www.thecentersquare.com – By Brett Rowland | The Center Square – (The Center Square – ) 2025-01-20 13:17:00
(The Center Square) – President Donald Trump promised Americans that their federal government would operate more efficiently with the creation of the Department of Government Efficiency.
“My administration will establish the brand new Department of Government Efficiency,” the 47th president said to applause from Republicans.
Trump’s Inauguration Day remarks on DOGE came the same day as a nonprofit group joined a union to file suit over the outside agency, alleging its secret meetings violate federal law.
The complaint, filed by Public Citizen and the American Federation of Government Employees, alleges DOGE violates the Federal Advisory Committee Act because “members do not have a fair balance of viewpoints, meetings are held in secret and without public notice and records and work product are not available to the public.”
“AFGE will not stand idly by as a secretive group of ultra-wealthy individuals with major conflicts of interest attempt to deregulate themselves and give their own companies sweetheart government contracts while firing civil servants and dismantling the institutions designed to serve the American people,” AFGE National President Everett Kelley said in a statement. “This fight is about fairness, accountability, and the integrity of our government.”
Trump spoke about DOGE during his inauguration after making bold promises for the department after winning the 2024 election.
Trump picked Tesla CEO Elon Musk and businessman Vivek Ramaswamy to lead DOGE. Trump said the new group will pave the way for his administration to “dismantle government bureaucracy, slash excess regulation, cut wasteful expenditures and restructure federal agencies.”
Both Musk and Ramaswamy attended Trump’s inauguration Monday. The two men previously outlined their plans for DOGE, which includes reducing regulations that would lead to mass layoffs of federal employees.
“A drastic reduction in federal regulations provides sound industrial logic for mass head-count reductions across the federal bureaucracy,” Musk and Ramaswamy wrote in an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal in November. “DOGE intends to work with embedded appointees in agencies to identify the minimum number of employees required at an agency for it to perform its constitutionally permissible and statutorily mandated functions.”
AFGE, which represents more than 800,000 workers in nearly every federal agency, had previously denounced DOGE. Kelley said it will hollow out the federal government and its workforce.
“By their very nature, cuts of this size also would require slashing spending on our military, homeland security, federal law enforcement, and virtually every aspect of our government operations,” he said. “This kind of financial pressure would lead to painful, widespread reductions in services that will affect Americans from every walk of life.”
Trump has promised to cut “hundreds of billions” in federal spending in 2025 through the reconciliation process. DOGE co-leader Musk initially suggested DOGE could cut $2 trillion in spending. Musk more recently said the group will aim for $2 trillion, but likely come up with half that amount.
Congress controls the purse strings for discretionary spending, which totaled about $1.7 trillion in 2023. Congress generally allocates about half of its discretionary spending to the U.S. Department of Defense.
“The number of federal employees to cut should be at least proportionate to the number of federal regulations that are nullified: Not only are fewer employees required to enforce fewer regulations, but the agency would produce fewer regulations once its scope of authority is properly limited,” Musk and Ramaswamy wrote. “Employees whose positions are eliminated deserve to be treated with respect, and DOGE’s goal is to help support their transition into the private sector. The president can use existing laws to give them incentives for early retirement and to make voluntary severance payments to facilitate a graceful exit.”
Congress has run a deficit every year since 2001. In the past 50 years, the federal government has ended with a fiscal year-end budget surplus four times, most recently in 2001.
Last week, the federal government reported net costs of $7.4 trillion in fiscal year 2024, but it couldn’t fully account for its spending. The U.S. Government Accountability Office, which is Congress’s research arm, said that the federal government must address “serious deficiencies” in federal financial management and correct course on its “unsustainable” long-term fiscal path.
SUMMARY: Jay’s Evening Weather for Thursday 07/31/25 reports southern West Virginia is currently very warm at 91°F with a heat index near 99°F, recently peaking at 101°F. Partly cloudy skies prevail with 56% humidity and light northwest winds. A front northwest of the region is causing showers and thunderstorms particularly in northern counties like Nicholas, Fayette, and Raleigh. These storms may become strong tonight with some heavy rain possible near Charleston, warranting flash flood monitoring. Temperatures elsewhere range from mid-70s to upper 80s, with lows in the 60s overnight. Rain persists into Friday, ending by weekend, leading to cooler, more pleasant days ahead.
More showers and storms are coming into the area thanks to a front, but in addition to giving us rain, the front will also cool us off quite a bit.
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act created the first national tax credit scholarship program, allowing states to decide if and how to participate. Blue states face a tough choice: reject it on principle or adapt it to support public school needs like tutoring and transportation. Since 2020, private school choice programs have rapidly expanded, with 2023 spending at $6.3 billion and growing participation. By 2026-27, about half of U.S. students will be eligible. States vary widely in program design and oversight. Critics warn of risks like inequality and misuse without strong regulations, while supporters see opportunities to innovate education funding.
When President Donald Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, he gave state leaders — not federal regulators — the power to decide whether and how to participate in the first-ever national tax credit scholarship program.
That decision now looms largest in blue states, where Democratic governors and lawmakers must weigh whether to reject the law outright on ideological grounds — or try to reshape it into something that reflects their own values.
“This isn’t the federal voucher program we were worried about five years ago,” said Jon Valant, a senior fellow in governance studies at the left-leaning Brookings Institution who testified before Congress on earlier versions of the bill. “It still has serious problems — but states now have tools to mold it into something they might actually support.”
The final law gives states wide discretion, he said. They can opt out entirely. They can opt in passively, leaving the program to operate as written. Or, as Valant suggests, they can try to redraw its footprint — focusing less on private school tuition and more on public school supports like tutoring, transportation and enrichment services in underserved districts.
“My hope is that blue states take a hard look and ask: Can this be used to address our own needs?”
For progressives and education advocates who are wary of school vouchers, the decision is fraught. Opting in could draw criticism for approving what many see as a vehicle for privatization of K-12 education. But opting out could mean turning down federal dollars — education money that states with budding or robust private school voucher infrastructures, such as Arizona and Florida, will gladly take.
“There’s money on the table, and it can be used for more than just private school tuition,” Valant said. “If blue states want to keep that money from reinforcing inequality, they’ll have to get creative, and act fast.”
Since 2020, private school choice programs — once limited to low-income or special needs students — have rapidly expanded.
In 2023, $6.3 billion was spent nationwide on private school choice programs — less than 1% of total public K-12 operational spending, according to EdChoice, a nonprofit that advocates for school choice measures. From 2023-24 to 2024-25, participation in universal private school choice programs surged nearly 40%, growing from roughly 584,000 to 805,000 students in just one school year.
By 2026-27, about half of all U.S. students will be eligible, according to estimates by FutureEd, an independent think tank at Georgetown University.
These trends, combined with new federal tax credit, could fundamentally reshape the education funding landscape across state governments, experts say.
“States will need to decide whether to encourage the redirection of funding to support private and religious schools — either by expanding existing voucher programs or, if they don’t have one, by introducing such a program for the first time,” said Sasha Pudelski, director of advocacy for AASA, The School Superintendents Association. The group opposes the national voucher plan.
State regulations
As of this May, 21 states operated tax credit scholarship programs with varying degrees of funding and oversight. According to the EdChoice Friedman Index, the states of Florida, Arkansas, Arizona and Alabama rank highest in private school access, with 100% of students eligible for school choice programs.
Some states, like Florida and Arizona, already have extensive tax credit scholarship systems. Others, including Texas, are building new infrastructure such as statewide voucher programs and education savings accounts, known as ESAs.
States with no current programs face decisions about participation, regulation and equity, but without clear federal guardrails, education advocates told Stateline.
The federal policy builds on existing state-level tax credit scholarship programs — such as Alabama’s — but significantly expands eligibility, removes scholarship caps and broadens allowable uses to include not just tuition, but also tutoring, therapy, transportation and academic support services. Beginning in 2027, scholarships will be excluded from federal taxable income.
Valant, of Brookings, told Stateline that some of his initial concerns were addressed in the version of the bill signed into law.
“There was a very realistic scenario in the earlier version of the bill where a small number of very wealthy people could essentially make money off this,” Valant said. “That was mostly addressed.”
The enacted version eliminates stock donations and caps individual tax credits at $1,700. And with states that opt in having the power to shape their own program, Valant said that gives them the chance to establish their own guardrails, such as income eligibility caps or nondiscrimination policies for participating schools.
If blue states want to keep that money from reinforcing inequality, they’ll have to get creative, and act fast.
– Jon Valant, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution
The scholarship-granting organizations, known as SGOs, would then be subject to new state regulations about where the money can go.
“States could say SGOs can’t give money to schools that discriminate based on sexual orientation. … There’s quite a lot of room here for state regulation,” he said.
Looking ahead, Valant said he’ll be watching how states interpret their regulatory powers — and how effective scholarship-granting organizations are at fundraising under the new rules, which prohibit large stock gifts and rely instead on millions of smaller donations.
“Now it’s a strange pitch: ‘Can you front me $300 to give to the SGO? I swear the IRS will give it back,’” he said. “It’s going to take time to figure out how to sell this to families.”
Concerns over transparency and equity remain. The program allows donors, scholarship-granting organizations and families to direct funds with little public accountability, critics say. And in states without robust oversight, Valant warns that funds could be misused — or channeled to institutions that exclude students based, for example, on identity or beliefs about sexual orientation.
He also emphasized that early participation is likely to skew toward families already in private schools, particularly in wealthier ZIP codes — mirroring patterns seen in programs in Arizona, Florida and Georgia.
“One big risk is that the funds will disproportionately flow to wealthier families — just like we’ve seen in many ESA programs,” Valant said.
What do these programs look like across the country?
FutureEd studied eight states — Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Iowa, Indiana, Ohio, Oklahoma and West Virginia — where 569,000 students participated in school choice programs at a cost to taxpayers of $4 billion in 2023-24.
The FutureEd analysis found significant differences among the states in design, funding and oversight.
Florida operated the largest and most expensive program, with broad eligibility, no caps or accreditation requirements, and a major influx of higher-income families, though it mandated some university-led performance reviews. Iowa fully funded ESAs and, like other states, saw mostly existing private school families benefit.
Arkansas had a cautious rollout due to legal delays and geographic clustering of participants, while West Virginia allowed spending across state lines with no performance reporting.
Newcomer North Carolina began with income-based prioritization but quickly expanded under political pressure or demand, while Alabama and Louisiana will launch ESA programs in 2025-26 using general state revenues.
Utah enacted a universal voucher program in 2023, providing up to $8,000 per student for private school or homeschool expenses. A state teachers union sued, arguing that participating schools were not “free and open to all children” and that the program diverted public school funds. A state court this April ruled the program was unconstitutional.
As the new federal law opens the door for tax-credit-funded tuition support, Texas is building its first universal school voucher program, aided through ESAs to begin in the 2026-27 school year. The program is funded with $1 billion over two years, with $10,000-$11,000 per student — up to $30,000 for students with disabilities and $2,000 for homeschoolers.
The Texas comptroller will oversee the program, and private schools must be open for at least two years to be eligible for funds.
Voucher programs can drain state budgets, and budget wonks predict the cost for Texas could rise to around $4.8 billion by 2030, The Texas Tribune reported.
A spokesperson for the Texas comptroller’s office said that details are still being finalized; the state has issued a request for proposals due Aug. 4 to select eligible educational assistance organizations that would help funnel scholarship dollars to schools.
Other states may be more cautious. The Missouri National Education Association filed a lawsuit this summer to block $51 million in state appropriations to private school scholarships through the MOScholars program. The suit argues that using general revenue rather than private donations violates the state constitution and undermines public education funding.
Stateline is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Stateline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Scott S. Greenberger for questions: info@stateline.org.
West Virginia Watch is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. West Virginia Watch maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Leann Ray for questions: info@westvirginiawatch.com.
Note: The following A.I. based commentary is not part of the original article, reproduced above, but is offered in the hopes that it will promote greater media literacy and critical thinking, by making any potential bias more visible to the reader –Staff Editor.
Political Bias Rating: Center-Right
This content provides a generally factual overview of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act and the national tax credit scholarship program it established. It presents perspectives from various stakeholders, including education policy analysts from the left-leaning Brookings Institution and advocacy groups critical of voucher programs. The article leans slightly toward a Center-Right bias by focusing on expanding school choice, including the benefits of private school access and state flexibility, while also acknowledging concerns raised by progressives and education advocates. The nuanced discussion of potential equity and oversight issues alongside support for school choice funding frameworks suggests an overall balanced but slightly pro-school-choice, market-oriented viewpoint typical of Center-Right coverage.
SUMMARY: Southern West Virginia experienced a warm afternoon with temperatures mostly in the mid-80s, cooler in areas with rain such as Beckley (76°F) where thunderstorms occurred. Humidity remains high, making it feel hotter, especially in Pineville and Welch where it feels like 94°F. Showers are beginning near Summersville and along Route 19. A cold front bringing thunderstorms is expected to move through Thursday to Saturday, possibly severe in higher elevations like Greenbrier Valley. By Sunday, conditions will clear with significantly cooler temperatures, dropping into the upper 50s and lower 60s, offering a welcome break from recent heat.
There have been more showers and storms around today, but after one more day of summerlike weather, a big change is in the forecast.
