Education Department Budget Request Includes Massive Cuts
From Forbes.com
The 2026 budget request for the U.S. Department of Education has been released, and it follows through on President Donald Trump’s promise of deep cuts for a department marked for elimination.
The budget summary begins by quoting a portion of Trump’s speech from his signing of the executive order calling for the elimination of the department. “But we’re going to be returning education very simply back to the states where it belongs,” he promised. The proposed budget seems to indicate that not only will states get more responsibility for education, but additional costs as well.
Per Trump’s promise, the proposal leaves Title I (support for schools with low income students) and IDEA (funding for students with special needs) intact. But billions of dollars for other programs have been slashed.
The budget proposes a new item, the K-12 Simplified Funding Program, which “would consolidate eighteen currently funded formula and competitive grant programs for elementary and secondary education into a single State formula grant program.” The stated goal is to eliminate “siloes and bureaucratic red tape," however it appears to eliminate more than that.
The K-12 SFP funding request is for $2 billion. The 2024 levels of combined funding for the 18 programs folded into K-12 SFP is over $6.5 billion. The consolidation comes with a $4.5 billion funding cut.