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Welcome to the Jefferson-Washington-Lincoln Elementary School in Anytown, USA. Our hypothetical public school is like thousands of others throughout the US: full of teachers passionate about their jobs and kids from different backgrounds with diverse academic needs.
Take Isabel, for whom English is a second language. She relies on the bilingual instruction in her classroom. Or Jack, who needs a little extra help understanding math and reading, and the one-on-one instruction he gets is helping him keep up. Or Sarah, whose parents work late and trust the after-school program to provide her a safe place to stay until they're off the job. And all three of them are taught by Ms. Smith, who relies on a federal student-loan forgiveness program for teachers and nonprofit workers like herself.
Whether these theoretical people — and millions of real children and teachers across America — continue to benefit from those programs in the future is up in the air. During his campaign, President Donald Trump promised to eliminate the Education Department. While the president can't get rid of the agency without Congress, the Supreme Court in July gave him the green light to forge ahead with his plan to reshape the agency in the meantime, including firing half its staff. In October, the agency terminated another 466 employees during the government shutdown, with the union representing the department saying that offices, including special education and civil rights, were hit. All year, the Trump administration has been gutting the department; in February, the administration cut millions of dollars in research contracts, putting at risk crucial data collection that teachers and education leaders say helps them better understand how students are performing in core subjects.
Education policy experts, teachers, state officials, and former US education secretaries I spoke with for this story said that while there's plenty of room to improve the Education Department's efficiency, cutting or outright eliminating the agency would have dire effects on American education. It would mean fewer resources for low-income students and those with disabilities, a lack of data collection on student outcomes, and risks to federal grants that millions of students rely on to go to college.
"If students with disabilities and low-income students do not get the services and support they need and do not get access to educational opportunity, that undermines the health of our economy and our national security," says John King Jr., who was the education secretary for former President Barack Obama and is the chancellor of the State University of New York. He added that America's higher education system is "the envy of the world," and dismantling the department that funds this system puts the US at risk of losing its innovation edge. "It's bad for everybody."
Meanwhile, teachers, students, parents, and administrators are stuck waiting for the next shoe to drop. Eric Sosa, a high school history teacher in Austin, said that it's the nature of the teaching profession to have to "beg, borrow, and steal to get what you need." But with federal funding now on the line, he and his colleagues are constantly wondering which program, or job, will be next on the chopping block.
It's a dilemma that Heather Stambaugh, a high school social studies teacher in rural Ohio, is all too familiar with: she tells me her district relies on federal funds to support programs for low-income families, and she's worried that if Trump continues his plans to dismantle the Education Department, the checks will stop coming.
"It feels a bit like we're being thrown into a chaos loop," Stambaugh says.
Programs at risk
Since its founding in 1979, the Education Department has played a critical role in the lives of individual students. Trump has suggested outsourcing the department's responsibilities to other federal agencies, but some experts say that other agencies — already tasked with many of their own responsibilities — are not equipped to manage the Education Department's vast funding and student aid network. Splitting up the functions could put the programs that millions of students rely on at risk, they say.
One of them, Title I, has provided grants for low-income school districts since 1965. Title I funds after-school and summer programs, teacher professional development, academic intervention for struggling students, tutoring, and more. The Education Department allocated more than $18 billion in Title I funds in fiscal year 2024. Trump wants to maintain that budget for fiscal years 2025 and 2026, which falls below the funding amounts Democrats have pushed for and Biden's 2025 budget request, which called for $18.6 billion.
"They're borrowing against the future and against the other programs that they need."
Linda McMahon, Trump's education secretary, said that Title I funding would be immune from any department cuts, but there has already been budget chaos. In June, the department withheld nearly $7 billion in federal funding for schools due to claims that some programs did not align with the administration's political agenda, including migrant education that was supported by $375 million in Title I funds. The funds were released a month later, but it doesn't mean schools will be able to bounce right back, Halley Potter, the director of PK-12 education at The Century Foundation, a left-leaning think tank, says. Some school districts were already preparing to shut down programs and fire staff in anticipation of not receiving funding, she says, and even with the release of funds, staff can't be rehired on a dime. For example, public school systems in Alaska, California, and Washington reported laying off staff because of the funding holdups.
"I think a lot of places are going to be as nimble as they can be, but you can't open an after-school program at the beginning of August with a week's notice necessarily," Potter says. Sosa said that in July, his district already saw "a small reduction in staffing," including teachers who helped kids catch up on math and reading.
The Trump administration also said it would place guardrails to ensure public schools are using the funds in ways that don't violate executive orders, including orders designed to discourage "woke" or diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. This means that although the funding has been released, it could be withdrawn. Potter says this uncertainty could cause schools to make some tough decisions about their budget. For instance, a district could cover the pay for a teacher who focuses on teaching English as a second language "by shifting things around in the budget and stealing from some of the funding that's supposed to cover next year's summer programs," Potter tells me. "So maybe they're able to keep going for now, but they're borrowing against the future and against the other programs that they need." The department announced on September 15 that it was repurposing funding from programs that it determined "are not in the best interest of students and families" toward American history programs and HBCUs. In response, a trio of Democratic senators said the move puts funding meant to train teachers at risk.
Kira Severson, a first-grade teacher at a Title I school in Phoenix, said she and her students have been directly affected by funding uncertainty. The state's booming school voucher movement — which has been supported by Trump — has eaten into public school funds, and Severson said it's led to "significantly less" school supplies this year. She also doesn't know if her school will have the budget for after-school programs in the coming year.
"That was a form of my income over the summer," she said. She added that "for a lot of these kids, school is the only safe place for them and the only place where they can get a free meal."
"It's very concerning that the funding could go away and those kids could lose that," Severson said.
Data collection
Another one of our hypothetical students at Jefferson-Washington-Lincoln Elementary, Jack, is struggling with his math and reading. Along with his yearly state assessments, he's in a district that was selected to take a nationwide test — commonly known as the Nation's Report Card — that compares achievement across all states, helping policymakers and teachers determine necessary interventions at the local and federal levels, so students like Jack have the best tools to help them keep up.
Without the Education Department's research arm, tracking Jack's progress in math and reading will become a lot more difficult. That makes the department's $900 million cut to research contracts "at the top of my list of things to worry about," says Margaret Spellings, the education secretary for former President George W. Bush. Spellings tells me that without the grants, it's unclear how states and districts will get the data they need to best help their students succeed.
"It provides a lot of data and transparency and accountability that guide policymakers at the federal and state, and local levels about how we're doing," Spellings says. "It shows us who's doing well and who's not doing well."
In April, the National Assessment Governing Board voted to cut some assessments over the next decade with the intent to save money, including the state-level math and reading tests for 12th graders and performance tracking in urban school districts. Specifically, the cuts mean that fourth graders, who were supposed to take a science assessment in 2028 and 2032, won't be taking that first test, and the writing test for fourth, eighth, and 12th graders in 2032 was canceled altogether, stripping school districts of those results.
"It's very concerning that the funding could go away and those kids could lose that."
Potter says the potential loss of valuable information has already created "a lot of instability" across public schools that have historically used that data to assess progress over time. She adds that some magnet schools use the data to apply for and receive federal grants, and it's unclear whether that grant process will continue after the cuts.
Ongoing cuts can directly harm students like Jack. The Institute of Education Sciences, the nonpartisan research arm of the Education Department, uses classrooms across the country as data points in its research. For example, it might provide technology to classrooms and assess how students are learning using that technology to determine whether it helps them progress. Cuts to that research mean Jack may no longer be able to use the computer system that was helping him advance in math.
Severson said the uncertainty makes her feel "helpless."
"I'm in a spot where my hands are tied, and I just wish there was more I could do for my students," she says. "And I feel like I can't, with what's going on, I feel like I can't protect them."
McMahon wrote in congressional testimony that she "began this year by canceling and renegotiating a number of contracts, and we are now redirecting those resources toward a leaner operation that will provide useful data and tools for teachers, education experts, and school administrators." Despite the assurances, the department hasn't indicated plans to outsource data collection to another agency, and it's unclear whether it plans to bolster those efforts down the road.
During a conversation hosted by The Federalist Society on September 17, McMahon said that she is "winding down" the department's activities in an effort to give more power to the states.
"What we're trying to do is to show how we can move different parts of the Department of Education to show that they can be more efficiently operating in other agencies," McMahon said.
Madi Biedermann, deputy assistant secretary for communications at the department, said in a statement that the department looks "forward to identifying additional strategies to make education programs more efficient and effective for students, families, and taxpayers."
Student-loan repayment and forgiveness
K-12 funding is just one bucket that the department facilitates — it's also responsible for trillions of dollars flowing through the country's higher education system. Proposed changes or cuts to the vast student-loan repayment system put our hypothetical teacher, Ms. Smith, at risk of higher monthly payments, with loan forgiveness on the line.
Carolyn Fast, The Century Foundation's director of higher education policy, says staffing cuts at the agency and the fallout from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which was signed into law in July, will complicate the already complex student-loan system. The OBBB eliminated existing income-driven repayment plans and replaced them with two less generous options, meaning borrowers will face a harder time achieving debt relief. On top of that, staffing cuts at the Education Department mean borrowers seeking help with repayment or with their servicers are likelier to see their phone calls go unanswered.
"The dismantling of the department will have the most immediate and soonest effect on people's day-to-day lives," Fast tells me. "The way that'll show up is just a lot of people who are frustrated and unable to get help with problems that they're having with their loan repayment, or potentially with their financial aid to go to school."
Trump's spending law also places new borrowing caps for graduate and professional students, which will cut some borrowers off from pursuing a medical or law degree — or push them toward the riskier private student-loan market.
In a district that's already short on money, Stambaugh says that should federal funds stop flowing, her school won't be able to pick up the slack, and students will suffer.
"It's potentially very, very devastating and starts to feel very much like we're under attack for just trying to do something that makes the world a better place, makes kids' lives better," she says.
'Blow it up and rebuild'
The Education Department is not flawless. Beth Akers, a senior fellow at the conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute, says there is room for "some significant reform" of the agency's practices but that the Trump administration may be taking its push too far.
"I think it comes back to this philosophy that this administration seems to be holding, which is that yes, we see that there's these problems. We see there's significant need for reform. We've also seen previous administrations fail to make the sort of normal-looking reforms that people would expect. So we're going to blow it up and rebuild," Akers tells me. But this aggressive approach, abruptly firing staff and cutting funding, probably isn't the way she would go about it.
Kevin Huffman, a former commissioner for Tennessee's education department who worked for a Republican governor, says that while he's "sympathetic to the idea that we want less bureaucracy," that's not a reason to ax the federal agency. Eliminating the Education Department, he says, would run counter to Trump's goal of reducing waste and boosting efficiency. Trump's plan involves redirecting the department's responsibilities to other agencies, but having a centralized department to track and distribute funds to schools, colleges, and education researchers makes it less likely that the cash goes to waste or that efforts are duplicated.
"It's potentially very, very devastating and starts to feel very much like we're under attack."
Additionally, it's not clear how the Education Department's responsibilities would be split up. Trump has suggested that the federal student-loan portfolio would be transferred to the Small Business Administration, and special-needs programs would be handed over to the Department of Health and Human Services. Recent court documents disclosed that the department was already looking into transferring some financial aid responsibilities to the Treasury Department. Jonathan Zimmerman, a professor of education history at the University of Pennsylvania, says the uncertainty means there's the risk that students who rely on funding from the department "will get lost in the shuffle, and that the parts of the Education Department that are devoted to them won't actually be replaced elsewhere."
And from a state education chief's perspective, regardless of political affiliation, Huffman says spreading out the Education Department's responsibilities would just make things a lot more complicated.
"I could call the people I knew at the US Department of Education and get answers and figure out what we were supposed to be doing," Huffman says. "The idea of having to do that across three or four separate agencies with different processes sounds daunting, bureaucratic, and not particularly efficient."
Potter says the funding whiplash and the gutting of the Education Department mean a rocky road ahead for students and schools.
"This is going to be a really challenging school year, and I think districts, in terms of what they're trying to figure out in terms of staffing and budgeting and how they make up for lost funds, is pretty unprecedented," Potter says.
Stambaugh just wants clarity on what the Trump administration actually plans to do so she and other teachers can best prepare to help their students.
"We all might actually be kind of in that flight, fight, or freeze," she says. "I think we're all kind of frozen, waiting to see what's going to happen."
