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CNN
15-07-2025
- Politics
- CNN
Here's what could happen as Trump works to dismantle the Department of Education
The Department of Education began sending notices to employees that it plans to resume shrinking the department after the Supreme Court said on Monday that President Donald Trump could carry out mass layoffs. A lower court ruling had indefinitely paused the president's plans, though the Supreme Court's decision puts that ruling on hold while the legal challenge plays out. Trump has attempted to eliminate the agency since the start of his second term to make good on promises he made on the campaign trail. The agency's dismantling could cause effects across the country for Americans and their schools. The Education Department, created during the Carter administration, is tasked with distributing federal funds to schools, managing federal aid for college students and ensuring compliance with civil rights laws — including ensuring schools accommodate students with disabilities. Most public-school policies are a function of state government. Federal federal funding programs for K-12 schools that help support the education of students from low-income families and children with disabilities predated the creation of the agency. Trump has said some of these funding programs could be moved to other federal agencies if the department was abolished. Already, the Department of Education announced on Tuesday that the Department of Labor will take on adult education and family literacy programs. And the Department of Education previously announced it would like the Small Business Administration to take over student loans and have the Department of Health and Human Services handle special education services. Low-income, rural and disabled students could be impacted as a result of Trump's efforts to dismantle the agency as the Department of Education provides tens of billions of dollars in funding per year to support millions of these students. Some of the department's biggest jobs are to administer federal funding appropriated by Congress to K-12 schools and manage the federal student loan and financial aid programs. Sheria Smith, President of AFGE Local 252 representing Education Dept. employees, talks about the Supreme Court decision giving the go-ahead for mass layoffs, and tells CNN's Wolf Blitzer how she thinks this move will impact children. Two of the biggest funding programs for K-12 schools are the Title I program, which is meant to help educate children from low-income families, and the IDEA program, which provides schools with money to help meet the needs of children with disabilities. The agency funneled more than $18 billion in supplemental funding annually to local school districts to provide extra academic support to schools with high rates of poverty. Title I grants serve about 26 million low-income students. The dismantling would not affect students' curriculum, which falls on states and localities. The department's Office for Civil Rights has been hit hard by a combination of layoffs and voluntary 'buyouts.' The office works to protect students by holding schools and colleges that receive federal funds accountable for combating antisemitism, islamophobia, racism and discrimination against students with disabilities. What happens to the office is still uncertain. But employees within the office have told CNN they are extremely concerned about their ability to process the claims effectively with half of the staff. Trump ordered mass layoffs earlier this year at the Department of Education. Lower courts had blocked his effort, noting that the Education Department was created by Congress. While Trump was on the 2024 campaign trail, he repeatedly pointed to the agency as a symbol of federal overreach into the everyday lives of American families. 'I say it all the time, I'm dying to get back to do this. We will ultimately eliminate the federal Department of Education,' he said in September during a rally in Wisconsin. 'We will drain the government education swamp and stop the abuse of your taxpayer dollars to indoctrinate America's youth with all sorts of things that you don't want to have our youth hearing,' Trump said. Despite Trump's campaign trail promises to eliminate the department entirely, his lawyers told the Supreme Court that wasn't what is happening in this case. Instead, they said, the department could continue to carry out its legally obligated functions — just with far fewer employees.
CNN
15-07-2025
- Politics
- CNN
Here's what could happen as Trump works to dismantle the Department of Education
The Department of Education began sending notices to employees that it plans to resume shrinking the department after the Supreme Court said on Monday that President Donald Trump could carry out mass layoffs. A lower court ruling had indefinitely paused the president's plans, though the Supreme Court's decision puts that ruling on hold while the legal challenge plays out. Trump has attempted to eliminate the agency since the start of his second term to make good on promises he made on the campaign trail. The agency's dismantling could cause effects across the country for Americans and their schools. The Education Department, created during the Carter administration, is tasked with distributing federal funds to schools, managing federal aid for college students and ensuring compliance with civil rights laws — including ensuring schools accommodate students with disabilities. Most public-school policies are a function of state government. Federal federal funding programs for K-12 schools that help support the education of students from low-income families and children with disabilities predated the creation of the agency. Trump has said some of these funding programs could be moved to other federal agencies if the department was abolished. Already, the Department of Education announced on Tuesday that the Department of Labor will take on adult education and family literacy programs. And the Department of Education previously announced it would like the Small Business Administration to take over student loans and have the Department of Health and Human Services handle special education services. Low-income, rural and disabled students could be impacted as a result of Trump's efforts to dismantle the agency as the Department of Education provides tens of billions of dollars in funding per year to support millions of these students. Some of the department's biggest jobs are to administer federal funding appropriated by Congress to K-12 schools and manage the federal student loan and financial aid programs. Sheria Smith, President of AFGE Local 252 representing Education Dept. employees, talks about the Supreme Court decision giving the go-ahead for mass layoffs, and tells CNN's Wolf Blitzer how she thinks this move will impact children. Two of the biggest funding programs for K-12 schools are the Title I program, which is meant to help educate children from low-income families, and the IDEA program, which provides schools with money to help meet the needs of children with disabilities. The agency funneled more than $18 billion in supplemental funding annually to local school districts to provide extra academic support to schools with high rates of poverty. Title I grants serve about 26 million low-income students. The dismantling would not affect students' curriculum, which falls on states and localities. The department's Office for Civil Rights has been hit hard by a combination of layoffs and voluntary 'buyouts.' The office works to protect students by holding schools and colleges that receive federal funds accountable for combating antisemitism, islamophobia, racism and discrimination against students with disabilities. What happens to the office is still uncertain. But employees within the office have told CNN they are extremely concerned about their ability to process the claims effectively with half of the staff. Trump ordered mass layoffs earlier this year at the Department of Education. Lower courts had blocked his effort, noting that the Education Department was created by Congress. While Trump was on the 2024 campaign trail, he repeatedly pointed to the agency as a symbol of federal overreach into the everyday lives of American families. 'I say it all the time, I'm dying to get back to do this. We will ultimately eliminate the federal Department of Education,' he said in September during a rally in Wisconsin. 'We will drain the government education swamp and stop the abuse of your taxpayer dollars to indoctrinate America's youth with all sorts of things that you don't want to have our youth hearing,' Trump said. Despite Trump's campaign trail promises to eliminate the department entirely, his lawyers told the Supreme Court that wasn't what is happening in this case. Instead, they said, the department could continue to carry out its legally obligated functions — just with far fewer employees.
Irish Times
01-06-2025
- Business
- Irish Times
‘There's a menace, an edge to life in America that wasn't there before. And the possibility of dark stuff'
Night after night on the drive from the White House to the family home in McLean, across the Potomac in Virginia, Zbigniew Brzezinski would recall the events of the day into a recorder as he watched the city slip by from the rear window. He couldn't have known it then, but he was speaking to an unlikely future lunch companion and a collaboration he would not live to see. Edward Luce, now the Financial Times' US national editor and columnist, was a schoolboy in England when Brzezinski was at the peak of his influence as national security adviser to Jimmy Carter during the crowded, significant four years between 1977 and 1981 of international crisis and diplomacy. 'I got a radio for Christmas in 1979,' recalls Luce when we meet. 'And I remember running into my parents' bedroom on Boxing Day and telling them the Russians invaded Afghanistan. I had a pretty bad impression then of Brzezinski as an ultra-hawk, which was not a rounded impression of him. I knew of him, but not in the way people knew about Kissinger. I mean, John Cleese was referencing Kissinger in Fawlty Towers.' Brzezinski was a counterweight to Henry Kissinger in the fraught cold war decades: never as famous, not as quotable, but just as consequential. He and Kissinger passed through Ellis Island within six weeks of one another, as adolescents, in 1938. It was the beginning of what Luce describes as a 'frenemyship', with a cinematic arc covering seven decades. The Brzezinski family gave Luce the transcriptions of those recordings when their father died, in 2017, aged 89. To the end, Brzezinski, a precocious Polish emigrant who arrived in Washington via Harvard to become the pre-eminent Sovietologist of the era, remained a fiercely independent thinker – and a Washington outsider. READ MORE Edward Luce. Photograph: Sylvain Gaboury/Patrick McMullan via Getty Fortunately for Luce, he was an immaculate keeper of records. Part of him always mourned his Warsaw childhood, and he developed an intense friendship with Pope John Paul II. Brzezinski's children also gave Luce full access to their father's letters and papers and their blessing to write an unauthorised biography. Luce was hooked, and understood that as well as immersing himself in contemporary histories, he was, as he writes, in 'a race against the actuarial clock' with Madeleine Albright and president Carter among the 100-odd interviewees he sat with in the twilight of their lives. 'It is obsessional,' says Luce, hopping on to the couch in his livingroom on a dazzling Saturday afternoon. Luce is a sprightly 56, quick to find humour and slightly bleary from a Friday evening book-publishing party held in his honour. His wife, Niamh King, who is Irish and director of the Aspen Strategy Group, says the most dedicated guests drifted back here, to their home in Georgetown, to prolong the night. She makes coffee and sets down a plate of Cadbury's Fingers, a treat she correctly predicts an Irish guest will appreciate – and shares the name of the store that stocks them. In the acknowledgments, Luce includes an exchange that became an in-joke during his four years spent on the book: at the dinner table, Niamh asks him to pass the salt. 'SALT 1 or SALT 2?″ comes the absent-minded reply. The term – referencing the strategic arms limitations talks – is a useful metaphor for the vanished world of high geostrategy to which Luce returned. 'It is apocryphal,' he says of the dinner table story. 'But what does Trump call it? Truthful hyperbole. Yeah, it is obsessional. Any other reading is an opportunity lost. It is a vast subject covering about 90 years. You need to include the rivals to Brzezinski and what their Sovietology was: you can't understand him without understanding his context. But it is inexhaustible. You either write a biography properly or not at all. And I felt it was not irrelevant to what happens today.' Former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski arrives to testify before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 2007. Photograph: Jim Young/Reuters The subtitle to Zbig: The Life of Zbigniew Brzezinski is America's Cold War Prophet. Brzezinski's steadfast view- that the Soviet Union would collapse under the weight of its distinct internal nationalities – was borne out. But his reputation was welded to that of Jimmy Carter. The men could hardly have been more different – the laconic southern Baptist and the bright, abrasive son of Polish aristocrats. They shared an intellectual hunger, a thriftiness that one reviewer described as 'comical tightfistedness' and, perhaps, too, an aloofness that did not go down well in Washington. 'That was a big mistake,' says Luce of the Carters' decision to keep their distance from Washington society events. 'Carter thought the people he was shunning were snobs – but they thought he was being snobbish by spurning them. And there was a sort of preachiness about Carter that really rubbed them up the wrong way. Carter was the first real modern outsider president. The way to fix that was to dive in and immerse yourself. There was a bit of Obama there, too – an impression of being supercilious and above-you-people. Which is not good politics.' After losing the 1980 election to Ronald Reagan, Carter found himself, as Luce writes, 'an orphan of history, disavowed by his party'. But Brzezinski also found himself in the wilderness through the 1980s. 'Yeah. He was really cast out. And he did a lot to get himself cast out. He was extremely rude to people. And his memoirs were ill-advised. He really did lionise himself and take down everybody else – except for Carter,' says Luce, laughing. 'And it was strange – he was actually very generous intellectually with people he thought were worth it. He usually attacked arguments, not people. But that memoir did him an enormous amount of damage. And he was a pariah amongst Democrats for years. The fall of the Soviet Union redeemed him. He was a superstar again. But he was a very restless soul. He was at his best having battles. So he didn't bask in any glory. In the 1990s he got very involved in Bosnia, and that is where Clinton used him. He was very pro-Nato. He really saw through Putin post-9/11 and was a really incisive critic of what was the establishment view. He was not part of the establishment – even in his grandest, most vindicated autumn years, he never was. And I think that is a good thing.' By then, Luce had moved from India, where he was a correspondent with the Financial Times, to Washington, where his weekly columns are frequently scathing of the current administration. He occasionally met Brzezinski for lunch in various haunts and came to like the senior man, who was generous with what Luce calls a 'deep fund of historical memory'. [ No limits? Why the United States could be on the verge of a constitutional crisis Opens in new window ] So Luce has had a busy May, double-jobbing as both guest at the recent FT Spring Festival, where he spoke with the newspaper's editor, Roula Khalaf, about his biography, before turning public interviewer to Steve Bannon. That event closed the show in front of a packed auditorium. The crowd was giddy: evening drinks loomed and Bannon excels at provocation, drawing murmurs of polite outrage when he cheerfully declared the recent papal conclave rigged and predicted that Trump would run for – and win – a third term (the constitutional limit is two terms). Luce has lived in the US for two decades and has travelled enough of the country to understand the reasons why the Maga faithful have come to see Trump as a messianic figure. 'Yes, I can. And as I said to Bannon: I agree with half of what you are saying. The diagnosis is good. But ... habeas corpus being suspended does not follow 'this is a plutocracy'. He is correct. It is a plutocracy. And the Left is too much a part of it. They are the cognitive and managerial elites who don't want to upset their part in the firmament. And until they get fire in their belly – and it has to be populist – then Trump or Trump-like figures are going to win or have a really good chance, assuming the system is free and fair next time. But Bannon understands that people hate the establishment in America and have pretty good reason to. And with Trump, it is not that people believe what he says. It is that him lying to them sounds more authentic and truthful than the Democrat blow-dried, focus group-tested, risk-averse talking points that so many of them campaign on.' Recently, Luce and Niamh found themselves chatting about the sense of unease they both detect in Washington now. His first experience of the city was as a speechwriter for Larry Summers, who was an avid FT reader, in the carefree 1990s. 'Summers and Greenspan and Rubin and these people – what were they called? 'Masters of the Universe' by Time magazine. When I came back here, the Pentagon was the department, not the treasury. It was a fortress mentality, and a very different town to the one I left. Less pleasant. But nothing like today. Trump has been the real change. Ten years ago, when your plane touched down in Dulles or DCA [Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport], you were coming home. Because we had been here for so long. And you would relax. Now I just tense up wherever I am coming in from. There is a menace, an edge to life. Not just in Washington, but in America, that just wasn't there before. And the possibility of dark stuff. I guess what schoolkids must feel when they do shooting drills. You are suddenly aware of something.' If Kamala Harris won ... in some ways it would have been darker than what we are going through now. I think the country would have broken down For the first time, he finds his 'heart skips a beat' going through emigration as a green-card holder. It is just six months into the new administration. It is impossible to predict the state of the nation in 2028. And there are no heavyweight strategic thinkers of Brzezinski's ilk to be found in government in Washington any more. Luce's biography, which has received uniformly dazzling notices, is a salute to a vanished age of intellectual and moral rigour. Luce's daughter Mimi, in a welter of school exam study, pops in to say hello. Luce describes his family background as 'privileged, quite posh ... not moneyed'. His father, Baron Richard Luce, was lord chamberlain to Queen Elizabeth. During the royal funeral, Ed and his father were guests on the popular MSNBC show Morning Joe, co-hosted by Joe Scarborough and Brzezinski's daughter, Mika: the hosts are a couple. Luce walks across to the bookcase and finds a photo-still of the television appearance. He had advised his father about video-link decorum. 'Just: please don't put the iPad up your nose.' His father paid no heed and then delighted in telling the hosts that Ed had been expelled from school in his younger days. 'It was excruciating,' says Luce cheerfully. 'But it was good television.' Then US vice-president Kamala Harris shakes hands with her presidential rival Donald Trump during a debate last September. Photograph: Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty London will always be home, even if Britain, post-Brexit, feels 'very Lilliputian and kind of grey'. But still, there were times last year, with the political atmosphere truly poisonous and the election forecasts see-sawing between Trump and Kamala Harris, that the family 'were seriously considering, if Kamala Harris won, we could actually move to London'. 'In practice, it would have been the Weimar Republic on steroids,' he explains. 'In some ways it would have been darker than what we are going through now. I think the country would have broken down. So, the Trump victory was the least-bad outcome in terms of social stability and the worst in governance. There would have been violence.' Zbig: The Life of Zbigniew Brzezinski, America's Cold War Prophet is published by Simon & Schuster in the US and Bloomsbury in the UK. Ed Luce will appear at the Dalkey Book Festival on Friday and Saturday, June 13th and 14th
BBC News
28-05-2025
- Business
- BBC News
The foreign policy titan who saw this moment coming
Ever since World War Two, the United States has boasted a storied bench of foreign policy titans – primarily men – who more or less managed to stay above partisan politics to focus on shaping the world order. Think of people like Henry Kissinger. George Kennan. Robert McNamara. Jim Baker. Among them is Zbigniew Brzezinski, a Polish immigrant who worked his way up from escaping World War Two, to becoming the US National Security Advisor under President Jimmy Carter. Brzezinski's life has as much history in it as just about anyone I can think of. His earliest memories were of living as a child in Germany and watching the Nazis rise to power. He spearheaded normalisation of US ties with China. He advised Jimmy Carter on how to handle the Iran Hostage Crisis. He was a key broker during the Camp David Accords. And he always believed the Soviet Union, the US's great foe, could be defeated, not just contained. Near the end of his life, Brzezinski had a warning for his adopted country. The Soviet Union was gone. The economy was strong. The US seemed invincible. But Brzezinski feared that a decline in US leadership was coming – and that it would be disastrous for both the US and the rest of the world. Ed Luce is a journalist at the Financial Times and author of the new book, Zbig. We spoke about why Brzezinski was such a prophetic figure in US foreign policy – and what he would have made of the current state of the world. It was a really eye-opening conversation; you can watch (or read) more of it below. Below is an excerpt from our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity. Katty Kay: Why choose Zbigniew Brzezinski? Why, in this moment, write about that person? Edward Luce: I was given tonnes of primary material, including the diaries he kept as national security adviser, where he would sort of speak paragraphs into his dictaphone every night, going home from the White House. I think his life was mostly dominated by the Cold War. So, when the Cold War ended, at a time when everyone else, or most other people, were triumphalist about the victory of the West and particularly of America, Brzezinski began warning that the rot now, from within, was America's major challenge. He accused Americans of hubris and of not understanding how quickly they could alienate Russia, Iran, China and fellow travellers. And that was quite prescient. And that's why the subtitle of my book is "America's great power prophet". He had a very good predictive record. KK: Was there something you learned writing this book, Ed, that made you think that this man seems relevant in 2025? EL: With a biography, you really need to get into the crucible where that character was made – and for Brzezinski, clearly it was interwar Poland, ending in this horrible conflagration where the Nazis and the Soviets divide the country and then raze it, essentially. In odd ways, it's not dissimilar to Henry Kissinger, whose Jewish extended family mostly died in the Holocaust and he coincidentally left Europe in the same year as Brzezinski: 1938. I think in both cases, but in very different ways, this shaped how they viewed the world, but one very similar way – which is that civilisation is inherently fragile; it's inherently unstable. I think that is something that both men, although they disagreed on so much, agreed on about America. It's that America somehow sees itself as standing apart from history and is not subject to its tragic laws. In 2025, with us living through what some people call the "revenge of geopolitics" that's going on around the world, it's very good for Americans to be reminded of the importance of understanding the value of what we have – and what we could be losing. A little bit like good health: you only rate it when you lose it. KK: As I went through the book, you keep coming across these issues around the world that America is still dealing with. There's Russia, there's the problems with Europe, there's the Middle East, of course the Iran hostage case, China – and it's the same issues, most of which have not been resolved. I wonder if there's anything in Brzezinski that would look at where we are today and say: "Maybe we didn't get it right". EL: I did a lot of interviews with Henry Kissinger for this book, and he said, "Look, I think what we don't understand so well in America is that history never stops. It goes on and on and on". If you look at how they both dealt with China, bringing China more into the American camp and breaking it away from the Soviets in the '70s. This was a brilliant strategic chessboard move, but of course it also seeded the rise of China, which is now a problem that America is indefinitely going to have to grapple with. Another is the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan: a perfectly sensible, although controversial, decision by Brzezinski to fund the Mujahideen rebellion against the Soviets. It helped contribute to the demise of the Soviet Union, but that then creates problems down the line of Islamism and worldwide terrorism. History does go on and on. And it does require solutions for the short and medium term, but there is never a permanent solution to anything. I think that sort of grit and pessimism at the heart of these strategic thinkers is something that's quite valuable. It schools us to realise you have to deal with what's in front of you and if you aim to an unrealistic height, you're going to fall flat on your face. KK: Are there any of those big strategic thinkers today? EL: Look, I think America is full of the most extraordinary scholarship of all regions of the world. But you don't see any scholar who's able to become a scholar practitioner in the way that Brezenski or Kissinger or George Kennan were. It's not because they're not there, but I think the demand for them has decreased. Foreign policy has become much, much more political. It's become domestic politics. Politics doesn't stop at the water's edge, as people used to say. KK: In his later years, Brzezinski felt that America lacked a kind of grand, overarching strategy. But you look at the Trump administration now and whatever you might say about the tactics and the implementation, Trump does have an overall grand vision for America, doesn't he? EL: I think it's a grand series of impulses. I don't think it has a real strategy behind it. The core of the Trump vision is essentially that we live in a jungle and big predators are more powerful than small predators. Trump sees the Western Hemisphere as America's backyard – and therefore we can do what we like, even to Canada, even to friends. Ukraine is Russia's backyard. And Taiwan, I think by implication, is China's. I don't think Brzezinski would have agreed – well, I know he disagreed with that. He would probably be looking to stoke Russian paranoia about China just to keep them a little bit suspicious of each other so that they don't unite. Things like Russian fears that China wants the territory back that the czars seized from it in the 19th Century. The fact that Russia is probably going to be the biggest beneficiary of climate change and you'll see the Siberian tundra unfreezing and becoming agricultural. China has acute population pressures. There's a lot of material to play with there, if you want to be Machiavellian and to pry Russia and China apart. I think he – and probably Kissinger, too – would be looking at that kind of strategy. I think Trump's policies are pushing Russia and China closer together which, again, just in terms of chessboard logic, it's not smart to unite your enemies. Try and keep them divided. Try and stoke mutual suspicion. --
New York Times
24-05-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
Frank Moore, a Top Aide to Jimmy Carter, Is Dead at 89
Frank Moore, who as President Jimmy Carter's congressional liaison toiled with mixed results to sell the agenda of a self-professed outsider to veterans of Washington, died on Thursday at his home in St. Simons Island, Ga. He was 89. His son Brian confirmed the death. Mr. Carter was known for having a 'Georgia Mafia' around him during his presidency. Mr. Moore was a leading member of that group, and the two men remained close until Mr. Carter's death. According to the Georgia newspaper The Gainesville Times, Mr. Moore was the last living person to have worked for Mr. Carter for the entirety of his political career: as an aide from his days as a Georgia state senator all the way through his presidency. In Washington, the two men had what might have seemed like an ideal chance for legislative achievements. For all four years of the Carter administration, the Democrats controlled every branch of government, and from January 1977 to January 1979 they had supermajorities in the House and the Senate. Yet it was a less ideologically homogenous era for the party. The Democratic caucus in the Senate, for example, encompassed liberals like Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, staunch anti-Communists like Henry Jackson of Washington and conservative segregationists like John C. Stennis of Mississippi. These separate factions and their wily tacticians were relatively unfamiliar to Mr. Carter and Mr. Moore, who had first met far away from the nation's capital — on a local planning panel in Georgia in the mid-1960s. In the 1970s, after Mr. Carter had been elected governor, he made Mr. Moore his chief of staff. During Mr. Carter's presidential run, Mr. Moore, a soft-voiced 40-year-old who held the title of national finance chairman, was one of a few of Mr. Carter's Georgia allies to set up his campaign office in Washington. By the standards of Mr. Carter and his allies, that made Mr. Moore a Washington expert. Mr. Carter made him the White House's liaison to Congress immediately upon taking office. Mr. Moore set about introducing himself to all 535 members of Congress and their roughly 15,000 staffers. In February 1977, The New York Times reported that he met with Mr. Carter up to four times a day, signed off on almost all the memorandums that reached the president's desk, and helped formulate most official policy. 'I think I know about everything that's going on,' Mr. Moore told The Times. 'People are willing to give me more information than I can keep up with.' He worked so tirelessly that even after he slipped on ice and broke his wrist, he declined to see a doctor for a week, The Times reported in a profile. He stopped attending his family's dinners, leaving home before his children woke up and returning after they had gone to bed. It was not enough. Members of Congress complained that Mr. Moore failed to consult them when necessary, neglected to return their calls, did not have experienced aides and could not speak credibly on behalf of the new administration. 'Each cabinet officer is operating under his own ground rules,' Benjamin S. Rosenthal, a veteran House Democrat from Queens, complained to The Times in 1977, adding, 'Moore presumably is not strong enough to turn that around.' The Times called Mr. Moore 'the most maligned man in the Carter administration.' Mr. Carter himself was gaining the reputation of a political novice and micromanager. Responding to criticism, the administration issued ambitious new domestic policy proposals: welfare overhaul, energy reform, inflation reduction, budget balancing and measures that would reverse the decline of cities. With Mr. Moore's help, Mr. Carter passed legislation cutting taxes, reorganizing the Civil Service and creating new cabinet departments for energy and education. But many other administration proposals, like urban aid and welfare reform, gained little traction. During the summer of 1979, Mr. Carter asked his entire cabinet to submit resignations. 'Speculation about possible staff changes,' The Times reported, 'has centered on Frank B. Moore, the president's congressional liaison, who has been blamed for many of his difficulties with Congress.' In the end, Mr. Carter accepted resignations from five cabinet officials, but Mr. Moore remained in his role. Mr. Carter lost to Ronald Reagan in a landslide in 1980. 'They ran against Washington, then became part of Washington, and were neither psychologically nor mechanically equipped to deal with that,' Representative Rosenthal told The Times. Francis Boyd Moore was born on July 27, 1935, in Dahlonega, a Georgia mining town in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. His father, Charles, ran a small Ford dealership and hardware store. His mother, Elizabeth (Boyd) Moore, was a teacher. He studied accounting at the University of Georgia and earned a bachelor's degree there in 1960. He also met a fellow student, Nancy Wofford. They married in 1962. Before working with Mr. Carter on the Georgia planning panel, Mr. Moore tested the cereal market in Georgia as an employee of Quaker Oats. After Mr. Carter's presidency, Mr. Moore was vice president for government affairs at Waste Management, a leading garbage removal company. An avid reader of World War II history, he was also involved in the planning of war memorials in the United States and abroad. In addition to his son Brian, Mr. Moore is survived by two daughters, Elizabeth and Courtney Moore; another son, Henry; a sister, Ann Wimpy; and five grandchildren. His wife died of cancer in 2024. In 2023, Mr. Moore told The Gainesville Times that he spoke to Mr. Carter on the phone every week. In spite of their four years together in Washington, they hardly ever spoke about the White House. Their favorite topics, Mr. Moore said, were hunting, family and their recollections of characters of yore from the Georgia state legislature. But Mr. Moore did discuss his record in Washington at length in a retrospective oral history interview with the Miller Center of the University of Virginia, which focuses on presidential scholarship. Mr. Carter, in his analysis, was an 'activist president,' which meant that fighting with Congress was unavoidable. 'The way to have good congressional relations,' Mr. Moore said, 'is not to send any controversial legislation.'
