Exclusive: Utah Mayor and Senatorial Candidate Trent Staggs Calls to ‘Abolish’ Federal Department of Education

Trent Staggs speaking with attendees at the 2023 Turning Point Action Conference at the Pa
Gage Skidmore/Flickr
Joshua Klein

Utah Senate Republican candidate and Riverton, Utah, Mayor Trent Staggs is calling to defund the United States Department of Education, advocating for state and local control for better-tailored education instead.

In an exclusive statement to Breitbart News on Monday, Staggs advocated dismantling the federal education department to enhance education through state and local governance.

“The Department of Education funds a small fraction of education costs yet has the most control of curriculum,” he stated. 

“It is time to abolish the federal Department of Education,” he declared, noting that “state and local communities are much better suited to work with parents toward giving children the best education possible.”

According to the Riverton mayor, President Joe Biden is unreliable in educational matters, having “shown us he can’t be trusted with anything, especially our future generations’ education.”

The matter comes as woke initiatives continue to incorporate leftist gender ideology and queer theory into the educational system, including the dissemination of sexually explicit pro-LGBTQ and transgender propaganda in elementary and kindergarten classrooms.

Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis — who previously signed a bill into law forbidding instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity in kindergarten through third grade — held an event in 2023 displaying some of the sexually explicit books found in his state’s schools.

In 2022, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) issued an “assessment tool” for teachers and school administrators to measure their commitment to “LGBTQ inclusivity” in the classroom.

The tool asks leading questions about school personnel and their commitment to queer theory, including encouraging sexual education teachers to employ gender-neutral anatomical terminology, referring to a boy as a “body with a penis” and a girl as a “body with a vagina.”

In July, the National Education Association (NEA), the largest teachers’ union in the country, added cartoonist Maia Kobabe’s book, Gender Queer — which features explicit drawings of teens performing sex acts — to its summer reading list for educators.

In September, Biden’s Department of Education opened a civil rights investigation into New College of Florida following a complaint alleging, in part, that author and New College of Florida board member Christopher Rufo “misgendered” the college’s former diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) director, who uses “ze/zir” pronouns.

Actress, author, and education freedom advocate Sam Sorbo has accused public schools of “child abuse” while blasting the “craziness” surrounding gender ideology in schools.

“Your children have been stolen from you by a system that seeks their destruction,” she warned as she called on parents to “save your families” by considering “home education” instead.

In April, Staggs slammed woke “indoctrination” in the country’s schools, including the availability of “inappropriate” and “pornographic” text materials, as he called to prioritize students’ “physical, mental, and spiritual” safety.

Joshua Klein is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jklein@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter @JoshuaKlein.

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