House Republicans on Thursday unveiled a federal budget proposal that once again proposes billions of dollars in education funding cuts, and aims to impose new restrictions for schools that support transgender students.
The fiscal 2027 appropriations bill, released Thursday morning in advance of a subcommittee markup on Friday, marks the opening salvo for what will likely be months of negotiations on Capitol Hill. Congress has until Sept. 30 to approve either a full spending bill or temporarily extend current fiscal 2026 funding levels.
House appropriators have revived several of their key proposals from last year’s budget bill, even though Congress as a whole rejected virtually all of them. For the 2027-28 school year, lawmakers are proposing to slash $1.6 billion, or 9%, of annual Title I formula dollars for low-income students; eliminate billions of formula dollars for teacher professional development and English-learner services; and nix competitive grants for community schools initiatives and teacher training, among others.
Annual formula funding would increase slightly for special education, Impact Aid for school districts with non-taxable federal property, education for Native American students, and Head Start for early childhood education. Competitive grants for charter schools would get a second consecutive boost of $60 million in annual funding, just a few months after Congress approved an equivalent increase for the program. And formula grants for before- and after-school programming ($1.3 billion), rural education ($230 million), and services for homeless students ($129 million) would remain intact.
All federal funds would be in jeopardy, though, due to language in the bill that would dock funding for K-12 schools and colleges that allow transgender girls to participate in women’s sports, or “withhold or conceal” information about students’ gender identity from their parents.
Implementing these policies wouldn’t be straightforward, though. Several states, including California, have enacted legal protections for transgender athletes that would likely conflict with this federal requirement and prompt messy court battles, said Julia Martin, director of policy and government affairs for the Bruman Group, an education law firm that represents states and schools.
Specifically at issue, Martin said, would be the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in the 2020 case of Bostock v. Clayton County, which held that the Civil Rights Act protects employees against workplace discrimination based on gender identity.
“If you’re a state who has that civil rights law … your lawyers are going to say, ‘Well, the Supreme Court requires us’” to do what federal lawmakers are now aiming to prohibit, Martin said.
Most of the changes under consideration wouldn’t touch schools until fall 2027. However, the new proposal does aim, as did last year’s bill, to cancel $1.6 billion of the $2.2 billion Congress already approved this year for Title II—the formula fund that pays for teacher professional development and other measures to boost teacher quality.
Schools are currently set to begin receiving those educator professional development funds in the coming months.
A House subcommittee will meet June 5 to mark up the appropriations bill, followed by a full appropriations committee markup on Tuesday, June 9. The Senate hasn’t yet begun releasing its appropriations bills for fiscal 2027; the Senate’s version of the education budget bill last year differed markedly from the House’s.
In the meantime, here are some more highlights from the House bill:
House Republicans align with Trump—but not on everything
Portions of the latest House bill mirror President Donald Trump’s proposed fiscal 2027 budget—including the elimination of Titles II-A and III-A, which are worth a combined $3 billion a year.
“They’re leading the discussion by saying, ‘We want to reduce or eliminate some really key formula programs in a targeted way’ that I think was not on the table until a few years ago,” Martin said.
The bill also appears to adopt Trump’s proposal to zero out annual funding for adult education programs. The Trump administration has characterized those programs, currently worth $729 million a year, as “ineffective,” and argued that they “inappropriately incentivized illegal immigration.”
In other areas, though, appropriators are charting their own course. Trump, for instance, proposed level funding for Title I ($18.4 billion), while House lawmakers want to reduce annual investment in the program to $16.8 billion.
The president’s budget proposed to slash annual funding for the department’s office for civil rights ($140 million), eliminate Title IV-B formula grants for before- and after-school programs ($1.3 billion), and consolidated discretionary funding for special education research, training, and technology development ($258 million) into the existing formula grants schools used to pay for direct services to students with disabilities.
The House bill includes level, year-over-year funding for all of those priorities.
Trump pitched $261 million in annual funding for the Institute of Education Sciences, the department’s research arm. House appropriators opted for a less dramatic cut, allocating $493 million for the program, compared with the current funding level of $790 million.
Education Department downsizing gets little mention
The press release that accompanied the new bill’s release touts a 10% year-over-year funding cut for the Department of Education—more than double the 4% cut proposed by Trump earlier this year, but a far cry from the Trump administration’s stated goal of closing the agency altogether.
The Department of Education under Secretary Linda McMahon in the last year has begun transferring day-to-day management of more than 100 Education Department programs to at least five other federal agencies. Agency officials have teased similar moves for special education, civil rights enforcement, and education research, though those changes haven’t been finalized.
The House appropriations bill doesn’t mention any of the ongoing or proposed program shifts, or the interagency agreements that made them possible. It doesn’t prohibit the Trump administration from continuing to pursue this strategy—but it also doesn’t formalize efforts to outsource Education Department functions.
The fiscal 2026 spending bill both chambers of Congress approved in February included some language expressing concerns about the interagency agreements and restricting the wholesale transfer of programs from one agency to another.
2026-06-04 20:57:02
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