The Trump administration and lawmakers in Congress are gearing up for fierce debates over education funding in the coming months—and with only two months to go before schools typically get the bulk of their annual federal allocation, it’s still not clear which priorities will win out.
The executive branch has three opportunities in the near future to detail its education funding priorities in writing: a plan for spending federal money that’s already been allocated; a budget proposal for the upcoming fiscal year; and a package of proposed federal spending cuts for Congress to approve or reject.
President Donald Trump’s administration hasn’t shared the timeline for publishing any of those documents—even though Congress’ deadlines for the current fiscal year spending plan and next fiscal year’s budget proposal have already passed. A spokesperson for the Education Department didn’t reply to requests for comment on its plans.
Drafts of some portions of the White House budget proposal—such as a Health and Human Services Department plan to eliminate funding for the Head Start early childhood program—have leaked in recent weeks, but none has touched on core funding for K-12 education.
News reports this week suggest a package of requests for funding “rescissions”—an effort to formalize some of the sweeping cuts implemented in recent months by the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency—may not emerge until after Congress makes headway on the federal budget.
Meanwhile, federal funding set to roll out to states and K-12 schools on July 1 could be in jeopardy if the Trump administration doesn’t clarify its plans soon. Alternatively, it could arrive as scheduled on that date, but with no warning or prior indication.
“We are still very much in the agony of the wait,” said Barbara Duffield, executive director of Schoolhouse Connection, a nonprofit that advocates for homeless children in K-12 schools and is eyeing funding programs that could be in jeopardy this summer and beyond.
The White House missed a deadline to detail its spending plan
All of the funds appropriated by Congress in March are supposed to start flowing to states and districts on July 1. Lawmakers approved a spending package through a “continuing resolution,” rather than agreeing on a full budget.
Congress gave the Education Department 45 days from the passage of the continuing resolution to report its plans for distributing funding allocated by lawmakers. That deadline passed April 29, but the federal website that typically displays those plans hasn’t been updated for more than a year.
Spokespeople for the heads of the House and Senate’s respective appropriations committees—Rep. Tom Cole, R-Okla., and Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine—didn’t answer requests for comment in time for publication.
Without that report, there’s no way to know whether the Education Department will move to cut programs that aren’t specifically listed by name in the continuing resolution bill—or whether it will even allocate funding for programs that are explicitly mentioned, said Sarah Abernathy, executive director of the Committee for Education Funding.
The line items that don’t have specific dollar amounts attached include Title II grants for instructional improvement and professional development; McKinney-Vento funding to support students experiencing homelessness; startup funds for charter schools; and grants that support migrant education and school desegregation.
Advocates are already sounding the alarm over the potential for those programs to slip through the cracks.
“I’m braced for the fact that they’re going to say they’re not going to fund [Title II, for instance], or put the money somewhere else, or propose to rescind it entirely,” Abernathy said. “But what they can’t do legally is just hold onto the funding.”
Pulling back Title II grants, for instance, could lead to districts cutting programs and laying off staff, a coalition of 31 organizations representing educators, administrators, and advocates wrote in an April 22 letter to Education Secretary Linda McMahon.
“In many states, school districts are legally required to provide professional development or induction programs—which means other services or supports for students would be eliminated if Title II-A funds are not allocated as intended by Congress,” the letter says.
Trump will likely propose dramatic cuts, but Congress’ response is uncertain
Presidential budget proposals typically serve as opportunities for the president to lay out a policy agenda. Congress routinely differs from the president’s priorities, particularly for executive branch proposals that lawmakers think might anger their constituents.
Most administrations in recent years have unveiled their “skinny” budget proposal—a prelude to the full-fledged document—past the early February deadline Congress mandates by law. But Trump’s current plan is later than most—the Biden administration released its first “skinny” budget proposal on April 9, 2021, and the first Trump administration released its comparable proposal in mid-March of 2017.
Cole from the House appropriations committee said in early April that the administration had promised him a skinny budget by the end of the month. Until that document materializes, past comments from administration officials are the main source of context for Trump’s priorities.
McMahon said during her Senate confirmation hearing in February that the administration is not proposing cuts to Title I, which supplies billions of dollars a year for schools to support low-income students, or IDEA, which helps cover the steep costs of special education services to which students with disabilities are entitled.
Trump has recently said he wants to “return education to the states” and minimize the federal responsibility for funding and oversight. That rhetoric dovetails with proposals laid out in Project 2025 to eliminate existing funding streams for K-12 schools or consolidate them into block grants that states can spend as they please.
Trump hasn’t said whether he agrees with those specific proposals. However, a leaked budget draft for the Department of Health and Human Services shows the Trump administration is considering proposing to eliminate the $12 billion Head Start program for early childhood education—a move straight out of the Project 2025 playbook.
Abernathy is steeling herself for what she calls the worst-case scenario for a White House budget proposal: funding for Title I, IDEA, and Pell grants for low-income college students under agencies other than the Department of Education, and zeroing out all other funding that has previously flowed through the Department of Education.
Congress remains a wild card in the second Trump era
Regardless of how extreme or significant Trump’s proposal is, there’s no guarantee the president will get everything he asks for.
During Trump’s first administration, he proposed consolidating education funds into block grants, creating new federal investments in private school choice, reducing allocations for Title I and IDEA, and axing programs that fuel after-school and summer-school programming. Congress didn’t follow through on any of those pitches.
In February, Congress agreed on a budget resolution that calls for cutting $330 billion over the next 10 years from education and workforce programs. Earlier this week, the House education and workforce committee published a draft budget bill that proposes to achieve those cuts by scaling back repayment options for student loans. If both houses agree on that outline, K-12 education funding wouldn’t have to be cut in order to achieve the mandated savings.
To realize Trump’s goal of abolishing the Education Department and other priorities his administration has pursued in its first few months, budget proposals could begin to outline where funding streams would shift in the absence of the federal education agency, like moving oversight of special education services to Health and Human Services—which Trump has suggested.
“They know they cannot eliminate those programs. They would still have to provide some funding for those programs because it’s congressionally approved,” said Kenneth Wong, a professor of education policy at Brown University. “But they could think about new ways of delivering [them].”
One such way would be block grants, which a number of Republican-led states have already begun asking McMahon to consider through the department’s waiver authority. That approach could also allow the federal government to give states more flexibility in a way that achieves Trump administration goals—like spending federal education funds on private school vouchers, for example.
Trump has already directed federal agencies to look at how they can use taxpayer dollars to advance school choice models. With the U.S. Supreme Court currently weighing the constitutionality of religious charter schools, the Trump administration could jump on an affirmative decision and look at how to send government dollars to those schools, Wong said.
The Trump administration’s staunch focus on eliminating DEI programs from K-12 schools and universities could also lead to new assurances tied to federal funds in a budget proposal. Though three federal judges have halted the enforcement of an Education Department effort to condition federal funds on states and schools eliminating DEI programs the administration finds objectionable, Wong thinks the administration will “double down on the assurance required of states and districts.”
“If they receive this block grant of Title I and IDEA, then they will have to certify that they are not using it for those purposes,” Wong said.
The administration also appears poised, Wong said, to ramp up investment in career and technical education programs and workforce development—issues where Trump may be able to tap into bipartisan common ground.
But more ambitious efforts to reconfigure school funding, like the Project 2025 proposal to set aside core federal education funds for parents to spend on private education options of their choosing, would require major new laws—a daunting logistical task that would also require support from Democratic lawmakers to meet the Senate’s 60-vote minimum for passing non-budget legislation.
“I have not heard clamoring from lots of members of Congress that they want to make wholesale changes in the way the federal government provides this funding,” Abernathy said.
Still, advocates for public school funding are wary of the different political landscape this time around. During Trump’s second term, Republican lawmakers have largely stayed quiet as Trump and billionaire adviser Elon Musk have slashed government spending and decimated longstanding programs.
“Members of Congress want to do what their constituents want, and they want to get reelected,” Abernathy said. “As long as they think that going along with the president’s priorities will achieve those aims, then they’ll do it.”
DOGE cuts could become permanent—if Congress agrees
The administration has thus far expressed its education funding priorities primarily through a series of abrupt cuts and terminations to programs mandated by Congress, including funding for teacher-preparation programs, data collection and research efforts, pandemic relief for ongoing contract expenses, modernizing school infrastructure like buildings and buses, and, most recently, supporting students’ mental health.
Many of those actions have prompted lawsuits, and in some cases, courts have ordered the administration to reverse the cuts until the legal case wraps up (before the U.S. Supreme Court paused the temporary funding restoration).
The executive branch is typically required to spend money strictly according to Congress’ appropriations. But the Impoundment Control Act of 1974, passed to rein in President Richard Nixon’s efforts to withhold federal funds at his discretion, offers a path to an exemption from those requirements, known as “rescission.”
Once a presidential administration announces to Congress a proposal for rescissions, lawmakers have 45 days to approve the proposal—with simple majorities in the House and Senate—or ignore it. If they ignore it, after 45 days the administration would have to spend all the money it proposed to withhold.
Every 20th-century president from Nixon through Bill Clinton proposed rescissions to Congress. George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden did not. Trump proposed some rescissions during his first presidency, but few involved education, and Congress approved none of them.
Details of education items that might be part of the $9.3 billion rescissions request Trump’s team is reportedly assembling haven’t yet emerged. But advocates assume that it will include cuts to many of the priorities Trump has already axed. Democrats have spoken out forcefully against those cuts, but Republicans have largely stayed on the sidelines.
“It seems unlikely to me that the appropriations committee would agree to not appropriate money,” Abernathy said. “They will hear a lot from their constituents about the value and importance of this funding, if the president does propose to eliminate it all.”