The U.S. Department of Education on Monday announced it will begin offloading the management of key federal programs for school safety, community schools, educational TV programming, and family engagement as the Trump administration continues its bid to wind down the agency.
The department announced Monday afternoon that it’s struck an “interagency agreement” with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to “take a growing role in administering” six grant programs related to K-12 schools.
Separately, the U.S. Department of State will take over management of a grant portal that displays foreign gifts to higher education institutions, the department announced on Feb. 23.
Under Secretary of Education Linda McMahon, the department has now forged nine separate interagency agreements to transfer program responsibilities to other agencies, including administration for most K-12 programs and funds. But shifts the administration has touted for special education (to HHS), civil rights enforcement (to the Department of Justice), student-loan management (to the Treasury Department), and data collection (to a federal statistics agency) haven’t yet materialized.
Programs newly shifting to HHS include the Full-Service Community Schools and Promise Neighborhoods programs for fostering connections between schools and local social services; Project SERV and National Activities funds for helping schools recover from violent emergencies and expand mental health services; Ready to Learn grants for educational TV and digital media programming for young children; and Statewide Family Engagement Centers for fostering connections between parents and educators.
Those programs will follow the same course as the Education Department’s Child Care Means Access for Parents in School program, which funds child care for college students who are parents. The agency began shifting that program to HHS last November.
The department is in the process of moving dozens of programs to other agencies
Congress recently approved a fiscal 2026 budget that offers a modest increase in overall annual funding for Department of Education programs, bucking Trump’s proposals for massive cuts. The explanatory language that accompanied that bill expressed concern about interagency agreements like the ones announced Monday, but it didn’t cancel the existing ones or prohibit the agency from establishing new ones.
HHS will run competitions and provide technical assistance to grant recipients for the programs it’s inheriting from the Education Department, which will “maintain statutory responsibilities and continue to provide oversight,” according to the fact sheet accompanying the announcement.
Since November, when the Education Department announced six new interagency agreements, the agency has detailed 50 higher education staffers to the Department of Labor, said Rachel Gittleman, president of the agency’s staff union. For the K-12 program transfers—which include key formula funds for schools such as Title I—the department hasn’t shared with the union a timeline for moving staff or program functions, Gittleman said.
Now, with the latest moves, “the agency is asking this overworked skeleton crew to manage a risky transfer to an agency with no educational expertise, weakening oversight and increasing the risk of waste, fraud, and abuse,” she said.
The department’s announcement of the shift frames the latest moves as part of ongoing efforts to improve efficiency and “return education to the states,” but stops short of explicitly mentioning the goal of eliminating the agency altogether.
“By partnering with agencies that are better positioned to deliver results for students and taxpayers, the new partnerships will streamline federal education activities on legally required programs, reduce administrative burdens, and refocus programs and activities to better serve students and grantees,” the statement says.
Staff who work on the programs affected by Monday’s moves haven’t yet been detailed to other agencies, a spokesperson for the agency said.
Grant programs shifting to HHS are already beleaguered
The six grant programs included in this week’s announcement include several the Trump administration over the past year has proposed to defund and moved to disrupt. Congress recently supplied level year-over-year funding for all of them—$514 million in total.
The Department of Education is currently facing three separate lawsuits from recipients of Full-Service Community Schools grant recipients in Illinois, Maryland, North Carolina, and the District of Columbia, who saw their ongoing grant awards abruptly discontinued in mid-December.
All told, the agency discontinued roughly $168 million that 19 Community Schools grant recipients in 11 states had been expecting in the coming years.
The agency last year also discontinued hundreds of mental health grants awarded under the National Activities banner; five grants for Statewide Family Engagement Centers; at least one Promise Neighborhoods project; and all the ongoing Ready to Learn awards.
The cancellation of the latter program—$23 million worth—contributed to the shutdown last month of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the private nonprofit organization established by Congress to oversee distribution of funds to public media organizations.
For the mental health programs affected by administration cuts, meanwhile, the department has since opened new competitions and made new grant awards while a legal challenge of last year’s terminations from 16 states continues.
