JACKSON, Miss.—Former Gov. Haley Barbour, a Republican from Yazoo City, Miss., says he no longer supports dismantling the U.S. Department of Education. He explained during a Mississippi State University Stennis Institute Press Forum on March 10 that he would prefer cuts to the federal department that decrease bureaucracy and allow state education departments to take more control over how each state handles education.
When this reporter asked if he still believed in abolishing the federal education department as he called for when he was the chairman of the Republican National Committee in his 1996 book, “Agenda for America: A Republican Director for the Future,” Barbour said, “not really.”
Barbour said on Monday that he did not think Trump’s administration would abolish the department. On Tuesday, the U.S. Department of Education announced it was eliminating almost 50% of its workforce, starting that evening with hundreds of layoffs.
“We haven’t had a Department of Education very long, but I think it’s unlikely that they would do away with the Department of Education. I think it’s likely they’ll make some modifications to make it less expensive and less bureaucratic,” Barbour said on March 10.
On Tuesday night, U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon told Fox News host Laura Ingraham that eliminating the department is President Trump’s goal. “His directive to me, clearly, is to shut down the Department of Education, which we know we’ll have to work with Congress, you know, to get that accomplished,” she said.
Project 2025, so far a blueprint for much of the Trump administration’s controversial moves, does call for abolishing the U.S. Department of Education. One of its primary authors, Russell Vought, who wrote about “taking the reigns of government” in the executive office of the president, is the Office of Management and Budget director in Trump’s administration.
The new president denied knowing much about the wildly unpopular Project 2025 during his campaign last year, even after previewing it at a Heritage Foundation event in 2022 and saying that the organization was going to “lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do.”
Barbour Called Education Department A ‘Behemoth’
The former governor said Mississippi could spend less money on education while continuing to see good results in school achievement. A school district with higher funding may not achieve better scores than another district with less monetary support, he noted.
Still, when long-time Washington lobbyist Barbour was the leader of the national Republican Party, and before he came back to Mississippi to spend two terms as governor focused on priorities like passing massive tort reform here, he was one of the strongest voices in his party calling to abolish the Department of Education. He wrote in this 1996 book that the U.S. Department of Education was a “behemoth” that amounted to a “federal encroachment into what had been state and local decisions.”
Under the subheading “Abolish the Department of Education,” Barbour wrote that “schools should be free to respond to community priorities, parental demands, and student needs.”
“The few valuable activities run by the federal government (such as information gathering and research, drawing attention to education, ensuring access to education, and guaranteeing student loans) do not require a separate cabinet-level department,” he continued. “They were running smoothly well before the department was established by Jimmy Carter.”
Mississippi’s educational scores have improved dramatically over the past decade. The state’s fourth-grade students ranked first in the country for achieving the highest score increases in math and reading since 2013, the National Assessment of Educational Progress’ 2024 data shows.
“People from other states call it the Mississippi miracle because our scores have improved so much. Well, if the federal government should be in charge of everything, that wouldn’t be the case, right?” Barbour told reporters on March 10 at Hal and Mal’s in Jackson, Miss.
“We, Louisiana, Massachusetts, whomever: the states are more likely to give better education to their children, and that’s been recognized since before we became a nation.” He was the chairman of the NAEP board during the first Trump administration.
NAEP data show Hispanic fourth-grade students in Mississippi rank first in the nation in reading and second in math among their peers. It says Mississippi’s Black fourth-grade students rank third in the nation among their peers for math and reading. The Magnolia State’s fourth graders rank No. 9 overall in the U.S. for reading and No. 16 for math, data show.
FEMA Then and Now
The Trump administration is also targeting another federal agency that Haley Barbour knows a lot about from his time as governor of Mississippi.
Hurricane Katrina struck the Mississippi Gulf Coast on Aug. 29, 2005, killing 231 people in the state, leaving thousands homeless and wiping out the profitable coastal casino industry. The Federal Emergency Management Agency played a large role in Mississippi and Louisiana’s recovery from the natural disaster, but faced intense criticism for its handling of the disaster under then-President George W. Bush.
“But at the end of the day, FEMA did a whole lot more right than wrong,” Haley Barbour said, noting that he is “not a critic of FEMA.”
National Geographic interviewed Barbour in August 2015 about Hurricane Katrina after he published his book, “America’s Great Storm: Leading Through Hurricane Katrina.” The former governor recalled meeting Bush at the Mobile, Ala., Coast Guard Station with then-Alabama Gov. Bob Riley days after Katrina tore through the South. He recalled Bush saying “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job” to the FEMA director at the time, Michael Brown, “which would be interpreted by people as showing he was out of touch with what was happening.”
“But I understood that for the next several years Mississippi was going to have to be partners with the federal government. My mama taught me: ‘Praise in public; criticize in private.’ And that’s the way I’ve tried to run my political relationships,” Barbour continued in his book.
Barbour helped steer FEMA and other federal resources into Mississippi after Katrina, often pitting his Republican-led state with the Democratic-led Louisiana, where the hurricane killed 1,577 people.
The former governor, who was investigated for his efforts to divert $570 million in federal low-income housing relief funds into a new port, credited the Republicans in Congress at the time for helping boost the federal response to Katrina.
Mississippi’s electricity providers also faced challenges as they worked to restore power to Mississippians who lost electricity during the hurricane.
“I asked President Bush to treat our electric utilities, treat them all the same. And he agreed to do that. And that brought tens of millions of dollars to both Entergy and Mississippi Power and probably also to Atmos, now that I think about it,” Barbour said at Hal & Mal’s.
Trump said in January that FEMA is “very bureaucratic, and it’s very slow,” and noted he wants to restructure the agency after questioning FEMA’s response to Hurricane Helene in fall 2024.
“FEMA is getting in the way of everything,” he said in January, adding that he would like to let states “take care of the tornadoes and the hurricanes and all of the other things that happen.”
A White House official told NBC News in early March that Trump is planning to sign an executive order that directs state and local governments to handle disaster relief instead of FEMA. The Trump administration has laid off more than 200 of its 20,000 FEMA employees since Jan. 20.
NATO, U.S. Support of Ukraine Not ‘Far-Fetched’
In response to the Trump administration’s temporary halting of U.S. aid and military intelligence to Ukraine, European leaders met for a summit in which they made plans to increase the European Commission’s total defense spending by no more than $800 billion and provide no more than $150 billion in loans for countries to purchase integral defense systems. The countries promised to increase military support and provide “regular and predictable financial support” for Ukraine, noting that “no negotiations on Ukraine” will happen without Ukraine.
“I think what the Europeans proposed to do to try to get in the middle and help us and the Ukrainians working out on a fair basis for everybody that NATO will support and the U.S. will support. I don’t think there’s anything far-fetched about that,” Barbour said on March 10.
“I think there’s a high probability that that will happen, and I think Putin has to have pulled up a little bit when he saw how quickly the Europeans jumped in and said things that they hadn’t said before, like ‘We’ll put troops in there. We will put more money in there; we’ll put more arms in there.’ And so, that may turn out to be looked back on as a blessing because it made a whole lot of people come together that should’ve been together the whole time,” he continued.
Barbour has long warned that the U.S. needs to help strengthen NATO to keep Russia at bay. In his 1996 book, he wrote: “The United States must provide adequate defense through its own forces and through alliances if Russia should become hostile or a Soviet Union should be reconstituted.”
U.S. and Ukrainian officials held talks in Saudi Arabia on Tuesday to discuss the potential for Ukrainian President Volodymr Zelenskyy to sign off on a deal that would give the U.S. access to Ukraine’s rare-earth minerals in exchange for continued defense support. Zelenskyy had expressed hopes that the deal would help patch up the Ukrainian-U.S. relationship after a falling-out with Trump in the Oval Office on Feb. 28 when speaking to reporters in London after a meeting with European leaders on March 2.
The Ukrainians said they would agree to a 30-day ceasefire in the war with Russia to allow time for peace negotiations if Russia would also agree. “But now the key is in Moscow’s hands — the whole world will see who really wants to end the war and who is simply playing for time,” said Head of the Office of the President of Ukraine Andrii Yermak, ABC News reported.
A ‘Bit of Logic’ to Trump Tariffs
After enacting 25% tariffs on all goods imported from Canada and Mexico, a 10% tax on Canadian energy products and a 20% tariff on Chinese goods on March 4, President Donald Trump announced March 4. That he would increase the tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum from 10% to 25% starting March 12.
Former Gov. Haley Barbour warned Monday that the tariffed countries would surely impose reciprocal tariffs on the U.S.
“There’s a bit of logic to Trump’s policy; tariffs ought to be reciprocal. If we charge the Brazilians a 10% tariff on top of fruit that they send up here, then why isn’t it fair for the Brazilians to charge us a 10% on something that we send down there to reciprocate?” I don’t think that’s crazy,” he said on March 10.
Tariffs raise prices but not necessarily at the rate of the tariff, University of Mississippi Department of Economics Chairman Josh Hendrickson told the Mississippi Free Press on Feb. 7. Tariffs on China and Europe would be more impactful than the ones on Canada and Mexico, he said.
The professor said the average Mississippian may not see any major price increases in their daily life depending on where their food and goods come from, but that the cost of construction, production and lumber could rise if Trump keeps the tariffs on Canada. He said the biggest question surrounding Trump’s tariffs is, “What other policies do we expect the administration to adopt at the same time?”
“What really matters is what other countries turn around and do to the United States,” Hendrickson said.
Barbour: Cut Income But Not Grocery Tax
Haley Barbour opposed a different kind of tax on Mississippi at the Stennis Institute luncheon. He said he supported many legislators’ efforts to cut or eliminate the income tax, but explained that he did not support eliminating the grocery tax in one of the nation’s poorest states because he “believe(s) everybody ought to pay something.”
“It is not lost on me that Florida, Texas and Tennessee have no individual income tax, and they are three of the fastest-growing economies in the South, indeed in the country,” Barbour said on March 10. “So, there’s no doubt in my mind that it would help our economy if there wasn’t an individual income tax.”
“Now, having said that, you have to figure out how to pay for it, and I’ve always been struck, even while I was governor, at the people who wanted to do away with the tax on groceries,” he continued. “Well, for tens of thousands of people in Mississippi, that’s the only tax they pay.”
The Mississippi House and Senate both have passed bills that address reducing the income tax, lowering the grocery tax and increasing the gas tax under House Bill 1 and Senate Bill 3095.
The House’s plan more gradually eliminates the income tax from the current 4.7% to 3% this year and lowers it by 0.3% each year for 10 years until the tax is gone. The state’s 7% grocery tax would drop to 2.5% by 2036, reducing by 0.2% yearly under the legislation. It says Mississippi would divert all grocery taxes to the state budget instead of giving the city that issued the tax 18.5% of the revenue. Cities could implement an optional 1.5% sales tax to make up lost money, H.B. 1 says. Under the legislation, the state’s gas tax would add an extra 5% gas tax to fund roads and bridges.
The Senate’s proposal aims to take the income tax from 4.7% in 2024 to 2.99% in 2030, declining by 0.25% each year until 2030 under the legislation. If S.B. 3095 becomes law, the grocery tax would be reduced from 7% to 5% starting on July 1, 2025. Municipalities currently get 18.5% of the general sales tax revenue and would also get 25.9% of the grocery tax revenue under Section 11 of S.B. 3095. The plan aims to increase the state’s gas tax from 18 cents per gallon in 2024 to 27 cents per gallon in 2027.
A municipality with more than 150,000 residents can impose a “special sales tax” of no more than 1% of the “gross proceeds of sales or gross income of the business” for any activities that have a tax rate of 7% or more under the Mississippi sales tax law, Section 3 of S.B. 3095 says.
Big Casino Could Help Jackson, Barbour Says
Efforts to bring a casino within 6,000 feet of the Mississippi Capitol Building in downtown Jackson failed in the Mississippi House for the second year in a row.
Mississippi-based licensed casino owners could have opened one new facility inside the Capitol Complex Improvement District downtown on water or land under House Bill 1879 to bring tourism and a “minimum capital investment” of $500 million and 6,000 jobs to the capital city.
Former Gov. Haley Barbour was the Mississippi state director of the Census in 1970, and he said he continues to review census data every 10 years. He talked about Jackson’s population soaring to 200,000 in 1980 but declining by 25% over time with an estimated 143,000 residents in 2024.
“I don’t think continuing to do more of the same will lead to a better result,” he said on March 10.
Barbour is the founding partner of BGR Group, a bipartisan consulting firm, which he started in 2012 after finishing his second term as governor. In 2017, he lobbied to legalize gaming in Georgia, representing Steve Wynn’s Nevada-based casino company Wynn Resorts, which owned the Beau Rivage Resort & Casino in Biloxi, Miss., the Sun Herald reported.
The former governor and lobbyist pondered how to make a “big infusion” of cash into a local economy and said a casino modeled after the Beau Rivage in Biloxi, Miss., could bring in thousands of jobs and millions of dollars into Jackson without the City of Jackson, Hinds County or state taxpayers having to pay anything since a Mississippi-based gaming establishment would bid for the space to place a new casino and pay for its construction and maintenance.
“Is there a better infusion of money into this local economy than that? I will confess that in 1990, I was quietly against legalizing gaming, but I was wrong,” Barbour said on March 10. “It turned out to be a great thing (that brought in) a huge amount of money for the state and half that money for the local governments.”
National NAACP CEO Derrick Johnson, who splits his time between his home in Jackson and Washington, D.C., told the Mississippi Free Press this week that declining population is not just an issue in Jackson—it is an issue that plagues the entire state. Mississippi lost a congressional district after the 2000 census showed a decline in the state’s population. The population decreased by 6,018 residents from 2010 to 2021.
“We have a problem in the State of Mississippi both retaining and attracting people to the state because of our policies, both economic policies, educational policies and just general public policies that’s not inviting to corporate interest or people who want to live in the state of Mississippi,” Johnson told the Mississippi Free Press on Wednesday.
Other states in the South are home to Fortune 500 businesses which bring in jobs and economic growth, but Mississippi does not have a prominent company headquartered in the state to “anchor our economy,” he said. Mississippi and West Virginia were the only southern states whose populations declined in the 2021 census.
“You cannot tout one small region; you cannot bemoan one city. You have to look at the entire picture, and the entire picture over the last 20 years has been a really bleak picture,” Johnson said.