President Donald Trump, just one day after detailing his administration’s efforts to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education, announced plans to shift federal programs supporting students with disabilities and school meals to the Department of Health and Human Services—prompting yet another round of confusion and anxiety among education advocates over policy actions that flout the law and decades of precedent.
Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office on Friday, Trump said HHS, overseen by Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., would handle “special needs and all of the nutrition programs and everything else.”
The Education Department’s office of special education programs for nearly half a century has overseen the distribution of billions of dollars in annual grants for states and schools to support students with disabilities as well as states’ compliance with the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. But school meal programs are managed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, not the Education Department.
“I think that will work out very well,” Trump said. “Those two elements will be taken out of the Department of Education, and then all we have to do is get the students to get guidance from the people that love them and cherish them, including their parents by the way, who will be totally involved in education along with boards and the governors and the states.”
Trump didn’t specify when the transitions would take place or what will happen with federal employees currently working on those issues. Only Congress has the authority to move functions of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act to another agency; not Trump.
“It’s an egregious flouting of Congress’s authority and the rule of law,” said Derek Black, a professor of law at the University of South Carolina who specializes in constitutional law and public education.
Still, Kennedy seemed ready to embrace such a change. In a statement on X, the Health and Human Services secretary said his department was “fully prepared to take on the responsibility of supporting individuals with special needs and overseeing nutrition programs.” The statement repeated Trump’s inaccurate assertion of the school nutrition programs’ current whereabouts.
“Look, we’ve said we’re going to work with different agencies. Where might some of the programs fit best?” Education Secretary Linda McMahon said on Fox News after Trump spoke. "...Title I funding was in place before there was a Department of Education. IDEA funding for our children with disabilities and special needs was in place before there was a Department of Education. And it managed to work incredibly well.”
Trump advances proposals first floated in Project 2025
The president’s comments on Friday double down on a proposal, first outlined in the conservative policy document Project 2025, to move federal oversight of funding and services for students with disabilities to HHS.
Special education experts and advocates reacted to Friday’s announcement as the latest in a string of disorienting developments for their field since Trump took office.
“I don’t think anybody feels confident that they fully understand the end goal,” said Melissa Taylor, executive director of the Illinois Alliance of Administrators of Special Education. “Is the goal to continue to have a national standard for what is a disability, and what the expectations are for special education? Or are we OK with that being dismantled?”
As for school meals, Project 2025 envisioned moving “all means-tested programs in one department to uncover ‘the size of the welfare state.’”
Anti-hunger groups, including the Food Research & Action Center, have sharply criticized that suggestion, along with recommendations to scale back or eliminate the community eligibility provision, a federal policy that allows some schools to serve universal free meals.
Trump’s interest in moving school meal programs may be motivated in part by Kennedy’s pledge to eliminate processed food from school lunches. HHS currently has limited involvement in school meal programs, aside from helping to set federal dietary guidelines that inform their regulations.
“Moving authority for school meals from USDA to HHS would require Congressional action and we have seen no appetite for such a drastic change,” Jason Gromley, senior director for Share Our Strength’s No Kid Hungry campaign, said in a statement.
The School Nutrition Association, which represents local school meal directors around the country, believes school meal programs should remain where they are, “given the programs’ strong ties to the U.S. agriculture community, long history of serving American grown and raised foods, and reliance on domestic commodities through the USDA Foods program,” spokesperson Diane Pratt-Heavner said in a statement.
Trump also said Friday that management of the nation’s $1.5 trillion student loan portfolio would shift from the Education Department to the Small Business Administration “immediately.”
Project 2025 suggested shifting student loans out of the Department of Education, but mentioned the Treasury Department as the final destination.
The Higher Education Act specifically tasks the Education Department with managing student aid programs.
Beth Maglione, interim president and CEO of the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators, said that any transfer of that responsibility “would take time.”
“In the absence of any comprehensive plan, a serious concern remains: how will this restructuring be executed without disruption to students and institutions?” she said.
In her Fox News interview, McMahon said she planned to work with SBA Administrator Kelly Loeffler on a “strategic plan” for shifting student loans to that agency.
Efforts to support students with disabilities could suffer under HHS
The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, first signed into law in 1975 as the Education for All Handicapped Children Act, is one of the Education Department’s largest grant programs.
The uncertain future of IDEA has loomed large over Trump’s repeated promises to shutter the Education Department.
The $14.2 billion program helps schools pay for special education services for students with disabilities, and the law and its regulations lay out the requirements states and schools need to follow in providing special education.
IDEA came up repeatedly during McMahon’s confirmation hearing last month, with Democrats worried students with disabilities would be left behind if special education moved to another department.
“I’m not sure that it’s not better served in HHS, but I don’t know,” McMahon told senators Feb. 13. “It is of high priority to make sure that the students who are receiving disability funding that that is not impacted. It is incredibly important that those programs continue to be funded.”
Much like it would take an act of Congress to dissolve a Cabinet-level agency, it will require Congress’ say-so to move any of the department’s statutorily mandated offices and programs to different agencies, Black said. Trump cannot just decree it so.
Though the president and his administration enjoy some discretion when it comes to the hiring and firing of employees, it is outside the president’s authority to get rid of—or move—offices or positions created by Congress.
Still, shifting oversight of special education grants to HHS is “not insane,” as long as the office’s staff carry over in the transition, said Larry Wexler, who served as director of the research-to-practice division in the Education Department’s office of special education programs from 2008 until last year.
The move would bring OSEP’s early childhood program, IDEA Part C, into the same agency that already oversees the national Head Start network of early childhood programs—a natural fit for collaboration.
But OSEP staff would lose opportunities for seamless collaboration with employees in the Education Department’s office of elementary and secondary education, as well as civil rights staffers with expertise on disability issues in education, Wexler said.
Experts and practitioners worry that the move to HHS dovetails with Trump’s stated goal of minimizing the federal role in education policy and shifting all responsibility to states. Before IDEA passed, as many as 1 million children with disabilities were excluded from attending school altogether, according to the law’s preamble.
“Left to their own devices, states historically do not do what was right for kids with disabilities,” Wexler said. “My fear is with a diminished emphasis on the requirements that that will happen again.”
