The U.S. Department of Education last year let more than $75 million in congressionally appropriated funds expire without spending it—an amount without recent precedent that the agency appears on track to repeat this fall, a first-of-its-kind Education Week analysis of federal spending data shows.
Education Week reviewed the Education Department’s “SF-133” spending reports, published monthly by the White House Office of Management and Budget, for the full federal fiscal years 2015-2025, as well as for the current fiscal year that ends Sept. 30, for which data are available through the end of June.
A clear pattern emerged: During President Donald Trump’s second term, the Education Department has left far more money unspent, and has spent key segments of its budget far more slowly, than during the last three presidential administrations, including Trump’s first. Federal law requires that agencies spend the full amount Congress appropriates for them.
Fiscal 2025 ran from Oct. 1, 2024, to Sept. 30, 2025. For that year, Congress set aside $420 million for department staff salaries and office expenses and another $140 million for the department’s office for civil rights.
But at the end of September 2025, the department had left $21 million for staff salaries (5% of the appropriation) and $14.2 million for OCR (10% of the appropriation) unspent, according to the 2025 SF-133 report—which labels the funds “unobligated.”
Other Education Department accounts with an unusual sum of unspent fiscal 2025 funds included $20 million for mental health grants (part of the Safe Schools and Citizenship Education account); $12 million for education research (the Institute of Education Sciences as well as the Education Innovation and Research grant program); $4.8 million for the department’s inspector general’s office; and $3 million for career-and-technical education.
These figures reflect the effects of the department laying off hundreds of staffers, moving slowly to implement mandated initiatives, and canceling previously awarded grants, experts and advocates told Education Week.
Last year’s unspent Education Department funds represent “a symptom of uninspired and unmotivated program execution,” said Joe Carlile, a federal spending expert and former OMB official who also spent 13 years as a staffer on House appropriations committees. “Congress sat down, negotiated a bill, and thought this was the right allocation for American students. Then the administration comes in and says, ‘Thanks for the law, we’re going to substitute our judgment for what Congress passed into law, and the president signed.’”
The second Trump administration’s approach to spending differs not just from that of the president’s Democratic predecessors did but from the first Trump administration’s.
“Generally speaking, our goal was to spend as close as possible to the amount of money that had been appropriated without going over,” said Ken Marcus, who oversaw the Education Department’s office for civil rights from August 2018 to July 2020, during the second half of Trump’s first term. “There were of course serious concerns about the prospect of overspending, which could be a serious violation of federal law, and we did not want to risk that sort of violation.”
But, Marcus said, “the notion at that time was to spend the money appropriated.”
That does not appear to be the mandate across the board this time.
All told, across eight separate agency accounts with funding that expired Sept. 30, 2025, the Education Department left more than $75 million unobligated last fiscal year. For the same eight accounts from fiscal years 2015 through 2024, the department left unspent a total of just $9.9 million.
In other words, the Education Department left 7.5 times more unspent from those eight accounts in one year than it did in the entire decade leading up to it.
All of the unspent funds in question were either fiscal 2025 funds that expired after one year or funds that Congress approved in fiscal 2024 that expired after two years. (The agency can take two years to spend some categories of funds and one year for others.)
An Education Department spokesperson said in a statement that having unobligated funds isn’t uncommon.
“The Department remains dedicated to utilizing appropriated funds effectively to fulfill our statutory obligations and support rigorous research and innovation for students,” the spokesperson said.
Current-year spending suggests more money could go unspent
Federal data also show that current-year spending for key department offices is lagging the pace of prior years.
With three months left in the fiscal year, OCR still had half its fiscal 2026 budget left to spend at the end of June, compared with roughly a third at the comparable point in previous years.
The current unobligated share of the appropriation for program administration, which covers compensation for most of the agency’s staff, is slightly higher than in each of the previous 10 years. The relatively normal pace of spending for that account comes despite the department currently having roughly half the employees it had at the start of 2025.
Separately, the White House Office of Management and Budget has for months withheld fiscal 2026 congressional appropriations for more than 20 competitive grant programs the Trump administration has previously proposed to eliminate. Roughly $206 million for those grants could expire on Sept. 30 if OMB doesn’t allow the agency to spend it in the next two months.
For another 11 competitive education grant programs totaling $795 million, OMB “apportioned,” or unlocked, fiscal 2026 funding four months later than in previous years.
Delayed apportionments for federal education programs this year have drawn one legal challenge and raised concerns among some advocates that current and future grantees will receive expected funds late.
The findings mirror recent reports from other federal agencies—including for the departments of Energy, Health and Human Services, and Transportation as well as the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation—that show the pace of spending is lagging prior years’.
Spokespeople for OMB didn’t return requests for comment in time for publication.
A spokesperson for the Education Department’s inspector general directed Education Week to file a Freedom of Information Act request for information about the reasons behind the unobligated fiscal 2025 funds for that office.
OMB Director Russell Vought has repeatedly denied that the administration is improperly stalling federal spending or that the Trump administration has illegally failed to spend congressional appropriations. Separately, he’s argued that the federal law that prohibits the president from withholding congressional appropriations is unconstitutional.
Education Department spent most of its budget—but left millions on the table
The unspent fiscal 2025 amounts for education accounts represent no more than 10 percent of appropriations for each. And overall the Department of Education spent the vast majority of its budget last year, even after shedding nearly half its staff, canceling hundreds of previously awarded grants, and shuttering entire programs authorized by Congress during the Biden administration.
Even so, the sum of Education Department funds unspent by fiscal year’s end is typically orders of magnitude lower than last year’s.
Federal law requires the executive branch to spend its entire congressionally approved budget within lawmakers’ prescribed timelines. The president can only rescind those funds after getting permission from lawmakers; Trump last year requested no such approval for any Department of Education dollars.
Agencies typically spend the last weeks of the fiscal year scrambling to ensure they’ve obligated as much of their appropriation as possible, experts said.
During Trump’s first administration, OCR let less than $2 million expire over the course of four years. OCR under one year of Trump’s second term has already exceeded that figure sevenfold.
The second Trump administration “didn’t return that money because there weren’t civil rights to enforce,” said Catherine Lhamon, who oversaw OCR during the presidencies of Barack Obama and Joe Biden. “It did it because it made a deliberate choice not to protect children and instead operate at an historic low. That is unconscionable.”
Between 2015 and 2024, IES each year left less than $650,000 unspent. In 2025, more than $7 million for IES was unobligated by year’s end, out of an $800 million budget.
This year’s unobligated figure for IES could be even larger. IES, as of June, had yet to spend more than $223 million that’s set to expire this fall—compared with less than half that sum at the same point in 2024 or 2025 and even smaller amounts in the previous five years under Biden and Trump.
Current agency spending can have ripple effects for future funding, potentially leading to lower appropriations. In June, House Republicans advanced a fiscal 2027 budget that cuts nearly $300 million in annual funding for IES.
“The Committee notes the extensive fiscal year 2025 carryover funding available to the agency, in addition to the funding appropriated in fiscal year 2026,” lawmakers wrote in a bill report explaining the funding cut.
The Trump administration has made changes that have hampered the institute’s ability to spend, including laying off about 90% of its staff as part of the Trump administration’s 2025 governmentwide staffing cuts.
OMB also withheld more than a third of the 2025 IES appropriation for 14 months after Congress approved it. And OMB is still withholding 59% of the 2026 appropriation for IES. In previous years, OMB unlocked the full appropriation within six weeks of Congress passing a budget.
A coalition of education groups recently sued the Trump administration, arguing that withholding those funds is illegal and unconstitutional.
In the meantime, IES under the second Trump administration hasn’t launched a single new grant competition—even as hundreds of millions of dollars sit unspent and a recent administration-commissioned report on IES emphasized the importance of timely education research.
Education researchers remain alarmed by the volatility of federal funding. “They broke the system. They can’t say, ‘The system’s broken, so we’re not going to fix the system,’” said Rachel Dinkes, the president and CEO of the Knowledge Alliance, an advocacy coalition.
Trump-era leftover funds far exceed normal amounts
Agencies can spend congressionally appropriated money past the deadline in certain cases when the scope of work for previously agreed-upon contracts expands after the funds’ prescribed expiration date, said Carlile, the former OMB official and congressional staffer.
In those rare cases, an agency might leave no more than roughly 3 percent of appropriated funds unobligated by their original expiration date, Carlile said. Unobligated sums last year for four Education Department accounts—OCR, mental health grants, the inspector general’s office, and agency staff compensation—exceeded that threshold.
OCR typically left at most a few thousand dollars unspent from its annual appropriation in case a lawsuit that settled after the fiscal year’s end included a required payout, Lhamon said. She spent much of her tenure trying to stretch available funds to hire more staff and process cases more quickly.
Now, she said, the department is squandering dollars that could go toward resolving civil rights complaints. “I cannot underscore enough how appalling it is to me to see funds returned to Treasury rather than spent on protecting students,” Lhamon said.
Marcus, Lhamon’s Trump-era predecessor at OCR, said he’s watching to see how much of the department’s remaining appropriations for OCR go toward implementing the office’s recently announced transition to the Department of Justice.
“In some respects, it’s surprising that the underspending wasn’t greater given the closure of the OCR offices and the staff layoffs,” said Marcus. “We’re looking at an administration that has been entirely forthright about its intention to close the U.S. Department of Education and move its functions elsewhere, so it shouldn’t be shocking that it is spending less money on the department, especially as some of the work is doled out to other agencies.”
