Federal lawmakers from both parties are moving toward approving a new spending plan that maintains the U.S. Department of Education and rejects the Trump administration’s proposal to slash billions of dollars in education investments.
Even so, Congress appears to be leaving the door open for the Trump administration to continue some of the unilateral funding and agency staffing maneuvers it implemented in the last year.
Budget writers from both chambers of Congress on Jan. 20—the one-year anniversary of President Donald Trump’s second inauguration—released what they’re calling a “bicameral, bipartisan” bill covering federal spending for education and several other agencies for fiscal 2026, which is already underway.
If lawmakers and the president approve the bill as written, funding next school year for key federal programs serving low-income students and students with disabilities would remain virtually the same as in the current and previous school years. And numerous programs the Trump administration has moved to other federal agencies or proposed to eliminate would continue to exist.
The legislation wouldn’t entirely halt the Trump administration’s education policy actions, though. The bill and its accompanying report express a litany of concerns that in-progress efforts to shift program responsibilities to other agencies could hurt students and waste taxpayer dollars. But they don’t order the department to cease those efforts.
“There’s language aimed at having the administration send Congress proposals to make changes, but there’s nothing in it that explicitly stops the administration from doing what it has been doing,” said Sarah Abernathy, executive director of the Committee for Education Funding, a nonprofit advocacy group.
The bill, set for consideration by the full House as soon as this week, puts Congress on a path to approve education funding levels for next school year by the end of the month, averting a partial government shutdown in the process.
Time is tight, though—the Senate will return from recess with just four days to approve this “minibus” spending bill and secure the president’s signature before the Jan. 30 funding deadline.
Funding levels across the board would stay virtually the same
The Trump administration last May proposed to shrink federal K-12 investments by roughly $7 billion and eliminate or consolidate dozens of decades-old education grant programs. District leaders and their advocates have spent the ensuing months lobbying fiercely against those changes.
The new federal spending proposal—originally due last Sept. 30 until Congress retroactively extended the deadline to end the 43-day federal shutdown—comes as many school district leaders are already deep into budget planning for next school year.
Some were already hedging their bets and expecting to receive nothing from the federal government for key programs like Title II for professional development, Title III for English-learner services, and Title IV-A for academic enrichment and student support.
District leaders in Tucson, Ariz., for instance, have been urging principals in recent weeks to start scenario-planning for cutting 10% to 30% of their overall school building budgets for next year in anticipation of sharp federal cuts, said Ricky Hernandez, the district’s chief financial officer.
Instead, funding levels for those programs and most others in the new bill are largely identical to those enacted for the current school year and the previous one.
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The bill does include modest increases of $60 million for charter schools grants ($500 million total); $10 million for the Rural Education Achievement Program that sends aid to small, rural districts ($225 million total); $5 million for Impact Aid school districts with federally owned land ($1.6 billion total); and roughly $100 million for the early-childhood-education program Head Start ($12.4 billion).
The only significant education priority for which Congress is now proposing reduced year-over-year funding is research. Funding for the Institute of Education Sciences, the Education Department’s research and data collection arm, would drop from $793 million to $765 million; and $24 million less would be available than in the current fiscal year for Education Innovation and Research grants ($235 million total) for studies of academic initiatives in schools and colleges.
Level funding for formula programs technically amounts to a cut, because inflation drives down the value of each dollar allocated.
But the de facto cut is far less severe than a lower dollar amount would be, Hernandez said. Getting more clarity on the federal outlook, he said, would also speed up his state’s process for generating its own funding estimates for schools.
Still, he’s not canceling budget-cut planning just yet.
“At this point, given just the context of how this government’s been working in the last 12 months, I would expect that we wouldn’t make any changes until we see a signature on this bill by the president,” he said.
Education Department’s recent staffing changes appear poised to proceed
In November, the Education Department announced it had signed six “interagency agreements” that move the responsibility for administering most K-12 education grant programs, and some for higher education, to other agencies.
The new appropriations bill’s report includes language requiring the administration to brief lawmakers at least twice a month on the status of implementing those agreements. It also says the bill’s authors are concerned the interagency agreements will create new inefficiencies, weaken federal support for vulnerable children, and place programs in the hands of agencies that “do not have experience, expertise, or capacity to carry out these programs and activities.”
It stops short, however, of invalidating already-signed agreements with the departments of Interior, Labor, and State, or prohibiting agreements the department has said it’s developing to move special education, data collection, and civil rights enforcement elsewhere in the federal government. It also doesn’t include language from an earlier budget bill draft that requires that Title I and IDEA remain in the Department of Education.
Democratic lawmakers’ insistence on pushback to these agency-shifting efforts was a key sticking point last week in negotiations over the appropriations bill, Politico reported last week.
The budget proposal also doesn’t appear to explicitly block the Trump administration from further reducing Education Department staff, which the administration shrank by about half last year. It does, however, supply nearly $400 million for staff salaries, only a modest decrease from current levels. And it specifies the department must maintain enough staff to carry out mandatory functions “in a timely manner,” and it may not pursue any staffing reductions that affect its budget-services office.
The bill includes more subtle pushback to the Trump administration’s unprecedented attempts to freeze congressionally approved funding and direct more money to priorities of its choosing.
It limits the amount the Education Department can transfer from one budget line to another without congressional approval, potentially preempting moves like the department abruptly reallocating $350 million for minority-serving higher education institutions to historically Black colleges and universities, or awarding $153 million in new civics grants when Congress only allocated $23 million in annual funds.
The Trump administration would also have less wiggle room to argue for the legality of its decision last July to withhold—and ultimately release—$6.8 billion in formula funds for education. The bill specifies the department must supply states with their funding allocations for education formula grants “on the date which such funds become available for obligation”—which, for those programs, is July 1.
Congress stays the course on programs the Trump administration cut
Lawmakers from both parties had already signaled their intent for less dramatic cuts than Trump proposed. But until today’s bill was released, the Senate and House appeared far apart on funding levels for key programs.
Meanwhile, the Education Department under Secretary Linda McMahon has bucked precedent and discontinued hundreds of ongoing grants across a wide range of programs the administration has signaled it wants to eliminate.
Among the projects that abruptly lost funding were nearly all the awards for three teacher-preparation grant programs: Supporting Effective Educator Development (SEED), Teacher Quality Partnership (TQP), and Teacher and School Leader (TSL) incentives.
But the new funding bill maintains level year-over-year funding for each of those programs ($220 million in total), effectively reversing the Trump administration’s effort to preempt Congress and undo the programs on its own.
Outside of the Education Department, the bill also notably includes $291 million for the Institute of Library and Museum Sciences—just a slight decrease from current levels. The Trump administration moved last March to eliminate the small independent agency and cancel all its existing awards—including many that support K-12 students and schools—though it ultimately reinstated all the grants and rehired staff after an ensuing legal battle culminated in a court injunction.
The bill, while encouraging for advocates of increased investment in education programs, still has hurdles to overcome before it becomes law. Recent signals of massive federal cuts have taken a toll on school district leaders as they try to make plans even a few months ahead, Hernandez said.
“To not be able to tell a family whether they’re going to have a summer enrichment program for their kid or not, that’s a problem,” Hernandez said. “It truly affects people’s lives.”
2026-01-20 21:36:58
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