Late on Friday, May 30th, the White House followed up on its release of the so-called FY26 “skinny budget” with a more fully fleshed-out version. This new document retains the overall goal of slashing the Department of Education’s budget by 15.3% by proposing to eliminate $12 billion from existing programs. A large chunk of these cuts would come from K-12 programs, including the elimination of the $890 million Title III English Language Acquisition program and the consolidation of 18 programs, totaling approximately $6.5 billion into a $2 billion block grant. The only increase in K-12 would be to the Charter Schools program – a plus up of $60 million, which is in keeping with the Administration’s goal of expanding school choice. Several key higher education programs are also slated for full elimination, including the $1.2 billion TRIO programs, the $910 million Supplemental Equal Opportunity Grants, and the $388 million GEAR-UP program, and maximum Pell Grant awards would see a 22% reduction.
The full budget also contains significant changes for the largest K-12 education programs – Title I and IDEA. While it would level fund Title I-A, the main state grant program, it would eliminate or consolidate into the new block grant the other Title I programs. For IDEA, the budget would level fund all special education programs but collapse all of them into a single formula grant. Other major programs, such as Perkins Career and Technical Education and Impact Aid would be level funded and unchanged structurally.
The K-12 block grant proposal, the centerpiece of this budget, merits a little deeper exploration. It is sweeping in scope, including large programs like Title II-A and Title IV-A as well as many smaller, niche programs like Native Hawaiian Education and Alaska Native Education. The budget book, under the headline “Cutting the Federal Red Tape,” explains the rationale for the proposed consolidation: “For decades, federal support for education has been doled out as part of numerous small, poorly designed programs that create silos and are ill-suited to state-specific contexts. As a result, states are forced to hire increasingly large numbers of staff not to serve students, but to apply for competitive grants and manage the bureaucratic red tape imposed by the federal government. At the same time, appropriations for these siloed, unnecessarily complex, and largely unproven programs have grown, increasing the federal footprint without commensurate improvements in students’ academic achievement.”
While the stated premise of the block grant is to provide states and localities flexibility to use the funds in “a manner consistent with the needs of their communities,” the block grant would require a 7.5% minimum reservation of funds for reading instruction, one of Secretary McMahon’s three Departmental priorities.
Here is the full list of programs that would be consolidated and their FY24 appropriation levels:
- Comprehensive literacy development grants (Title I) – $194 million
- Innovative approaches to literacy (Title I) – $30 million
- State agency: neglected and delinquent children (Title I) – $49 million
- Supporting effective instruction state grants (Title II-A) – $2.19 billion
- 21st century community learning centers – $1.33 billion
- State assessments – $380 million
- Education for homeless children and youths – $129 million
- Native Hawaiian education – $46 million
- Alaska Native education – $45 million
- Rural education – $220 million
- Student support and academic enrichment – $1.38 million
- School safety national activities – $216 million
- Promise Neighborhoods – $91 million
- American history and civics academies – $23 million
- Magnet school assistance – $139 million
- Arts in education – $37 million
- Javits gifted and talented – $17 million
- Statewide family engagement centers – $20 million
While the Department of Education’s budget book leads with a quote from President Trump from his Executive Order to close the Department, the budget contains no request to move key parts of the Department to other federal agencies. There is no mention of moving IDEA to HHS, shipping the student loan portfolio to the Department of Treasury or to the Small Business Administration, or moving the Office of Civil Rights to the Department of Justice. According to the budget, the Institute of Educational Sciences (IES), which the Administration effectively eliminated through staff firings and contract and grant terminations, is not completely dead yet. While providing it no funds, the budget book states: “The Administration is currently in the midst of reimagining a more efficient, effective, and useful IES to improve support for evidence-based accountability, data-driven decision making, and education research for use in the classroom.”
With this full budget’s release, the ball is now in Congress’ court to fashion final FY26 appropriations bills that take into account the President’s priorities. While challenging in any year, this proposed budget is perhaps more nettlesome than many others that any administration has produced. For one thing, it proposes massive structural changes to a number of programs – a K-12 block grant and the collapsing of all Title I and IDEA programs into formula grants – that would require statutory changes. For another, it defunds bipartisanly supported programs, such as rural education, TRIO and GEAR-UP. Finally, with concerns still remaining over the final FY25 allocations for important K-12 programs, including Title II-A, Congress is still struggling to understand the baseline figures from which it will work.
Below is a breakdown of key K-12 program funding levels:
* Assumes FY24 allocation level.
