President Donald Trump on Friday unveiled a budget plan that would slash billions of dollars in federal funding for K-12 education and dramatically rework how the federal government distributes education grants to schools.
The “skinny” budget proposal—which the administration will flesh out in the coming weeks—falls well short of Trump’s stated goal to eliminate the Department of Education and shift some of its core functions to other agencies. It also leaves unanswered many questions about the administration’s priorities and intentions.
“This is better than my worst imagining, but not very good,” said Sarah Abernathy, executive director of the Committee for Education Funding, a nonprofit advocacy group.
The Trump administration published a 46-page list of budget proposal highlights on Friday morning, kicking off negotiations between the White House and Congress over government spending for the federal fiscal year that starts Oct. 1.
Federal spending amounts to roughly one-tenth of K-12 education funding nationwide each year—a small but significant share.
The prospects for Trump’s proposal in Congress are mixed. Republicans have narrow majorities in the Senate and House, which means they can only afford to lose a few members from each if Democrats reject Republicans’ spending priorities in lockstep.
Many Republicans on Capitol Hill cheered the budget proposal. But three top GOP lawmakers, including one who oversees the appropriations process on Friday, criticized Trump’s sweeping push to shrink the federal government. Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, who chairs the Senate appropriations committee, said she had “serious objections” to some elements of the plan.
Rep. Tom Cole, R-Okla., who leads the House appropriations committee, said Thursday that lawmakers also aren’t “in a big hurry” to enact billions of dollars in “rescissions” Trump may separately propose for appropriations Congress has already made.
“Congress is not the Army. And the president is the president, but not the commander in chief of Congress,” Cole said, according to Politico.
Education Secretary Linda McMahon said in a statement Friday that the budget proposal “puts students and parents above the bureaucracy.”
A clearer picture of Trump’s education vision emerges—but also raises new questions
The proposal itself is symbolic and light on details, but offers the clearest view yet of how the president may try to carry out some of his biggest education policy priorities.
It emphasizes school choice by making charter school grants the only K-12 program slated for increased funding relative to current levels. It targets for elimination efforts to diversify the educator workforce and support students from vulnerable groups, including English learners and migrants. And it proposes slimming down the federal education workforce in an effort to “continue the process of shutting down the Department of Education.”
But the proposal leaves some questions entirely unanswered. An early budget proposal draft that leaked appeared to propose shuttering the $12 billion Head Start program, which provides preschool instruction and child care for 800,000 students from low-income families nationwide. But the White House budget proposal includes no mention of Head Start—either preserving or eliminating it.
On several core K-12 education items, the administration’s word choices invite varying interpretations.
The proposal says the administration is “preserving full funding” for the Title I program that annually provides more than $18 billion for schools to support low-income students. That statement will come as a relief to district leaders who are worried about having to upend their instructional programs and conduct sweeping layoffs if that funding stream dries up.
But on the very next page, the proposal calls for eliminating two small programs that fall under Title I—a combined $428 million to support migrant students who move from place to place throughout the year.
The proposal for transforming special education funding is similarly ambiguous. It calls for level year-over-year funding for the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), which supplies more than $15 billion a year for special education services millions of K-12 students need.
But it also asks Congress to consolidate seven existing grant programs within IDEA into a single allocation; emphasizes without explanation that “parents of students with disabilities would remain empowered to direct these funds because the Federal IDEA law would remain in place”; and threatens to withhold IDEA funding from “states and districts who flout parental rights.”
Acting on those proposals would require substantial changes to IDEA law, which lawmakers haven’t reauthorized since 2004.
Alternatively, the administration could be teeing up Congress to carry out another Project 2025 recommendation: a special education funding stream that gives parents money to use for private educational options of their choosing.
“To do what is proposed in the skinny budget, lawmakers will need to either amend IDEA or create a new funding program outside IDEA,” said Tammy Kolbe, a principal researcher at the American Institutes for Research and one of the nation’s leading experts on special education finance. “If they create a new block grant outside IDEA, then an open question is whether policymakers will still require states and districts to comply with IDEA.”
A new grant program would replace existing grants—but it’s not clear which ones
A recurring theme in the education section of Trump’s budget proposal is reducing the federal role in shaping education policy.
To that end, the skinny budget proposes rolling up separate K-12 education grant programs into a single $2 billion Simplified Education Fund, which states could spend on priorities of their choosing.
“The new approach allows States and districts to focus on the core subjects—math, reading, science, and history—without the distractions of DEI and weaponization from the previous administration,” the budget proposal says.
The proposal for $2 billion in annual funding doesn’t name the existing grant efforts that would fold into this new program. Nor does it spell out whether the money would flow to states through the existing Title I formula or through a different mechanism.
The budget document says it would consolidate 18 existing programs, but a statement from McMahon on Friday morning said 24 programs were included. That same statement has since been updated to reflect that the proposal is to consolidate 18 programs—but the programs still aren’t named.
Key grant programs like Impact Aid for school districts that have federal land within their boundaries, and McKinney-Vento for supporting homeless students, go unmentioned in Trump’s budget documents. They could be among the programs whose funding Trump wants to wrap up in the “simplified” fund, they could be proposed for elimination, or they could be proposed for no changes at all.
Trump has already moved in recent months to revoke education grants that were already awarded and cancel education contracts that were already signed. The budget proposal calls for Congress to codify some, but not all, of those changes.
For instance, it proposes eliminating the Teacher Quality Partnership grant program, whose current recipients have seen funding slip into limbo as court battles over Trump’s cancellation efforts play out.
But whether to eliminate, preserve, or consolidate two similar grant programs Trump also cut—the Seeking Effective Educator Development (SEED) and Teacher and School Leader Incentive (TSL) programs—doesn’t come up in the budget documents released Friday.
The Department of Education appears poised to stick around—for now
Overall, the administration is proposing to slash $12 billion, or roughly 15 percent, from the Education Department’s $78 billion budget for the current fiscal year. That’s a slightly bigger cut than Trump proposed during his previous administration, but it falls well short of the president’s threats, codified in a March 20 executive order, to eliminate the agency altogether.
Another key education priority of the Trump administration, private school choice, gets relatively minimal attention in the budget proposal.
“State-level choice and education developments/activity continue to be our top priority as a team and organization,” Paul DiPerna, vice president of research and innovation for the private school choice advocacy group EdChoice, told Education Week in an email.
The president’s budget overview doesn’t mention proposing to convert Title I or IDEA funds into vouchers for parents to spend on private school tuition. It doesn’t revive Trump’s first-administration proposals to make new federal investments in choice programs. A proposal under consideration in Congress to invest $10 billion in a new federal tax-credit scholarship program would likely require separate legislation outside the annual budget process.
The White House proposal also lacks some of the agency-shifting moves Trump announced earlier this year. Special education funding would stay under the Education Department’s purview rather than shifting to Health and Human Services. And the federal student loan apparatus wouldn’t shift to the Small Business Administration.
Still, the proposal does move to reduce federal oversight of K-12 education, by cutting roughly one-third of the annual budget for the Education Department’s civil rights office. The administration earlier this year slashed staffing at the agency’s civil rights division and eliminated more than half its regional offices virtually overnight.
“That implies to me that some of the work that they’re doing focusing on DEI efforts is going to have to happen at the Justice Department or somewhere else,” Abernathy said.
Across the federal government, Trump is also proposing to slash budgets for agencies that touch K-12 schools, including the Federal Emergency Management Administration and the Department of Labor. The proposal also calls for shutting down entire agencies, including the Institute for Museum and Library Sciences and the National Endowment for the Humanities, that supply grant funding for educational services schools and students use.
