White House proposes merging education, labor
WASHINGTON — The Trump administration proposed a major reorganization of the federal government on Thursday, calling for merging the education and labor departments, moving the federal food stamp program to the Department of Health and Human Services and renaming that agency. The plan represented the latest aspiration of a presidential administration to revamp a sprawling federal government.
Mick Mulvaney, director of the Office of Management and Budget, told The Associated Press in an interview that the effort is part of President Donald Trump’s “drain the swamp’ agenda” and was aimed at streamlining a long list of overlapping regulations and department functions.
The sweeping reorganization proposal, which was formally unveiled during the president’s Cabinet meeting Thursday, is the result of an order signed by Trump in March 2017 calling for a review of the federal government aimed at identifying redundancies and streamlining agencies.
Mulvaney pointed to the fact that there are currently more than 40 job training programs spread across 16 different Cabinet agencies — just one of a list of examples he cited.
“If it’s cheese pizza, it’s FDA, but you put pepperoni on it and it becomes a USDA product. I mean, come on,” he said. “An open-faced roast beef sandwich is USDA, a closed-faced roast beef sandwich is FDA. Not making this up. You can’t make this kind of stuff up. This would only happen in the government.”
Among the specific proposals outlined is a plan to merge the departments of education and labor into a single Department of Education and the Workforce, or DEW. The combined agency would oversee programs for students and workers, ranging from education and developing skills to workplace protections and retirement security.