The constitutional principle known as “the power of the purse” has been a fixture of American history classrooms for generations. Federal law explicitly prohibits the executive branch from overriding Congress’ spending decisions.
But with a cascade of unilateral federal funding changes in the last year, President Donald Trump has challenged those principles more directly and aggressively than any leader in the nation’s 250-year history—and the education field felt the effects early and often.
Education Week has spent the last year building a running—and increasingly sprawling—tabulation of the individual grant cancellations and broader funding disruptions affecting education as they’ve happened. During the first year of Trump’s second term, Education Week found that the federal government bypassed Congress and disrupted more than $12 billion for K-12 education that lawmakers had already allocated, much of it before Trump took office.
That’s just $3 billion shy of the entire amount Congress allocates annually for special education nationwide—or equal to two-thirds of all the Title I money that annually flows to schools.
Some funds were cut off permanently, while others were delayed, or halted then reinstated. Hundreds of individual grant recipients saw their awards vanish virtually overnight. Billions of formula dollars Congress allocated for schools showed up weeks late. Rules for spending leftover pandemic relief cash changed, then changed again.
The U.S. Department of Education alone moved to cancel more than 730 grants collectively worth at least $2.2 billion across 30 K-12 and higher education programs. The precise dollar value of all the affected awards is likely much higher, as many grant recipients also lost access to previously awarded funds they hadn’t yet spent, and federal agencies haven’t released a full list of canceled grants, or their value.
Lindsey Burke, a Trump-appointed deputy chief of staff for policy and programs at the Education Department, confirmed $2 billion of grant cuts during a Jan. 14 online event held by Chalkbeat.
“We are using those dollars to reinvest in better projects that are really serving students better than the initial grants, that were serving the adults in the system better than they were serving the students,” said Burke. “We’re not on autopilot. We are reviewing everything.”
Before joining the department, Burke wrote the education section of the conservative presidential policy agenda Project 2025, which laid out a blueprint for many of the policy agenda items Trump has pursued since taking office last January.
Trump administration has aggressively pursued its policy agenda
In the Chalkbeat interview, Burke offered one concrete example of grants the Trump administration views as wasteful: higher education awards that were “supporting students to travel to Colombia to assess systemic conditions of anti-trans violence.”
Some of the other cuts the administration has pursued reflect its stated goals: overturning policy priorities of the Biden administration; strengthening a conservative imprint on higher education; shifting school funding responsibilities to states and local districts; and cracking down on programs serving immigrant students.
But many of the programs affected by the department’s funding cuts were tackling initiatives administration officials have broadly said they support and want to prioritize, including literacy instruction, charter schools, school choice, mental health services, special education, and parent engagement.
Federal funding disruptions have extended beyond grants overseen by the Education Department. Education Week has identified 67 separate grant programs at 14 other federal agencies where cuts or changes in the last year affected K-12 education. Affected grants disrupted projects promoting enrichment programming, healthy food, building modernization, violence prevention, research on curriculum and health, and far more.
Most of these changes hit without warning—and in some cases without a stated reason. Administration officials have emphasized that they’re cracking down on what they call “illegal DEI” and “gender ideology,” in many cases without specifically defining the terms.
During the first year of his second term, President Trump signed executive orders seeking to abolish the U.S. Department of Education; curtail federal spending aligned with former President Joe Biden’s priorities; and stamp out initiatives in schools and beyond that promote diversity, equity, and inclusion. His administration has often used those orders as a rationale for reviewing existing spending and cutting off grants.
As a result of Trump’s education cuts, hundreds of educators have lost their jobs. Thousands of aspiring teachers found themselves without financial support they were using to cover college tuition. Dozens of school districts canceled plans to upgrade buildings, purchase library books, contract with mental health providers, and help middle and high schoolers apply to college.
Many of these moves have sparked court challenges, including some that already succeeded in reversing cuts and more that are ongoing. Trump-era funding cuts and freezes have also drawn rebukes and condemnations from federal lawmakers of both parties, state officials, and government watchdogs.
Even with the pushback, though, the Trump administration has shown little interest in scaling back its spending disruptions. Just last week, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services canceled grants supporting school-based mental health programs, then reinstated the funds the next day, all without explanation.
Top administration officials like Russell Vought, who heads the federal Office of Management and Budget, contend that the executive branch has far more power to control federal spending than Congress has historically tolerated.
“We are not saying that the power of the purse does not belong with Congress. It absolutely does. It is one of the most constitutional foundational principles,” Vought told reporters last summer. “But ... it’s a ceiling. It is not a floor. It is not the notion that you have to spend every last dollar of that.”
Early signals of disruption to come
On Jan. 28, one week into Trump’s second term, federal agencies made an unprecedented announcement: At the close of business the following day, hundreds of billions of dollars of federal funding across the government, including for education, would freeze indefinitely for a “review” of spending that touched on DEI initiatives.
Education advocates scrambled to figure out which programs would be halted and how to prepare for such a large-scale disruption. Concrete answers proved elusive, and ultimately irrelevant: A federal judge put the effort on hold just minutes before it was to take effect. The administration rescinded the order just a day later.
In the months since, federal agencies have effectively carried out a prolonged, piecemeal version of the originally announced DEI review, leading to funding halts, clawbacks, and terminations for federal investments that were already in progress.
Until 2025, canceling a previously awarded grant was an exceptionally rare step for the Education Department to take. The second Trump administration took a dramatically different course during its first year. Top agency officials sent “notices of non-continuation” to more than 730 grantees across 30 different funding streams—effectively canceling their remaining years of funding, including allocations that were due to arrive within weeks.
With help from grant recipients, education advocates, court filings, and publicly available databases, Education Week tabulated an estimated sum of all the future-year funds grant recipients lost as a result of these cancellations: $2.2 billion.
For some programs, identifying the canceled funding amounts proved impossible; the actual dollar figure is likely much higher.
Nearly all the notices accused the grantees of engaging in illegal or improper initiatives to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion. The agency offered grantees an opportunity to appeal, but rejected the vast majority of the requests. Only a small fraction of these grantees—including school districts, state education agencies, colleges and universities, and education nonprofits—were able to secure court injunctions that permanently restored their funding.
On March 28, after business hours, Education Secretary Linda McMahon sent a letter to all 50 states, notifying them that schools and state agencies would effectively lose access immediately to $3.3 billion in unspent pandemic relief dollars—out of the original $190 billion in emergency relief Congress allocated for schools in 2020 and 2021.
Schools had been planning to use those dollars for priorities like construction projects, technology contracts, and tutoring programs—and had generally already signed agreements with vendors to spend the money. Districts scrambled to cancel contracts and rejigger budgets, all while submitting appeal requests to have their costs covered, most of which the department rejected.
An ensuing legal battle changed the status of portions of these funds several times. But on June 26, McMahon sent another letter announcing that the agency would reverse its original policy change and make all the funds available after all. At that point, some schools found it was too late to carry out their original plans for using the money.
State education agencies usually receive updates from the federal government in May and June that detail formula funding allocations they can expect to start receiving on July 1 for distribution to K-12 schools.
Last year, the night before the July 1 deadline, the Trump administration instead announced it had decided to hold back the entire funding allocations for seven separate formula funding streams for education, while a “review” of the spending continued with no end date specified.
Those funds were set to support professional development, English-learner services, academic enrichment and student support, before-and after-school programs, and adult education. State chiefs and lawmakers across the political spectrum blasted the decision, and a legal challenge emerged within days. By the end of July, the agency had voluntarily unlocked the funds. But many schools’ trust in the federal government—long seen as a reliable actor—has been shattered, and may not be repaired for years to come.
One example of how the administration’s cuts to school programs extend beyond the Department of Education can be seen at the Federal Communications Commission. In recent years, the FCC has helped schools subsidize Wi-Fi on school buses and internet hotspots for students and their families.
But on Sept. 30, the FCC voted 2-1 to remove those two expense categories from its eligibility list—effectively cutting off $42.6 million in E-rate funding school districts had requested for hotspots, and $15.1 million they had requested for school bus Wi-Fi.
Grants from other agencies that affected K-12 schools
Department of Education funding got the bulk of the attention from the education world in 2025. But it was hardly the only agency pulling back grant funds that touch K-12 schools. Education Week identified 67 grant programs from 14 other agencies where abrupt and unplanned cuts and cancellations affected K-12 education in the last year.
Identifying the total dollar value of these cuts proved virtually impossible—agencies haven’t provided easily accessible lists showing how many and which grants they canceled, how many years of funding canceled grants had left, or how many of those grants have since been partially or completely reinstated.
