The Trump administration has capped off an agonizing and tumultuous period of funding instability for K-12 schools with a budget proposing to eliminate dozens of longstanding funding streams and slash billions of dollars in education investments.
The administration is aiming to eliminate roughly $7 billion in funding for K-12 schools in its budget for fiscal 2026, which starts Oct. 1. Much of it is currently geared toward supporting special student populations including English learners, migrants, students experiencing homelessness, Native students, and students in rural schools.
Longstanding federal programs that support training for the educator workforce; preparing students for postsecondary education as early as middle school; reinforcing key instructional areas like literacy, civics, and the arts; and promoting student safety and well-being would disappear. A new K-12 grant program would offer a smaller pool of funds to states and let them decide whether and how to invest in those areas.
And for the first time, all federal funding for special education would flow to states through a single funding stream, rather than a core set of dollars for schools supplemented by smaller separate allocations for infants and toddlers, family resources, technology tools, and state personnel development.
These proposals represent a starting point for Congress as lawmakers spend the coming months working on the federal budget for the 2026 fiscal year.
Experts view Trump鈥檚 budget as part of an effort to roll back a half-century of effort by the federal government to help make educational opportunities more consistent and equitable from state to state and district to district.
To cite one student population as an example, 鈥淒o we want foster students to have a dramatically different experience in school depending on what state they live in?鈥� said Jess Gartner, a school finance expert who currently serves as group vice president of Allovue and enterprise resource planning at PowerSchool. 鈥淥r is that something we want to say, as a country, this is an important component of opportunity and access to education, we want to ensure opportunity and access to education by having very explicit funding attached to this initiative that is protected?鈥�
(Gartner serves on the board of trustees for Editorial Projects in Education, the nonprofit publisher of Education Week.)
Resolving that tension is likely to be slow and arduous. Congress still hasn鈥檛 finalized a budget for the current fiscal year, even though it鈥檚 more than half over.
Here鈥檚 a look at what we know so far about the Trump administration鈥檚 approach to K-12 funding.
Flat funding amounts to a de facto cut given inflation
The administration is proposing to maintain current funding levels for key programs like Title I-A for low-income students ($18.4 billion), the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, Part B for special education ($14.2 billion), and Perkins grants for K-12 and postsecondary career and technical education ($1.4 billion).
But those funding levels are from fiscal year 2024, which ran from October 2023 to September 2024. Inflation has raised prices since then.
鈥淭eacher salaries are going up; benefits costs are going up; supplies, materials, and technology costs are going up,鈥� Gartner said. 鈥淚f your funding is not, you have to make a cut somewhere to make up that difference.鈥�
Special education changes would require revising federal law
The Trump administration wants to zero out six existing grant programs under the banner of IDEA, and instead transfer that funding to IDEA Part B, the program鈥檚 core funding stream. States would then get flexibility to spend a portion of those IDEA Part B dollars on the priorities previously fueled by the closed supplemental grants, known as IDEA Part D.
If those changes take effect, every state would have to enter into its own contract with providers of technical assistance and parent advocacy鈥攁 process that could take months and cause lengthy gaps in services available to families, said Larry Wexler, who from 2010 to 2024 oversaw IDEA Part D grants as a director in the U.S. Department of Education鈥檚 office of special education programs.
Absent federal funding requiring them to do so, some states would likely also forgo investment in crucial priorities like services for preschoolers with disabilities, Wexler said.
鈥淭he formula grant puts money into the budgets of school districts to support services for kids with disabilities,鈥� Wexler said. 鈥淭he Part D program, which is a small percentage of the money that comes to the states, shows states and districts how to provide services effectively and efficiently. And that will be lost.鈥�
Unlike with proposals to change funding levels for existing programs, this section of the budget would require Congress to reauthorize federal special education law for the first time in two decades to permit the structural program changes. Disability experts, however, don鈥檛 expect that to happen any time soon.
The proposal also doesn鈥檛 offer any indication that the Trump administration is following through on efforts to shift oversight of special education programs from the Education Department to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Trump announced that move during an unrelated Oval Office appearance in March, but it hasn鈥檛 come up since, and a court order currently in effect blocks such a move.
White House math is a little fuzzy
Numbers aren鈥檛 always what they seem.
The White House has framed its education proposal as cutting $12 billion, or 15 percent, from a $78.7 billion annual budget.
But the released last week shares slightly different numbers. The current funding levels are listed as $79.1 billion in discretionary spending and $90.7 billion overall. The proposed discretionary spending is listed as $66.7 billion ($12.4 billion less than current levels) and the proposed overall spending is listed as $77.2 billion ($13.5 billion less than current levels).
An Education Department spokesperson didn鈥檛 respond to a request for clarification.
Meanwhile, the proposal touts an 鈥渋ncreased level鈥� for core IDEA funding鈥�$677 million above the current level.
But in reality, overall investment in IDEA would remain flat鈥攖he $677 million increase over the 2024 funding level accounts for the funds transferred over from the six IDEA grant programs Trump wants to eliminate.
Some programs survived the cut鈥攊ncluding Head Start
Headlines from the proposed budget have naturally emphasized the cuts Trump wants Congress to enact. But the president鈥檚 goal of aggressively shrinking the federal footprint on education leaves some programs untouched or bolstered. Grants for charter schools would increase $60 million to $500 million annually, Impact Aid for school districts that include federally owned land would remain flat at $1.63 billion, and Indian Education grants to support schools on Native American reservations would also be flat-funded at $194.7 million.
Outside the Education Department, two major education-related programs also would maintain roughly level funding: the Head Start early childhood education program ($12 billion) in the Health and Human Services Department, and the National School Lunch program from the U.S. Department of Agriculture ($18 billion).
A proposed private school choice investment would dwarf nearly all existing K-12 funding
Separate from the federal budget process, Congress is currently advancing a massive package of tax changes, including a proposal for a new tax-credit scholarship program that fuels up to $10 billion a year in federal subsidies for private K-12 education.
Annual spending on that program could approach the amount the Trump administration is proposing to cut from elsewhere in the education budget. It would be five times greater than the annual investment in the consolidated K-12 grant program the administration proposes for states to spend on public schools. And it would be at least 20 times greater than the federal government鈥檚 largest current school choice investment, in charter schools.
The tax-credit scholarship program is currently part of the 鈥淏ig, Beautiful Bill鈥� currently under discussion in Congress. The bill from its House-approved incarnation once the GOP-led Senate makes changes.
