The future of the US Department of Education: 8 tips for journalists covering the agency under Trump’s second term
by Denise-Marie Ordway, The Journalist's Resource
January 23, 2025
The U.S. Department of Education, one of the federal government’s smallest Cabinet-level agencies, operates programs across every level of education. With an annual budget of about $242 billion, it helps fund approximately 98,000 public schools and 32,000 private schools serving kindergarten through grade 12 as well as thousands of colleges, universities, vocational schools and other higher education institutions.
During his reelection campaign, President Donald Trump pledged to close the U.S. Department of Education if he returned to the White House. In the months leading to his inauguration on Monday, some Republican state leaders and members of Congress expressed support for his proposal, although it is still unclear how he would implement it.
In Oklahoma, for example, Ryan Walters, the state superintendent of public instruction, has formed a committee to oversee the changes in federal education policy he expects the Trump administration to make.
“The education system has needed these reforms for decades,” Walters told FOX23 News Tulsa in November. “We’re going to be the first state ready to go to enact them.”
Even if the federal Education Department remains intact, which academic researchers and other experts assert is most likely, there probably will be changes. Trump has said he plans to use federal funding as leverage to limit what he considers “left-wing indoctrination” in K-12 schools and higher education institutions.
He has made it clear that he opposes so called “diversity programs” as well as school vaccine requirements, teaching critical race theory in K-12 classrooms and allowing transgender students to participate in sports that align with their gender identity.
“The big question isn’t whether the Department of Education is going to go away -- I think the big question is what it’s going to do,” says education historian Jonathan Zimmerman, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania who wrote the books Whose America? Culture Wars in the Public Schools and The Amateur Hour: A History of College Teaching in America.
We created this tip sheet to help journalists tackle this very complicated issue. Below, we spotlight eight tips to help you better understand the Education Department’s role, put Trump’s plan into historical context, and examine possible consequences for students, families, educators and their communities.
1. Make clear what the U.S. Department of Education does and that most of its funding is spent on programs for adults.
Many people don’t realize the U.S. Department of Education spends most of its budget on education and training for adults, namely college students, students enrolled in career and technical programs, and people with disabilities who need help finding jobs. In fiscal year 2024, the Education Department spent about $161 billion -- 60% of its $268 billion budget -- to fund its office of Federal Student Aid, the country’s largest provider of student financial aid.
Another $2 billion went to the Office of Career, Technical, and Adult Education, which administers a variety of education and training programs for adults, including adults with disabilities and incarcerated individuals. About $4 billion went to the Office of Postsecondary Education, which, among other things, provides grants for colleges controlled by tribal governments and for other minority serving institutions. The Rutgers Center for Minority Serving Institutions maintains a list of MSIs, which are public and private colleges and universities that serve a large percentage of Black, Hispanic, Asian or Indigenous students.
K-12 public schools receive relatively little money from the U.S. Department of Education. In fact, less than 8% of public school revenue came from federal agencies, including the Education Department, before COVID-19 reached the U.S. in 2020. Since then, the federal government has sent schools a combined $189.5 billion in emergency aid to help them deal with the wide-ranging impacts of the pandemic.
This temporary infusion of money bumped the federal government's share of public school funding to 13.7% during the 2021-22 academic year, the most recent year for which data is available.
The U.S. Department of Education’s largest K-12 programs are grant programs, designed to help public schools afford the higher cost of educating certain groups of students. For example, special education grants help schools pay for education and services for students with disabilities until they turn 21 years old. The Title I program, which gets its name from Title I of the federal law known as the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, provides financial assistance to schools where at least 40% students come from lower-income families.
A key function of the U.S. Department of Education is investigating civil rights complaints at K-12 schools, colleges, universities, trade schools and the other institutions it funds. Meanwhile, the agency’s research arm, the Institute of Education Sciences, collects a variety of education data and publishes regular reports on topics such as K-12 student demographics, high school graduation rates, college costs and college enrollment trends.
2. Note that some federal education programs are funded by other government agencies.
Much of the public probably does not realize that several major education programs are not run by the U.S. Department of Education. For example:
- Head Start, which provides education-related services to preschool children from low-income families, is funded by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
- The National School Lunch Program and the School Breakfast Program are funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
- While the Education Department provides some funding for K-12 schools controlled by tribal governments, most comes from the Bureau of Indian Education, part of the U.S. Department of the Interior. Some K-12 schools located on tribal land are operated and funded by the Bureau of Indian Education, which also funds and operates two tribal higher education institutions: the Haskell Indian Nations University in Kansas and the Southwestern Indian Polytechnic Institute in New Mexico.
- The GI Bill, which helps military veterans and their family members pay for college and other types of education, is funded by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.
- The primary federal agencies that provide research funding to colleges and universities are the National Science Foundation, Department of Defense, Department of Health and Human Services, Department of Energy, National Aeronautics and Space Administration and Department of Agriculture.
3. Emphasize that closing the U.S. Department of Education has been a goal of conservative politicians for decades.
Several high-ranking Republicans have sought to eliminate the Education Department since it opened in 1980 under Democratic President Jimmy Carter. Ronald Reagan, who won the presidential election that year, announced his plan to shutter it during his first State of the Union address.
“In campaigning for the presidency, Mr. Reagan called for the total elimination of the U.S. Department of Education, severe curtailment of bilingual education, and massive cutbacks in the federal role in education,” education historian Gary K. Clabaugh writes in “The Educational Legacy of Ronald Reagan,” published in the academic journal Educational Horizons in 2004.
Bob Dole, the Republican presidential nominee in 1996, also advocated for closure, as did Trump and several other Republicans competing for the U.S. presidency in 2024. Former Vice President Mike Pence, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum and biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy have all said they would eliminate the Education Department.
Shortly after Trump’s reelection in November, U.S. Sen. Mike Rounds, a Republican from South Dakota, introduced the “Returning Education to Our States Act.” The bill seeks to abolish the Department of Education and transfer its programs and responsibilities to other federal agencies. For example, the Department of the Treasury would take over federal financial aid programs and the Department of Health and Human Services would administer the special education program.
U.S. Rep. Thomas Massie, a Republican from Kentucky, introduced bills in 2017, 2019, 2021 and 2023 to either terminate or reduce the size of the Education Department.
4. Explain what it would take to close the U.S. Department of Education.
Closing the Education Department would require federal legislation and, likely, a supermajority vote in the U.S. Senate. Although senators can pass bills with a simple majority vote, it takes a supermajority vote to halt discussion on a bill so a vote can take place.
That means that unless the Senate eliminates its filibuster rule, which often has been used to block controversial legislation, three-fifths of senators would have to vote in favor of closing the debate on such a bill to allow a vote. Political observers have said they doubt 60 of the 100 senators would vote in favor of that. Only 53 are Republicans.
Less than two years ago, the U.S. House of Representatives considered a legislative amendment that endorsed moving K-12 education programs out of the Department of Education. It failed, with 60 Republicans and 205 Democrats voting against it.
The Education Department generally enjoys bipartisan support, Pedro Noguera, dean of the Rossier School of Education at the University of Southern California, explained recently on a podcast he co-hosts and in an essay he co-wrote for The Hill.
“There are a lot of red states, red communities across the country that benefit from the policies and the programs,” Noguera said on the “Sparking Equity” podcast.
Education scholar Frederick Hess supports closing the department but says it will not happen. Not only do Republicans lack the votes to make the change, they have shown little interest in cutting programs that serve lower-income kids and kids with disabilities, says Hess, an executive editor of the Education Next journal, which, like The Journalist's Resource, is housed at Harvard Kennedy School.
Hess is also director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative-leaning think tank, and the author of several books on education policy, including "Getting Education Right: A Conservative Vision for Improving Early Childhood, K–12, and College" and "The Great School Rethink."
"What really matters for people who want to shrink the federal role or change it is: What are we changing about spending and rules and regulations?" he says, adding that journalists need to examine how the current rules for spending federal education dollars harm K-12 students. For one, he notes, they create a lot of paperwork for teachers at a time when public schools are struggling to hire and retain teachers, particularly special education teachers.
Says Hess: "There's a real opportunity here to look at the role of federal aid and the use of federal funds -- how are they used and are they actually creating budgetary problems rather than solving them?"
5. Provide your audiences with a realistic sense of how K-12 and higher education could be affected by an Education Department closure.
Educators, school administrators, policymakers and academic researchers have all speculated on how an Education Department closure could impact federal education funding and programs. Ten journalists from the Hechinger Report, a nonprofit news outlet that focuses on education issues, teamed up recently to examine that question. The resulting article is a must-read for journalists covering this topic.
Among its main takeaways: Abolishing the agency would not undo federal laws that established federal funding for K-12 programs that serve some of the nation’s most marginalized students, including students with disabilities and those from lower-income families. “But doling out that money and overseeing it could get messy,” the outlet reports.
Marguerite Roza, a research professor who studies education finances at Georgetown University, has said funding for K-12 schools probably would not change much.
“We've been telling school districts, ‘Don't expect massive changes in your federal dollars,’” Roza, who directs Georgetown’s Edunomics Lab, said in a Dec. 12 interview on a podcast produced by the right-leaning Defense of Freedom Institute for Policy Studies.
Meanwhile, higher education scholars like Marybeth Gasman, the Samuel DeWitt Proctor Endowed Chair in Education at Rutgers University, are concerned about college funding. She’s especially worried about funding aimed at helping marginalized youth get to and through college. Trump and some other conservative lawmakers have expressed disdain for so-called “diversity programs.”
A drop in funding could be devastating for minority serving institutions, which serve close to half of all U.S. college students who are racial or ethnic minorities, says Gasman, who is also executive director of both the Rutgers Center for Minority Serving Institutions and the Samuel DeWitt Proctor Institute for Leadership, Equity & Justice.
For example, 25% of Historically Black Colleges and Universities’ revenue came from the federal Education Department in fiscal year 2022, according to a report released last month by the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association. At the same time, most students enrolled at HBCUs qualify for Pell grants, a type of financial aid the Education Department offers lower-income students that they do not pay back.
Most minority serving institutions, commonly referred to as MSIs, are designated as Hispanic serving institutions because a large percentage of their students are Hispanic. They get 18% of their revenue directly from the Education Department grants. Many of their students also qualify for Pell grants.
“There needs to be more exploration into the ramifications of Trump’s presidency on MSIs,” Gasman says. “If they change loan forgiveness [policies], if they change Pell [grants], if they change aid to MSIs, it will have profound impacts.”
6. Evaluate how well the U.S. Department of Education runs its programs.
When President Jimmy Carter signed the Department of Education Organization Act, which created the Education Department, he said he wanted to ensure Americans got a better return on their investment in education. He said the new department would, among other things, save tax dollars and make federal education programs more accountable and responsive.
Has the department accomplished those goals? That’s a question journalists should try to answer for their audiences. Here are resources to get you started:
- Investigative reports from the U.S. Government Accountability Office, often referred to as Congress’ watchdog. The office examines the use of public funds and makes recommendations for improvement.
- Performance Results Reports and Congressional Reports compiled by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Inspector General. The purpose of that office is to “promote the efficiency, effectiveness, and integrity of the Department’s programs and operations through independent and objective audits, investigations, inspections, and other activities.”
- The National Center for Education Statistics provides an assortment of data on various K-12 student groups, including students who participate in Title I, special education and English language acquisition programs. It also provides data on students who participate in federal higher education programs, including the graduation rates of lower-income college students who receive Pell grants, one type of federal financial aid.
- The Congressional Research Service, which assists Congress in researching issues and creating laws and policies, regularly releases reports focusing on Education Department programs.
- Researchers have studied the effectiveness of the Title I program specifically, although no academic articles have been published in recent years. An analysis from George Mason University’s School of Policy, Government and International Affairs, updated in 2015, looks at the results of national assessments of the Title I program conducted from 1966 to 2013. It finds “little evidence that Title I has contributed significantly to closing achievement gaps nationwide.” A 2015 analysis by the Brookings Institution, a centrist think tank, asserts that the Title I program “doesn’t work,” in part because Title 1 “is spread so thin that its budget of $14 billion a year turns out not to be much money.”
- Some school districts have hired the American Institutes for Research to review their special education programs. A handful of recent reviews are posted on the organization’s website, and others could be obtained directly from school districts through public records requests.
- Several academic journal articles examine the burden of paperwork associated with federal K-12 education programs. In a paper published in 2023, for example, researchers write that “excessive paperwork” is a main reason special education teachers leave the field.
- A June 2024 analysis from EdSource, a nonprofit news outlet in California, finds that students who are learning to speak English do worse on California’s state exam the longer they are enrolled in the federal English language acquisition program.
- Many news outlets have reported on the Education Department’s botched rollout of the new FAFSA -- the Free Application for Federal Student Aid -- that students must submit to determine their eligibility for college grants and loans.
7. Find out whether state Education Departments are prepared to take on additional duties if the U.S. Department of Education closes.
Trump and many other influential Republicans want states to oversee their own education programs. But it is unclear which responsibilities would be transferred from the federal Education Department and how changes would be rolled out. What also is unclear is whether individual states are ready and able to take on these new duties.
It’s well known that state and local governments struggled with staffing during the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly in law enforcement, public health and education. Hiring has picked up recently, but some human resource managers have reported an uptick in resignations and retirements, according to a 2024 analysis conducted on behalf of the National Association of State Personnel Executives and the Public Sector HR Association. Some of the hiring officials surveyed for that report also said they expect a major wave of retirements during the next few years.
Veteran education journalist Daarel Burnette recommends journalists visit state Education Departments and look into how well they are handling their current workloads.
“You can just walk into those buildings and see rows and rows of empty desks -- they look like newsrooms,” says Burnette, a senior editor at The Chronicle of Higher Education and a former assistant managing editor and reporter for Education Week.
He notes that state education officials have been widely criticized for their response to the pandemic and the decline of K-12 students’ test scores in the wake of it. Individual legislators and the American Civil Liberties Union have requested investigations into the alleged misuse of schools’ COVID-19 relief funds.
The federal Education Department’s Office of the Inspector General has released several reports investigating individual state’s use of those funds. In December 2024, a subcommittee of the U.S. House of Representatives released a 557-page report examining the nation’s response to the pandemic, indicating that “[t]he unprecedented scale and lack of transparency in COVID-19 pandemic relief programs exposed vulnerabilities for waste, fraud, and abuse.”
8. Ask education experts about angles and issues you have not yet considered.
Even if the Education Department is not dismantled, close federal scrutiny could easily open the door for other conversations about funding cuts and changes to the agency’s programs and procedures. Journalists should ask education researchers and other experts for help identifying issues the public needs to know about.
Laura Enriquez, director of the University of California Collaborative to Promote Immigrant and Student Equity, urges journalists to look beyond their regular sources and ask about students the news media tend to overlook. For example, while journalists frequently report on how public policies affect unauthorized immigrants, their coverage does not often include children born in the U.S. to parents who are unauthorized immigrants, she says.
These individuals can face challenges accessing programs and services that government agencies provide to U.S. citizens. Last year, these students had trouble submitting their FAFSA forms to obtain financial aid for college if their parents did not have social security numbers, says Enriquez, who is also an associate professor of Chicano/Latino studies and director of the Center for Liberation, Anti-racism, and Belonging at the University of California, Irvine.
“There are so many ways to tinker with aid award formulas and make the process more complicated than it already is for first-generation college students, racial minorities and citizens with undocumented parents,” she says.
She urges journalists to routinely ask themselves who is missing from their coverage. She adds: “The question you need to ask of yourself as a reporter is ‘Who else could be impacted through social ties?’ That’s a guiding question I wish more reporters asked of themselves.”
This article first appeared on The Journalist's Resource and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
