Month: February 2025

The Parents Defending Education organization has released a report exposing extensive waste within the Department of Education, much of it taking funds from legitimate teaching purposes and shifting those dollars to leftist ideological propaganda.

Last January, the House Subcommittee on Health Care and Financial Services held a hearing titled “America’s Report Card: Oversight of K-12 Public Education”  At the hearing, lawmakers examined how billions of dollars in taxpayer funds distributed to state educational agencies to mitigate the effects of COVID-19 on elementary and secondary schools and to help them reopen safely were frequently misused to support pet projects and left-wing political agendas.

The Subcommittee found that “The Nation’s Report Card shows test scores in reading and math have significantly declined.

Despite the well-known harms of school closures and ineffectiveness of remote education, Democrats continue to put politics before students.

“The connection between closures and learning loss is clear. Education recovery scorecard and return to learn data show that in math, the most in-person third of districts lost 44 percent of a year’s progress. The most remote third lost 60 percent,” Dr. Nat Malkus, Senior Fellow and Deputy Director of Education Policy Studies at American Enterprise Institute said during his opening statement.

“The President and governors, leaders on Capitol Hill, and in districts must decisively communicate that pandemic-era exceptionalism in schools is over,” Dr. Malkus continued.

School districts are increasingly investing in diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs instead of focusing on student performance.

The recently released Parents Defending Education verifies those findings, exposing the misuse of approximately $1 Billion in grant funding. The analysis notes that:

• Total ED Grant Money Awarded (2021-present): $1,002,522,304.81.
• Total number of ED grants (2021-present): 229
• Number of States: 42 plus Washington D.C.
• Number of K-12 school districts: 296
• Number of K-12 students*: 6,766,158

Parents Defending Education breaks the grants down into “three buckets:

• Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) Hiring: $489,883,797.81
  • This category includes DEI or race-based recruiting, training, and hiring practices. Read more about DEI Hiring in K-12 here.
• Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) Programming: $343,337,286
  • This category includes general DEI programming and trainings, discipline including restorative practices, and youth activism.
• Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) Based Mental health/Social Emotional Learning (SEL): $169,301,221
  • This category includes DEI based mental health training programs and SEL trainings and programming. Some grants covered two or all of the above categories, in those cases, the grant was counted only towards the most dominant category.”

The analysis provides key takeaways:

• Multiple grants feature programming that advances race-based teacher recruiting, hiring, and training, including the use of race-based affinity groups.
• Several grants were issued for youth activism programming widely used in far-left ethnic studies courses.
• A $4,000,000 grant was given for a 3-week residential “culturally responsive” computer science summer camp for 600 11th and 12th graders.
• Grants often feature Social, Emotional Learning (SEL) programming that uses curricula like Second Step and Harmony, as well as transformative SEL.
• The University of Iowa received a grant award of $1,261,718 to train 40 elementary teachers to “enact equity-centered education” in partner K-12 districts.
• The University of Missouri – St. Louis was awarded a $306,209 grant to train school counselors in Trauma-Informed, Antiracist Social-Emotional Learning (TIAR-SEL).
• The School District of Philadelphia was given $3,973,175 for its restorative justice program that is modeled after Oakland Unified School District’s (CA), and a program advisor is a far-left activist and former Communist Party USA member.
• A Michigan school district spent over $38,000 on an equity consultant for a one-day professional development and copies of their book.

From 2021 to the present, the Department of Education (ED) awarded to universities, school districts, and nonprofits 162 grants totaling $1,002,522,304.81. This report only captures grants that specifically included diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), Social-Emotional Learning (SEL), restorative practices, and/or youth activism as part of the programming.

Recently revealed details of the relationship between a California council woman with Mike Sun, who has been accused of pursuing Chinese interests, has renewed concern about the relationship between the state’s Democratic Party and Beijing’s Communist leadership.

The Los Angeles politician is Sun’s fiancée. Sun has been accused of peddling political influence on behalf of the Chinese regime, court records show.

Published reports state that “Mike Sun, has allegedly worked with a recently sentenced Chinese agent to advance the Chinese regime’s political interests in Los Angeles. Court documents suggest the two have worked closely for years to align U.S. policy interests with Beijing on sensitive issues, with the Chinese agent Chen Jun telling Chinese officials that Sun—and the councilwoman—were part of a ‘basic team dedicated for us.’”

Sun is a former Chinese army member. Despite his record and ties, he served as the campaign manager for Eileen Wang in her 2022 bid for Los Angeles City Council 2022.

Chinese communists have already made extensive use of the California Democratic Party to play an outsized role in American political life. 

 Kamala Harris’ Vice Presidential running mate, Governor Walz has a history of being a devotee’ of Beijing. In 1993, according to the Star-Herald, as a teacher, he organized a trip to the PRC with Alliance High School students, where costs were paid by the Chinese government. In 1994, Mr. Walz set up a private company named “Educational Travel Adventures, Inc.,” which coordinated annual student trips to the PRC until 2003 and was led by Mr. Walz himself. The corporation was reportedly dissolved four days after he took congressional office in 2007. Since his first trip to China, Governor Walz has visited the PRC an estimated 30 times. While serving in Congress, Mr. Walz also served as a fellow at the Macau Polytechnic University, a Chinese institution that characterizes itself as having a “long held devotion to and love for the motherland.”

Governor Walz spoke alongside the President of the Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries, which, a year later, the Department of State exposed as “a Beijing-based organization tasked with co-opting subnational governments,” including efforts “to directly and malignly influence state and local leaders to promote the PRC’s global agenda.”

In a letter to Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Director Christopher Wray, Committee Chairman Comer requested information, documents, and communications related to the CCP-connected entities and officials Governor Walz has engaged and partnered with, as well as any warnings or advice the FBI may have given to Governor Walz about U.S. political figures being targeted by or recruited for CCP influence operations.

The Biden-Harris Administration’s relationship with China appears to have begun when Hunter Biden flew to China with then-Vice President Joe Biden aboard Air Force 2, and returned home with a vast financial gain, in return for no discernable commercial service.

Kamala Harris is a California Democrat.

The Biden-Harris Administration ties with China are just part of the Democratic Party’s concerning history with America’s most dangerous enemy.

  The late Democrat Senator from California, Dianne Feinstein, employed a chauffeur, who according to CBS News, was a Chinese spy, reporting to the Chinese government about local California politics for 20 years. 

The Chinese communist spy who compromised California Congressman Eric Swalwell, Fang Fang, also “socialized, networked with Rep. Judy Chu and then-Rep. Mike Honda, campaigned for now-Rep. Rho Khanna, volunteered for Bill Harrison, the mayor of Fremont, California at the time, and in some cases, developed romantic or sexual relationships with politicians to gain intelligence and send it back to her handlers, who were believed to be stationed in mainland China.” 

Donald Trump’s first campaign for President was marked by substantive warnings about China’s military, political, and economic policies. That may have been the prompt for the California Democrat,  then-Representative, now Senator, Adam Schiff’s vociferous (and, as subsequently revealed, wholly false) attacks on him.

The volume, intensity and consistency of the ties between significant members of the California Democratic Party and China require urgent and significant further examination.

China’s threats to violently conquer Taiwan, if necessary, has led Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) to expand and diversify its operations in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), using engineering talent from several sanctioned PRC firms. It is a risk to TSMC’s position as a leading-edge company in the global chip industry. Last summer TSMC announced that it was shifting to a “Foundry 2.0” model to ostensibly avoid monopoly concerns. The Foundry 1.0 model does not include back-end products. However, it complicates the company’s global position. Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) want to shrink the technology gap between the mainland and Taiwan.

The plan calls for TSMC to expand to handle packaging, testing, mask-making, and other parts of the value chain, according to a recent Jamestown Foundation report. Foundry 2.0 comes with risks and may impact the Trump Administration’s support for Taiwan this year. The President made it clear on Monday that he intends to impose tariffs on imported chips to force manufacturing to return to the US.

“If TSMC cedes its dominance, the deterrent effect of Taiwan’s “silicon shield” would be greatly reduced,” says Matthew Brazil, the report’s author. He points out the company is now setting up fabrication plants in the United States at the urging of many of its main customers, including Apple and Nvidia. Some analysts are questioning whether TSMC will be successful in straddling a neutral line between Beijing and Washington, while Taiwan’s government labeled the move “a win-win business model for Taiwan and US industries.” 

TSMC’s new hedging strategy is viewed as more closely linked to Xi Jinping’s pronouncement on Taiwan than to President Trump’s tariff threat. The company is a target for Xi, as he pivots the PRC toward and economic model that Brazil says focuses on achieving dominance in several key technologies crucial for achieving a “Chinese-style modernization (中国式现代化)” and the country’s “great rejuvenation (伟大复兴).” It is a strategy long-practiced by Beijing; sometimes using illicit means to achieve its goals. 

The Jamestown Foundation report compiled a database that exposes the exchange of PRC talent between several of the TSMC fabrication plants, some of which has been sanctions by the US Department of the Treasury for violating exports controls or giving technology to the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). The report adds that others are on the US Department of Commerce Entity List.

TSMC’s Shanghai plant produces its 200mm waters, while in Nanjing it began producing 300mm wafers at the 16 nm mode in mid-2018. This makes it one of the most advanced lines in all of the PRC with excellent commercial viability. Brazil used a Chinese-based platform called MaiMai.cn (脉脉) to identify a large personnel turnover of dozens of former TSMC specialists and experts now employed at Huawei in advanced technical roles. He notes that former “TSMC engineers and technical experts can also be found at several other leading PRC firms under U.S. government sanctions.” These include Changxin Memory Technologies Inc., Yangtze Memory Technology Co., Advanced Micro-Fabrication Equipment, and SiEn Integrated Circuit. LinkedIn accounts indicate that several former TSMC and Maimai China employees list their address as in the Hanzhou Chengxi Science and Technology Innovation Corridor. This is a Silicon Valley like corridor but set up, funded and endorsed by Beijing’s Ministry of Science and Technology as a special science and technology development zone. It is the location of a large number of the PRC’s defense-linked technology firms that are subsidized by Beijing.

TSMC faces two risks beyond the loss of their intellectual property. If the company fails in its expansion attempt to move into other parts of the value chain, it could result in a global slowdown in technology worldwide due to the decreasing chip supply followed by steep increases in their products. Second, in the event of a kinetic war with the PRC, the Taiwanese company’s fabrication plants could be damaged which would also serve as a constraint on the global supply of leading-edge chips. TSMC currently holds 62 percent of the revenue in the global semiconductor foundry market, a share that is expected to grow to 66 percent by the end of this year. In comparison, Samsung controls only 11.5 percent of the market.

Since 2022, Beijing’s ability to project military power has grown dramatically, making the threat of physical action against Taiwan a greater possibility than only a few years ago, despite Xi’s lack of a definitive timeline for conquest. TSMC is hedging its bets on Taiwan’s ability to remain free at the risk of angering both China and the United States. With the new Trump administration policy of containing China, TSMC’s best bet may be to reduce the flow on talent to its Chinese competitors.

Daria Novak served in the U.S. State Dept.

Illustration: Pixabay