AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman. We’ve still lost touch with Gaza. We’ll see if we can get the two American doctors back who are volunteering there.

We turn now, though, to look at two stories at the U.S. Department of Education. On Monday, Education Secretary Linda McMahon issued a warning to 60 universities that they’re being investigated for antisemitism on their campuses and could face penalties. Her warning came days after the Trump administration withdrew $400 million in federal grants and contracts to Columbia University.

This comes as Linda McMahon is moving ahead with plans to gut her own agency. On Tuesday, plans were announced to fire an additional 1,300 workers, effectively cutting the agency’s workforce in half since Trump took office.

We’re joined now by Tariq Habash, who served as a policy adviser in the Department of Education’s Office of Planning, Evaluation and Policy Development until he resigned 14 months ago to protest President Biden’s support of Israel’s war on Gaza. He was the Education Department’s only Palestinian American appointee. He’s co-founder and director of A New Policy, a lobbying group focused on U.S. policy towards Israel and Palestine.

So, Tariq Habash, we brought you on to talk about two issues. One is what Linda McMahon, the new education secretary, has just announced, warning 60 universities equating antisemitism with the pro-Palestinian protests on campus, where many of those who are protesting are Jewish students, and then also the gutting of the department, what it means. Why don’t you start with the warning?

TARIQ HABASH: Thank you so much for having me back, Amy.

I think it’s pretty clear what this administration is trying to do, and it has nothing to do with antisemitism, unfortunately. It has everything to do with Donald Trump’s vision for America, which is consolidating his authoritarian power and pressuring any political dissidents who disagree with his policies and his approach and leveraging our civil rights laws and our institutions to be able to repress any sort of dissent and active speech on college campuses or across the country. And unfortunately, this isn’t something that is just happening under Donald Trump, but this was long-standing under the Biden administration and one of the reasons that I left.

Unfortunately, this idea that student protests in solidarity with Palestinian rights, this idea that antiwar protesters are somehow hateful or discriminating against their peers, particularly when Jewish students are disproportionately represented in these protests, is really concerning. And Trump is escalating that threat against college campuses right now through the announcement that you said Linda McMahon made, 60 colleges now essentially being put on notice for investigations.

The problem with that is also that we are simultaneously seeing the Department of Education get gutted. And a huge part of the gutting that is happening, just a couple days ago, is specifically targeting the Office for Civil Rights and all of the experts and lawyers that are in charge and tasked with doing the investigations, that take a pretty substantial amount of time to do. What is happening here is not real investigations into actual discrimination. This is a political ploy. This is the weaponization of our institutions, and it’s extremely dangerous. And colleges have an obligation to stand up and protect not only their students and faculty, but our democratic institutions as we know them.

AMY GOODMAN: And so, what does it mean to — I mean, it’s clear from Project 2025, what President Trump has said, and Linda McMahon even, that they’re actually trying to just shut down the Department of Education. But to lose half its staff, what this means? They say, “Just give money to the states. The Department of Education is just a bureaucracy.”

TARIQ HABASH: Yeah, unfortunately, it is patently illegal for Donald Trump and the executive branch to just eliminate a federal agency. And they know that, which is why they’re doing the next best thing, in their eyes, although still illegal, is completely gutting the entire civil service and workforce without any rationale or reason for that to happen.

The Department of Education does numerous things that they can’t just wave away with money to states and money to schools and that be the end of it. There’s a lot of oversight. There’s a lot of security. There’s a lot of student privacy and data and information that the department is responsible and obligated to protect. And when you gut the people that are doing that day-to-day work, when you’re gutting the people who are doing the program compliance to make sure that schools are following the rules and protecting their students and providing equal opportunity for education, it creates a really, really dangerous circumstance, where money is not going where it needs to go, and people are misusing the money.

And when you talk about that in the context of what DOGE is supposed to be doing, this idea of government efficiency and ending waste, fraud and abuse, this is the exact opposite. The Department of Education is the smallest Cabinet agency. They had just over 4,200 employees just a few months ago. This is not a bloated institution. This is an institution that is working for the American people and some of our most vulnerable, our students, our disabled students, our students who are international who are here to study and to learn, to be able to contribute to society, to serve their communities. And it’s horrifying to see that the Trump administration doesn’t value any of that. And the reality is, they don’t value education. They value what they can use the Department of Education for, which is turning it into a propaganda machine, a political tool to be able to consolidate Donald Trump’s power.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Tariq Habash, I want to thank you for being with us, co-founder and director of A New Policy, lobbying organization focused on U.S. policy towards Israel and Palestine. He’s a former Department of Education official who resigned in response to President Biden’s support of Israel’s war on Gaza, was the department’s only Palestinian American appointee.