The Trump administration’s abruptly announced decision to withhold $6.8 billion in federal education funds approved four months ago by Congress touched off a frenzy of chaos, confusion, and cost-cutting for schools across the country on Tuesday, with immediate and far-reaching implications for K-12 students, staff, and administrators.
Some districts and education service providers are already moving to shut down programs and rejigger budgets. Many more are looking to state leaders to help them make sense of the rapidly evolving situation—even as policymakers and advocates struggle for clarity and contemplate legal action against the federal government.
The U.S. Department of Education told states in a three-sentence memo on Monday afternoon (June 30) that when federal funding for the next school year arrived July 1, as it typically does and is supposed to under federal law, funding for five key programs would not be there. Those formula programs—worth $6.8 billion in total—are under review, the memo said without specifying when the review would wrap up, what the review is aiming to determine, or whether the funds will go out once it’s finished.
The Office of Management and Budget didn’t respond to detailed questions from Education Week on Monday evening or Tuesday. An Education Department spokesperson on Monday referred all questions to OMB.
As a result, states now have to warn districts that, at least for the time being, they will be getting far fewer federal dollars than they were expecting for the school year that starts in a matter of weeks—including, in some cases, for services they’re required by law to provide.
Vermont and the District of Columbia will each lose 20 percent of their federal funding allocations for K-12 schools if these cuts persist, according to an analysis by the Learning Policy Institute. Every state stands to lose at least 10 percent of their federal K-12 funding from these cuts, the analysis shows.
The U.S. Constitution grants Congress, not the president, the power of the purse. Under a 1974 federal law, the president must spend funding that Congress has already appropriated. Russell Vought, the Trump administration’s top budget official, has said he doesn’t believe that law, the Impoundment Control Act, is constitutional.
States and schools are already feeling the impact
Effects on students began playing out almost immediately.
Most states on Tuesday told providers of adult education services to suspend services in light of the Trump administration withholding $715 billion for adult education initiatives, Jeff Fantine, executive director of the National Coalition for Literacy, told Education Week.
Several school districts are already halting professional development programs that had been getting underway for the summer, Susanne Peña, president of the Florida Association of Bilingual Education, said Tuesday during a webinar on the funding disruption.
Some after-school programs that operate summer sessions may also have to shut down, advocates said during the webinar. More than 10,000 before- and after-school programs nationwide serving 1.4 million children depend largely on now-disrupted Title IV-B funding ($1.4 billion in total) to continue operating, according to the Afterschool Alliance. (Title IV-B is also known as the Nita M. Lowey 21st Century Community Learning Centers program.)
Districts with high concentrations of low-income students and English learners are likely to be hit hardest by the sweeping cuts, which largely touch programs allocated to states and districts via formulas designed to account for high concentrations of poverty and need.
“These are not luxuries in our schools. These are lifelines, especially in our most under-resourced districts,” said Ana DeGenna, superintendent of the 13,000-student Oxnard school district in California, during a Tuesday press call hosted by the National Association for Bilingual Education and other advocates for English learners.
During a separate press conference Tuesday afternoon, California State Superintendent Tony Thurmond called the sudden withholding of funds “egregious,” “mean-spirited,” and “illegal.”
“Once again, the president and his administration continue to pick on and bully those who are the least among us: students, those who rely on health care, those who rely on the federal government to have a chance at a great education and at a great life,” said Thurmond, flanked by representatives from state organizations representing teachers, administrators, and school boards. “And we won’t stand for it. It will not happen on our watch.”
A coalition of education advocacy groups currently suing in federal court to halt the Trump administration’s efforts to dismantle the Department of Education announced Tuesday that they’re including the $6.8 billion in cuts announced this week as further evidence for their assertion that the administration’s education actions are illegal and will ask a federal judge to halt them.
Members of Congress were largely quiet on the matter on Tuesday, as the Senate separately approved a massive package of cuts to taxes and social safety net programs and sent it to the House for another round of consideration.
Spokespeople for the Republican chairs of the U.S. Senate and House committees on appropriations and education didn’t respond on Tuesday to requests for comment on the school funding issues.
Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., ranking member on her chamber’s appropriations committee, issued a statement Tuesday calling for the Trump administration to “stop sabotaging our students’ futures and get these resources out the door.”
Rep. Bobby Scott, D-Va., ranking member on his chamber’s education committee, said in a statement Tuesday night that the administration’s funding halt constitutes illegal impoundment.
“Ultimately, the halting of these critical funds harms the students, educators, and schools that strive to provide quality public education with the meager funds and challenges they face,” Scott’s statement said.
The programs the Trump administration isn’t funding, and where cuts could hit hardest
Funding programs the Trump administration moved to hold back this week—and has already proposed to eliminate in future school years—fuel services for students in every state.
Three states—California, Florida, and Texas—account for nearly a third of the entire $6.8 billion from the seven affected programs. Every state gets at least $25 million from those programs.
Title I-C for migrant education annually supplies $375 million for schools to support students from families whose jobs in industries like fisheries and food processing necessitate that they live in different states during different seasons.
Title II-A funds, also known as Supporting Effective State Instruction grants, pay for districts to offer professional development that helps educators and administrators learn new curriculum approaches, instructional practices, and technology tools. All told, the program funds $2.2 billion in services each year.
The Pittsgrove district in New Jersey gets about $40,000 in Title II funds for professional development already on the runway for the upcoming school year.
While losing that small amount of funding isn’t catastrophic for a district with an operating budget of $30 million, it does mean the district now isn’t getting the money it had budgeted for that purpose.
“Now we’ll have to go back to the drawing board,” said Darren Harris, the district’s business administrator and board secretary.
Title III-A funding—$890 million a year nationwide—covers a wide range of services for the nation’s English learners, who number roughly 5.3 million in total and represent the nation’s fastest-growing population of public school students. Under civil rights law, school districts have to ensure that students who are still learning English have equal access to education, as their peers do.
The $1.3-billion Title IV-A funding stream is a block grant of sorts for academic enrichment and student support that replaced a group of smaller programs Congress consolidated a decade ago. Because it funds a wide variety of priorities, rather than supplying resources for a particular group of students or type of school, “it’s harder for any one group to raise a ruckus” on its behalf, said Sarah Abernathy, executive director of the Committee on Education Funding, a nonprofit advocacy coalition.
Cuts to Title II-A and Title IV-A could cause acute challenges for rural school districts. The thousands of school districts nationwide that receive federal funds from the Rural Education Achievement Program, or REAP, also get extra flexibility to spend funds from those two broader programs as they see fit.
“Policymakers designed REAP with this unique flexibility and integration as a way to help fund rural education, rather than isolating federal support for rural schools in a single budget line item,” said Devon Brenner, president of the National Rural Education Association and a professor of education at Mississippi State University.
The funding cuts unfolding now “impact dollars available to schools under REAP legislation and districts’ ability to determine what students most need and to meet those needs,” Brenner said.
Schools are experiencing a new level of federal funding turbulence
Unpredictability with funding is hardly a new phenomenon for school districts. With weeks to go before the school year begins, some states—including California, Florida, Missouri, New Jersey, and Ohio—just finalized their own budgets in the last week. Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin are still working on theirs.
Even so, advocates nationwide said Tuesday, the Trump administration’s increasing willingness to halt federal funding that Congress already allocated poses new challenges for holding the federal government accountable to its promises.
States have successfully secured temporary relief from court injunctions against previous rounds of Trump administration cuts and policy changes.
Another round of legal battles appears almost inevitable. Top administration officials have told reporters and lawmakers in recent weeks that they intend to aggressively wield executive power over spending decisions, even if it means challenging existing federal law and constitutional precedent.
David Schapira, chief of staff at California’s education agency, said the state is considering “all possible legal remedies” to get the affected education money back.
2025-07-01 22:25:17
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