d need buy-in from Congress in order to fully shut it down. All he can do via executive order is strip the department down to bare essentials and have other agencies pick up overlapping responsibilities. There’s a 2-seat majority in Congress. Shutting down the Department of Education might actually be popular enough of an idea that I could see every Republican, including the recalcitrant Thomas Massie, get on board with it and pass it. And then the dream would end before the trip across Statuary Hall to the Senate chambers. 

The legislative filibuster is still very much alive and well in the upper chamber, meaning that all 53 Republicans would have to be on board with it, which is no sure thing at all, and you’d need at least seven, maybe as many as 10 Democrats in order to achieve cloture and move to a final vote to close the Department. I’m sorry, but that’s not going to happen. There is a higher statistical probability that David Strom will host next year’s Oscars than finding one Senate Democrat willing to close Ed. After what we saw on display at the Joint Session of Congress speech last Tuesday night, and with the deranged 22-Democrat script video holding the lapel mic, it’s delusion to hope that you’ll sway one Democrat, let alone a bunch. And Randi Weingarten knows this. Her anger in this clip is stagecraft, pure and simple. She’s acting. She’s not eligible for an Oscar, but she’s emoting enough to be in contention for an Emmy. 

I like to live in the real world, a place in which Weingarten has not resided for a decade. She likes to remind people she used to teach history at Clara Barton High School in Brooklyn long ago. Clearly, Civics and Government were not her long suit. 

Even if the President engineered some sort of E.O. to weaken and neuter the Department, putting in on a path to ultimate extinction, an action of which I would heartily approve, the ink wouldn’t be dry on it until a district judge in D.C. would enjoin it and add it to the pile of lawsuits waiting for appellate and/or Supreme Court action. I actually like Trump’s chances in most of these suits. But trying to be cute and getting around a Congressional act to create a department? That’s going to be hard to fly with the Supreme Court, even with a 6-3 conservative majority. 

Now if closing the Department of Education is really a goal of yours, and it should be, now would be the time to work even harder in the mid-term elections, especially on the Senate side. 53 Republicans is nice. 55 is nicer. 60 is divine. 65 and you’ve pretty much Collins and Murkowski-proofed it so you can actually get some real stuff done for President J.D. Vance in 2029.