--- title: The Department of Education Office That Changed My Life description: The office of International and Foreign Language Education changed novelist Lydia Kiesling's life. Under Trump, it's been cut. canonical: https://time.com/7269589/department-of-education-cuts-essay/ author: Lydia Kiesling article:opinion: true article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2025-03-20T11:00:00.000Z article:modified_time: 2025-03-20T21:33:56.000Z article:section: Ideas og:title: A Department of Education Office Changed My Life. Now It's Been Cut og:description: Novelist Lydia Kiesling on lost jobs and possibilities og:url: https://time.com/7269589/department-of-education-cuts-essay/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt673e5a117e05f120/6998c50766d4e37c05cbc4e6/us-department-of-education-doge.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 2400 og:image:height: 1350 og:image:alt: us-department-of-education-doge og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: A Department of Education Office Changed My Life. Now It's Been Cut twitter:description: Novelist Lydia Kiesling on lost jobs and possibilities twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt673e5a117e05f120/6998c50766d4e37c05cbc4e6/us-department-of-education-doge.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # A Department of Education Office Changed My Life. Now It's Been Cut > Sponsored content. 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Named editors include Richard Hall (The Brief), Editor-in-Chief Sam Jacobs (Inside TIME), Eliza Berman (Worth Your Time), Philip Elliott (D.C. Brief), Justin Worland (Future Proof) and Harry Booth (In the Loop). Health Matters is written by TIME's health desk. #### How do I sign up for a TIME newsletter? Go to time.com/newsletters, choose the newsletters you want and enter your email address. There is no cost and no subscription requirement. ### Sources * TIME Newsletters: [time.com/newsletters](/c/time-nl-network-2026q3/newsletters?i=202be6c8-dbd6-4b43-9cf5-198fc61c40b3&cr=time-nl-network-2026q3-v1) by [Lydia Kiesling](https://time.com/author/lydia-kiesling/) ## Lydia Kiesling Kiesling is the author of the novels Mobility and The Golden State Updated: Mar 20, 2025 9:33 PM UTCPublished: Mar 20, 2025 11:00 AM UTC  Al Drago—Bloomberg/Getty Images by [Lydia Kiesling](https://time.com/author/lydia-kiesling/) ## Lydia Kiesling Kiesling is the author of the novels Mobility and The Golden State Updated: Mar 20, 2025 9:33 PM UTCPublished: Mar 20, 2025 11:00 AM UTC In the wake of the 2008 recession, like many recent college graduates at sea amid the wreckage of the U.S. economy, I decided the only way to put myself on any kind of career path was to go to graduate school. Because I had worked in Turkey for a year after college, I applied to master’s programs in Middle Eastern Studies, believing this would bring a linear quality to my haphazard early adulthood. The University of Chicago was the only place that offered me any kind of financial aid: half off an extraordinarily large sum for the first year, with the implication that the second year could be free. So that is where I went, and the second year _was_ free, paid for by the federal government. Because I studied Uzbek, a Turkic language, at one of the few places in America where you can study Uzbek, I got a free year of school at one of the best universities in the country, via something called the Foreign Language Area Studies (FLAS) fellowship. The FLAS falls, or fell, under the umbrella of the office of [International and Foreign Language Education (IFLE)](https://www.ed.gov/about/ed-offices/ope/ifle), an office within the Department of Education that was functionally dissolved by the Trump Administration this month amid the massive cost cutting overseen by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). This office funds the Fulbright-Hays programs, which many people have heard of, but it also administers the Title VI program, which funds foreign language and area studies at colleges and universities across the United States. These take the form of FLAS awards and campus-based [centers](https://iris.ed.gov/programs) focusing on specific areas of the world. My FLAS and MA program were routed through one such National Resource Center (NRC) at UChicago. My experience there was exhilarating, exposing me to people of incredible erudition even as it revealed some disillusioning things about academic hierarchies. After graduating, though, I found myself in the situation of many millennials who thought that a higher degree would solve their employment issues: in debt for a degree that qualified for me for a job that probably didn’t exist, or, at best, a job that I didn’t want and couldn’t pass a background check for in any case. For several months I sheepishly flung myself into completely unrelated work, until I stumbled across an opening to manage one of these NRCs at UC Berkeley—in many ways the platonic ideal of a job you could do with the kind of degree I had. **Read More:** [_Eliminating the Department of Education Would Hurt Black Students_](https://time.com/7261667/eliminating-department-of-education-resegregate-schools/) Over three years at UC Berkeley, I learned the intricate workings of Title VI, a program that was allotted [nearly $2 billion ](https://www.ed.gov/about/ed-offices/office-of-postsecondary-education/history-of-title-vi-and-fulbright-hays-programs)between 2000 and 2024\. This was the program that had paid for part of my education, paid for part of the (too-small) salaries of my language instructors and graduate TAs, paid for public events that made the work of university available to people from the surrounding city, and now paid for a portion of my salary. I learned that the Title VI program funded the majority of higher-ed foreign-language study in the U.S., but that it also benefited younger students, primarily through training programs that brought K-12 educators together to develop new curriculum modules with subject-matter experts from the university. Title VI is at its heart a Cold War program, launched after Sputnik as the [Defense Education Act of 1958](https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/minute/Sputnik%5FSpurs%5FPassage%5Fof%5FNational%5FDefense%5FEducation%5FAct.htm), and incorporated into the [Higher Education Act in 1965](https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/COMPS-765/pdf/COMPS-765.pdf). Its founding principle was, essentially, Know Your Enemy (read: learn Russian). Although the Department of Defense and the State Department fund some of their own language and area-studies programs, there is no question that many American meddlers and spies have benefited from Title VI. But over time, the program has evolved into something much more generous, and vital, than its original mandate. Once money leaves the federal government and enters the realm of the scholar and the university administrator, its purview stretches, not only to address the constitutional miserliness of our academic institutions, but the curiosity and ambition of their students and faculty. Title VI funds were a particular boon for public universities. There are NRCs all across the country, giving students from many different backgrounds the chance to learn a little bit more about the world. FLAS stipends might support one student learning about Ottoman statecraft, and another studying modern Portuguese literature, and a third studying contemporary South African politics. As such, over time, the Title VI program has become a site of bureaucratic creativity. It’s also been the subject of a long-simmering bureaucratic civil war to determine the best and proper use of taxpayer funds, and to define what constitutes an education. **Read More:** [_How the Supreme Court Paved the Way for DOGE_](https://time.com/7262781/supreme-court-doge-musk-trump/) I studied and then worked at a Center for Middle Eastern Studies, and we were under no illusions about the political target on our back. For decades Middle East Studies centers have been maligned as left-wing hotbeds that, in their critics’ view, are excessively hostile to Israel, overly friendly to Islam, and troublingly uninterested in terrorism. Periodically, an inflamed lawmaker would demand an inquiry into the way centers like ours represented the Middle East, charging that they fueled antisemitism by being critical of Israel. Donald Trump’s return is a gift to these efforts, as seen most plainly in his [Administration’s letter to Columbia University](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/03/14/nyregion/columbia-letter.html), demanding that the academic department affiliated with their Title VI-funded Middle East Institute be placed under receivership. DOGE, too, is the culmination of a decades-long effort, a moment of triumph for those in our national apparatus who take an exceedingly narrow and incurious view of what education in this country is for. Given that NRCs are a hub for multidisciplinary efforts at any given host university, they are threatened whenever a congressperson opposed to the very principle of a humanistic education deigns to notice them. The grant process, every four years, is thus an exercise in contorting the natural activities of these centers to fit the U.S. government’s rubric, which insists that Title VI exists to prepare students for work in government and “business,” where business is understood to be something important, unlike, for example, poetry. The real enemy of DOGE is not waste and bureaucracy, as Musk claims, but the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake—and the idea that education should be a public good. The people who believe that taxation is theft argue that the market will fill any void left by the Department of Education’s millions. But the market will never decide that Uzbek class is a worthwhile proposition, or that it is important for a K-12 teacher in a cash-strapped district to attend a free symposium on world history. **Read More:** [_Can Young People Afford Not to Go to College?_](https://time.com/7267451/college-is-expensive-but-not-going-to-college-costs-even-more/) As someone who administered one of these centers and was deep in the grant process, I had plenty of opportunities to thrash in a helpless rage in the three-way bureaucratic web of the federal government, the State of California, and the UC system. There were, indeed, maddening inefficiencies, but many of them were introduced or exacerbated by the private sector (just before my tenure, Bain’s consulting arm [charged UC Berkeley millions of dollars to prescribe a shared-services system that](https://inthesetimes.com/article/the-shared-services-disaster), in many employees’ view, made everything just a little harder to do). Free marketeers will advise deans to cut whatever course can’t fill a giant lecture hall or lead to lucrative research grants. To the consultants, language instruction will never pencil out, and it is exceedingly unlikely that the administrators who take their advice can or will fill the void left by the federal government. The dissolution of IFLE within the Department of Education will lead to countless lost jobs and educational opportunities, and an educational landscape denuded of possibility—the possibility of learning a new language, seeing a new place, understanding a new point of view. It is stealing from generations of people. I left my job at UC Berkeley because I had a baby and I wanted to be a writer and I couldn’t make all the math work. I suppose Elon Musk could argue that my story embodies exactly the kind of pointless government largesse that he has been tasked with ferreting out. Why should the taxpayers subsidize the learning of agglutinative grammars by an aimless young woman who became an administrator and then left the nine-to-five workforce to become a novelist? For what it’s worth, I put what I learned in [my books](https://time.com/collection/must-read-books-2023/6332603/mobility/). And writing those books changed my life. Writing one book helped me buy a home. Writing another helped me buy a car. Now I’m 41 and I pay taxes and participate enthusiastically in the consumer economy. But even if my work had nothing to do with what I learned on the government’s dime, that education would still be valuable–priceless, even. If the wrecking crew at DOGE doesn’t understand why, there’s no class in the world that can teach them. **Correction, March 20** _The original version of this story misstated the period for which Title VI was allotted nearly $2 billion. 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