Trump's actual agenda is to slash and shrink the federal government (excluding military spending and ICE) by any and all available means in support of reducing the tax burden on interests that already enjoy generational wealth, increasing corporate profit, and diverting billions to a misguided and immoral attack on the immigrant population. This administration continues its destructive campaign of tearing down valuable federal services not by pruning, not by audit and analysis and quality control, but by taking a chain saw and cutting down entire programs, setting aside decades of progress and discarding the career experience of tens of thousands of dedicated public servants.
GUTTING THE CORE MISSION OF THE DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION
MAGA supporters somehow justify these priorities with a regular intake of enabling propaganda...hearing the Destructor in Chief claiming to take down a RADICAL WOKE AGENDA and seeing a steady stream of anecdotal stories on FOX NEWS and other ideological media outlets highlighting outlier programs and distracting from the true impact of these drastic cuts. In service of the Project 25 agenda, this ENABLER CONGRESS has completely abdicated its constitutional mandate to make wise and fully informed decisions on spending priorities and the budget process. We can only hope that Congress will exercise its proper discretion to protect and restore some of the most valuable federal programs and that the judicial branch by application of law will be fully utilized in service of limiting the damage as much as possible until this destructive rampage is over.
Trump is discarding the career experience and expertise of thousands of dedicated public servants and hundreds of programs previously developed and approved under decades of federal oversight under appropriate cooperation of the legislative and executive branches.
The salient point in this discussion is that the DOE embodies decades of work by thousands of dedicated experts working toward continual improvement of educational opportunities across the spectrum of educational needs in the United States from coast to coast. The K-12 funding has an average individual student impact of $2,400 per student per year.
**K-12 spending supports:
-Education for the Disadvantaged
-School Improvement Programs
-Supporting Effective Instruction
-Innovation and Improvement
-Special Education
-Blind and Deaf Education
-Indian Education
-Safe Schools and Citizenship Education
-English Language Acquisition
What is the impact? We should inform ourselves on the implications of these funding cuts.
Federal Education Spending FY2024
If you are familiar with the federal budget, you will recognize that the Congressional appropriation is typically a higher amount than the President's budget, shown below in FY24 at $274 Billion. This amount reflects a greater allocation to college assistance funding programs, totaling approximately $160 billion.
Historically, states have allowed local funding to dramatically favor wealthier school districts and poor districts have suffered. Part of the federal funding agenda works to assist underfunded schools so that there is more equity of educational opportunity.
In addition, the Department of Education works to insure quality of opportunity for special education students and differently abled students, and promotes post-secondary opportunities in technical education and vocational rehabilitation programs. Federal dollars also support Native educational efforts and HBCU programs that work to extend opportunities previously denied by a historical legacy of inequitable educational funding.
The second chart is based on data compiled by USA Facts and is reflected in the bar chart below.
Sources:
www.ed.gov/media/document/fiscal-year-2026-budget-summary-110043.pdf
https://usafacts.org/government-spending/
https://www.ed.gov/about/ed-overview/federal-role-in-education
https://educationdata.org/pell-grant-statistics
https://educationdata.org/public-education-spending-statistics
See also my blog post "Desire, Coveting, Greed and Protectionism" March 26, 2020.
