A Stitch in Haste

For about two years a plan has been bouncing around the Department of Education to create a massive federal database of college students -- including transcripts, financial aid and post-academic pursuits. I've blogged about it twice before.

Well, the proposal is back in the news:

It was given a boost last month when Education Secretary Margaret Spellings's Commission on the Future of Higher Education released a draft report endorsing such a plan.
...
Right now, the plan has no legs. The House included in its higher education bill a prohibition on such a plan; the Senate bill ignored it; and some powerful legislators oppose it. Nonetheless, private institutions are fretting that the Department of Education will find a way around Congress to implement it.

The Executive Branch circumventing Congress to implement tracking of American citizens? Why would anyone be worried about that?

As I blogged previously:

Does anyone truly believe that some fourth-tier bureaucrat from a third-tier branch of a second-tier cabinet office is going to defy a judge's subpoena or an inquiry from Homeland Security?

Now we need to add the NSA to that list.

Which, by the way, is not my point. This is:

In 1980, Ronald Reagan ran for president with the promise that if he were elected, he would abolish the Department of Education. His opponent, President Jimmy Carter promised to protect the department, which he had created several years earlier. The department still exists, but the Republicans are gearing up to fulfill Reagan's promise.

That was in 1996, when Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole was under attack for promising merely to cut funding for the Department of Education.

So we've gone from Reagan's "abolish" to Dole's "cut" to George W. Bush's "No Child Left Behind" and proposals for federal student cradle-to-grave tracking databases. (And, for all we know, NSA monitoring...)

Sigh.

Remind me again how libertarians naturally lean toward the Republican Party?