It’s getting hard to track all the ways that the Trump administration is messing with school funding. Jan Resseger outlines a few of them. Reposted with permission.
What parents prize in their children’s public schools—small enough classes so that teachers can connect with each child, music programs, high school science labs and advanced math classes, enough school counselors, special education services, school libraries, programs for English language learners—all depend on public school finance. Is there enough money, and are public dollars distributed fairly to provide these services in every community? This year, however, Education Week‘s Mark Lieberman summarizes fiscal unpredictability and confusion across the nation’s 13,000 public school districts:
“The federal government supplies roughly $1 of every $10 that pays for America’s public K-12 schools… Even so, for many school district leaders, recent experiences with federal money, no matter how small a share of their overall budget, have been tumultuous… But the federal turbulence also has helped shine a brighter spotlight on the perennially precarious structures underlying school finance at all levels. The state and local shares of K-12 investments nationwide are roughly 45 percent each. At those levels, too, school funding is complicated and volatile, which means school district leaders will likely have to confront lots of unknowns for the 2026-27 school year, making planning difficult.”
As the new school year begins, there continue to be mixed messages about the stability of federal school funding.
One positive: education leaders have received reassurance that states and school districts will receive federal funding this autumn in a predictable way. On August 17, Education Week‘s Lieberman shared positive news for nervous school district leaders: “Despite ongoing efforts to transfer program responsibilities to other agencies, the U.S. Department of Education will continue to send billions of formula dollars for the current school year through its own online payments system this fall… . including $10.8 billion through the Title I formula grant for schools serving low-income students and $1.7 billion for teacher professional development.”
Because Education Secretary Linda McMahon has been moving the work of the Education Department to be implemented through interagency agreements with several other federal departments, there has been worry and confusion about whether the federal government will be able to distribute promised federal funding on time for the huge formula programs like Title I and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). Title I and other major elementary and secondary education programs are now being run out of the Department of Labor, and the implementation of the IDEA was moved to the Department of Health and Human Services in June. There have already been complaints about the Department of Labor’s management of some of the education programs. Lieberman quotes Rachel Gittleman, president of the union that represents the Department of Education’s staff, quoting staff who, “have been telling leadership… that the Labor Department’s grant system is not capable of administering federal education funding of all types, not just Title dollars.”
Lieberman adds: “The department’s efforts to transition funding delivery to grants platforms managed by the Department of Labor have been rocky at times. Numerous state agencies reported experiencing weeks or even months of delays accessing formula funds for career-and-technical education last fall, the first time the department sent that money through the Department of Labor’s grant system… The Education Department’s decision to keep existing systems in place for the rest of the current fiscal year’s funding suggests the transition may be more complex than officials have asserted at times.”
A new potential problem: the Department of Education will now propose its own set of rules to be able to terminate federal education program grants midstream. Education Week‘s Matthew Stone reported last week: “The Trump administration is proposing to give itself greater authority to cut off education grants and reduce the size of multiyear awards after its efforts to end in-progress grants have repeatedly run into legal trouble. The U.S. Department of Education issued a new set of proposed regulations for grantmaking… that would codify tactics it’s used over the past year and a half to terminate more than $2 billion in multiyear competitive grants and enforce presidential orders on grant recipients. The new rules would also cut off some avenues for grantees to appeal the loss of their funding and end requirements that the department publish grant competition notices in the Federal Register, where agencies routinely post new rule proposals and public notices. They also include some of the language the administration has used to prohibit what it considers to be “diversity, equity, and inclusion” initiatives… in grantmaking regulations. The rules are only a proposal at this point. the department is accepting public comments on them through September 23 and says it plans to finalize the regulations late this year… The proposed regulations would also require that states distributing formula funds to school districts, such as Title I for disadvantaged students, follow presidential executive orders in addition to federal laws and regulations.”
The new rules are in addition to the Office of Management and Budget’s new universal grants guidance, which was published in the Federal Register and is scheduled for implementation on October 1, 2026. The new universal grants guidance will, if finalized, give the Trump administration the latitude to terminate or underfund any grants across the entire federal government that have already approved by Congress. (See here and here.)
Under this week’s new proposed rules, reports Lieberman, the Department of Education, “would have no obligation to provide continued funding for multiyear grants; be able to reduce subsequent years’ funding if grantees have unspent funds; and have the ability to end grants ‘for convenience’—essentially, when the agency decides it’s in its best interest to cut off an award.” Lieberman adds: “The proposed regulations address many of the mechanisms funding recipients have successfully used to challenge grant terminations in court.”
Despite Linda McMahon’s claim that she is shutting down the U.S. Department of Education in order to return education to the states where she says it belongs, clearly the Trump administration is trying not only to circumvent Congressional appropriation of federal dollars but also to impose its will and ideology upon the states and the nation’s public school districts.
Why introduce this set of new departmental regulations on top of the new universal grants guidance already proposed by the Office of Management and Budget—rules that will give political appointees new power to intervene in ongoing awards and end them early across the entire federal government? Lieberman quotes the answer to that question from Julia Martin at the Bruman Group, a law firm that works with state education departments on federal grants: “The administration tends to try to do things multiple ways and see what sticks, knowing that many of these policies and changes in rules are going to go to court.”
Linda McMahon’s Department of Education has prioritized protecting the Trump administration’s right to impose its ideology on the nation’s public schools and has abandoned its responsibility to protect each student’s rights and ensure that all school districts can serve every student’s needs.