President Trump signed an executive order last week that would begin the process of dismantling the Department of Education “once and for all.”
“We’re going to eliminate it, and everybody knows it’s right,” Trump said during a signing ceremony on March 20. “We’re not doing well with the world of education in this country, and we haven’t for a long time.”
Trump’s order argues that the department’s functions “can, and should, be returned to the States.”
Unlike some other Cabinet-level agencies that have broad, nationwide authority over the areas they oversee, the Education Department has a comparatively minor role in how education works in the United States. For the most part, schools across the country already have their policies set at the state and local level, which is also where the majority of funding comes from. The federal government provides just under 14% of the $857 billion spent nationally on K-12 public education, according to figures from the Education Data Initiative.
Despite Trump’s order, there is a lot of uncertainty over what happens next. He does not have the authority to unilaterally eliminate the agency. Only an act of Congress can do that. But Trump has already taken steps to shift some of the Education Department’s responsibilities to other agencies. All of this upheaval has raised serious questions about whether states will continue to receive money for schools from the federal government.
Education Secretary Linda McMahon tried to counter those concerns during an interview with CNN on Sunday, saying “there’s not going to be any defunding” of programs that directly affect students.
But unless Congress passes a bill that enshrines McMahon’s promise into law, the future of federal education funding will remain in limbo — and even that might not protect those programs from the widespread cuts that Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has been making across the government.
Where federal dollars go
Even though most education funding comes from state and local governments, schools would still feel a huge impact if they stopped receiving money from the federal government.
Some states would be affected more than others. Federal education funds are distributed by several agencies. By far the largest share comes from the Education Department, specifically through programs designed to support poor children and kids with disabilities. So while big states like California receive the most total money, it’s actually some of the smallest, least wealthy states that get the most significant amount on a per-student basis.
States also fund their schools at different levels, which means they’d have a bigger hole to fill if federal money suddenly dried up.
Mississippi, for example, gets $3,000 per student from the federal government to supplement about $10,000 from state and local sources. That means federal funds make up nearly a quarter of the state’s education budget, the most of any state. A total of 22 states rely on federal money for at least 15% of their education funding. On the other hand, federal funds make up less than 10% of the education budget in five states, all of them in the Northeast.
The Education Department has two major programs that send money to states. The first is Title I, which provided $18 billion in 2023 for schools with a high population of low-income students. The other is special education funding through the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), which accounted for nearly $14 billion the same year.
If Title I and IDEA funding went away, some states would miss out on billions of dollars designed to go to the students who need support the most.
McMahon told CNN that both of these programs are safe, regardless of what happens to the structure of the Education Department in the coming months. But Project 2025, the conservative playbook that has informed many of the actions taken by the Trump administration since he returned to office, calls for ending Title I within the next decade and turning IDEA into a “no-strings” block grant that imposes no limitations on how the money is spent.
