Tom Tancredo: “I was charged with the responsibility of trying to reduce the size of the Department to more accurately reflect its…”

“I was charged with the responsibility of trying to reduce the size of the Department to more accurately reflect its responsibility under the Constitution. As the gentleman knows, we can search the Constitution in vain to find some responsibility for the U.S. Department of Education. It is not there. So we set about a task to, as I say, reduce the size. When I came in in September of 1981, there were 222 people, if memory serves me right; here there were 220-some people employed by the U.S. Department of Education in the regional office, Denver, Colorado, Region VIII. That was astounding to me. I had been a teacher before that. I was in the legislature. I was chairman of the education committee. We did not know there was a regional office of the U.S. Department of Education. They had absolutely no contact with real life, 227 some people. It took us about 4 years, and we went through a series of budget cuts and transfers, and we went from 220-some people down to around the mid sixties, 65, an 80 percent cut.”