DoEd Secretary Miguel Cardona (D) wants to enact a rule that would expand Title IX (illegally, but that’s a separate problem) to require State education systems to include transgender athletes in all heretofore women’s sports programs and all on heretofore women’s sports teams. Half of the governors of our States object.

If it comes down to it, Cardona’s move is very likely to fail in the courts. That will be an expensive and time consuming enterprise.

I propose another solution to be pushed in parallel with the lawsuit effort. It also would be expensive and time consuming to put into effect, but I think it would have a more permanent, and more beneficial, outcome.

States should stop taking Federal dollars altogether into their education systems. That would put the States beyond the reach of Title IX, which applies only to those State systems that take Federal dollars.

Not taking the government’s lucre would be expensive, certainly, but only until the States’ budgets adjusted. However, the move would do more than place those States’ education systems beyond the reach of Title IX’s strings, it would free the States from a potful of Federal education strings—and demonstrate that States can get along just fine without those dollars and those strings and so encourage them to decline ever more Federal dollars and reap the increasing value of being free of those strings.