The U.S. Department of Education took roughly $1 billion Congress appropriated for specific education programs during the first months of President Donald Trump’s second term and either spent it differently than how lawmakers intended or hasn’t spent it at all, the agency acknowledged in recently published budget documents.
That figure includes more than $700 million the agency says it shifted from one funding stream to another, and another $300 million expiring in five months for education research the administration hasn’t spent.
Congress in March 2025 belatedly approved spending for fiscal year 2025, which ran from Sept. 30, 2024, to Oct. 1, 2025. The Education Department, under President Donald Trump, subsequently subtracted appropriated funding from more than a dozen programs and instead added those dollars to other priorities, according to an Education Week analysis of congressional justification documents the White House published this month as part of its fiscal year 2027 budget proposal.
For instance, Congress allocated $90 million for Supporting Effective Educator Developments (SEED) grants, which help support pre-service preparation and professional development for educators. The agency terminated most of that program’s in-progress grants, then “reprogrammed” all of the appropriated funds into the American History and Civics grant program, one document shows.
Experts on federal education spending said they couldn’t recall any other time in recent decades when the executive branch adjusted congressionally approved program funding levels at all—let alone to this extent.
“This is the first time I’ve ever seen an administration say, ‘We have tons of authority to make our own decisions about funding levels for programs,’” said Sarah Abernathy, who’s served for 10 years as executive director of the Committee for Education Funding, an advocacy coalition, and for 18 years before that as a U.S. House budget committee staffer.
In a statement to Education Week, the Education Department framed its funding moves as “a decisive victory for America’s students and taxpayers.”
“For the first time in years, federal funds aren’t going to auto-renewed grantees or divisive ideological pet projects,” wrote Savannah Newhouse, the agency’s press secretary. “Instead, the Trump Administration is scrutinizing every dollar of taxpayer investment to fuel programs that lift achievement, reward excellence, and put students—not bureaucracies—first.”
The funding shifts affected competitive grant programs
Administration officials may have felt emboldened to adjust spending levels after lawmakers in March 2025 passed an abbreviated “continuing resolution” for fiscal 2025, rather than a full budget that spells out funding levels for every program.
All of the documented funding shifts affected discretionary, competitive grant programs, rather than the K-12 formula grants that make up the bulk of Education Department spending each year.
The lack of explicit written instructions for which programs should receive portions of Education Department funds in broad categories like “Education for the Disadvantaged” and “Innovation and Improvement” gave the Trump administration legal leeway to overhaul funding levels for programs it doesn’t support, said Julia Martin, director of policy and government affairs for the Bruman Group, an education law firm that represents state education agencies and schools.
Even so, documents show the White House acknowledges Congress’ prescribed funding levels even for programs that aren’t listed by name in the 2025 budget. When Congress approves continuing resolutions, lawmakers typically apply the most recent previously approved funding levels for each program to the period covered by the latest resolution.
Some signs have emerged that the Trump administration may not meddle as much with congressional appropriations this year. Lawmakers included language in the fiscal 2026 budget law they approved in February that much more explicitly restricts movement of money from one program to another. The department has already begun soliciting new grant applications for programs it moved to disrupt or shutter last year.
Still, recent comments from Trump administration officials haven’t foreclosed the possibility of more disruption to education funding—particularly as the Education Department is simultaneously proposing billions of dollars in spending cuts, and beginning to shift day-to-day responsibilities for administering most of its current programs to other agencies.
Even the specter of more disruption could make school districts cautious about planning big investments.
“Federal funding has become unpredictable and feels somewhat tenuous,” Martin said. “We’re hearing from a lot of providers, whether it’s ed tech or contractors, that states and districts are feeling very skittish about signing contracts right now.”
Canceling in-progress grants freed up money the Ed. Dept. moved to other programs
The Trump administration already acknowledged some funding changes in press releases over the last year. But some details weren’t spelled out until recently.
For instance, the Trump administration announced last May that it would increase annual funding for the Charter Schools grant program from $440 million appropriated by Congress to $500 million. But the Education Department didn’t specify at the time where those additional funds were coming from.
Now it has.
To bolster the Charter Schools program, the agency depleted the entire $31 million allocation for the Ready to Learn grant program, which supports the development of educational TV programming for young children.
The remaining $29 million boost for charter schools came from portions of fiscal 2025 allocations for four other programs: Magnet Schools ($14 million), Javits Gifted and Talented ($9 million), Statewide Family Engagement Centers ($3 million), and Assistance in Arts Education ($3 million).
The Trump administration last year slashed some ongoing grants for each of those four programs as well as dozens of others, arguing in many cases that individual grantees were engaged in diversity-related initiatives that contradicted the president’s priorities.
But for most of those changes, the department offered no public announcement, instead notifying individual grant recipients with little warning that their awards had been discontinued.
To boost the civics program, the Trump administration reprogrammed $90 million from SEED as well as another $50 million from the Teacher and School Leader Incentive (TSL) grant program, which supports differentiated pay experiments. On Sept. 29, the department announced a “record investment” in civics initiatives, with 85 projects receiving new awards.
Even before Congress approved fiscal 2025 appropriations, the department had already shrunk expenses for those programs by canceling the vast majority of in-progress, grant-funded projects for those teacher-preparation programs.
The administration’s decision to move funding for teacher-training programs to other priorities is likely to make some universities wary of applying for the new grant opportunities the department published recently, said Jaci King, a research, policy and advocacy consultant for the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education.
“That should be deeply concerning for anybody that has any connection to federal policy, whether it’s in the Department of Education or anywhere else,” King said. “We rely on the fact that when Congress makes decisions, the administration will faithfully execute those decisions.”
She has been heartened to see the department soliciting applications for this year’s congressionally appropriated funding for SEED and TSL. Her organization is encouraging members to apply, even if they lost funding last year.
Newly published documents offer a first look at how the Ed. Dept. shuffled funding
The Education Department typically publishes its “spending plan” mere weeks after Congress passes a new fiscal year budget, confirming allocations lawmakers laid out in their budget bills. Congress approved fiscal 2025 spending in March of last year, but the Education Department’s spending plan never materialized.
That means the recently published numbers offer the first glimpse at how the executive branch decided to spend funds Congress appropriated more than a year ago.
For four Education Department programs, the Trump administration spent more than what Congress had prescribed: charter schools ($60 million added), civics instruction ($140 million added), historically Black colleges and universities ($438 million added), and tribal colleges ($56 million added).
To come up with those added expenditures, the Trump administration effectively zeroed out another four programs entirely, rerouting a total of $463 million for teacher preparation, public television, university foreign-language studies programs, and Hispanic-serving higher education institutions.
For another eight programs, the executive branch underspent the allocation Congress approved. That included redirecting hundreds of millions of dollars for minority-serving institutions within a higher education grant program—Aid for Institutional Development—that the Trump administration has argued violates the Constitution.
Many of these cuts had tangible consequences. Nonprofits that lost funding from the Assistance in Arts Education grant program had to shrink programming and lay off staffers last year, said Amanda Karhuse, assistant executive director for advocacy and public policy at the National Association for Music Education.
“When Congress passed the Every Student Succeeds Act in 2015, they were clear that the intent of the Assistance for Arts Education program was to expand access and opportunities in the arts for underserved students and students with disabilities,” Karhuse said. “… There is no assurance that the Charter School Program grantees will use the funding for these activities.”
The department also moved $5 million from the Innovative Approaches to Literacy grant program into the much larger Comprehensive Literacy State Development grant program. Then it awarded that $5 million to Wyoming’s education department, with another $20 million promised to the state agency between 2026 and 2030.
Meanwhile, some programs that saw individual grant cuts last year still show fiscal 2025 spending levels consistent with appropriations. That could be because the funds that were pulled back were from a prior year’s appropriation, or because the administration rerouted the money it yanked back to other grantees in the same program. The Education Department has said it took the latter approach for tens of millions of dollars pulled back from existing awards through its Full-Service Community Schools program, as well as for discretionary grants for special education.
Nearly $300 million in education research funding could lapse
Advocates for education research are sounding the alarm about another Education Department funding change that breaks from decades of precedent: The agency is on track to let as much as $289 million in fiscal 2025 funding for its research arm, the Institute of Education Sciences, lapse on Sept. 30.
These cuts follow a slew of contract terminations and staff layoffs the Trump administration implemented for IES during its first months in office.
The congressional justification document for IES acknowledges funding levels Congress carried over from previous fiscal years’ full federal budgets, but specifies that “actual” fiscal 2025 spending for priorities within IES was lower than appropriations because of an agreement between the agency and the federal Office of Management and Budget.
In some cases, listed funding levels look miniscule compared with congressional appropriations. The Education Department lists $1 million for special education studies and evaluations, compared with lawmakers’ intended amount of $13 million. Instead of $245 million for the broad category of research, development, and dissemination, the Education Department and OMB agreed upon $79 million, the document says.
An agreement between two federal agencies to differ from congressional appropriations is highly atypical, budget experts said. The agreement has not been made public.
“The agreed-upon spending plan should be what Congress tells the agency to spend, and then the agency’s supposed to spend it,” Abernathy said. “That’s what the law says.”
Federal funding for education research comes with a two-year expiration date; in any given year, the agency could have funds on hand from two fiscal years at once.
Roughly five months is likely not enough time for the department to spend the remaining unspent 2025 funds by conducting grant competitions and awarding contracts, according to a memo from the Knowledge Alliance, which advocates for education research. Spending from the fiscal 2026 allocation is also behind schedule, the Knowledge Alliance found in its analysis of publicly available federal spending data.
“Without timely competitions and new awards, the pipeline of evidence dries up, weakening the ability to improve teaching and learning over time,” the memo says.
Failing to spend that IES money by Sept. 30 could constitute a violation of the Impoundment Control Act, a 1970s-era federal law that requires the president to seek congressional approval and give 45 days’ notice before withholding—or rescinding—funds appropriated by lawmakers.
Russell Vought, the Trump administration official who was a lead author of Project 2025 and leads OMB, argued as recently as last week that the impoundment restrictions are unconstitutional. Neither of the Trump administration’s rescission requests to Congress last year included Education Department funds.
The Government Accountability Office, an independent federal watchdog funded by Congress, in 2025 published reports asserting that the second Trump administration violated impoundment law in seven different instances. None of the decisions so far has examined Education Department programs, though the office has “more investigations underway,” a spokesperson told Education Week.
Trump and Vought have repeatedly blasted the GAO and argued its decisions are untrustworthy.
‘Uncharted territory’ on executive branch funding decisions
With both chambers controlled by Republicans during Trump’s second administration, Congress has largely avoided intervening in the Trump administration’s funding disruptions. Lawmakers even tacitly endorsed the Trump administration’s unilateral increase of $60 million for charter schools by codifying it in the 2026 budget they approved in February.
Education Week contacted spokespeople for the Republican chairs and Democratic ranking members of House and Senate committees on appropriations, budget, and education. Of those six lawmakers, two shared a statement in time for publication—Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., ranking member on the Senate appropriations committee, and Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., ranking member on the House appropriations committee.
Both Murray and DeLauro said they prioritized unambiguous guardrails in the fiscal 2026 budget to block the Trump administration from further reprogramming funds.
“It is outrageous—and telling—that President Trump and Secretary McMahon slashed funding to train teachers in order to pump money into a program they’ve turned into a slush fund for conservative civics institutes at colleges,” Murray wrote in a statement to Education Week. “The negotiated funding bill we passed in January requires the administration to once again fund key programs that help students, and we need Republicans to join us in demanding accountability if they try to break the law.”
Vought has also asserted the legality of a maneuver known as “pocket rescissions,” in which the executive branch proposes to rescind appropriated funds so late in the fiscal year that the money expires whether Congress approves the changes or not. That’s one possibility for what could happen with the 2025 funding for IES that the department hasn’t spent.
Alternatively, Abernathy believes the Trump administration could end up executing what she calls “silent rescissions” of the research funding—simply letting the unspent money return to the Treasury rather than moving it to another line item or asking lawmakers to approve a rescission. For other programs, the administration could also expand its arguments that funds for certain racial minorities are unconstitutional.
“This administration has exerted what it is calls unitary authority to make decisions about funding in many different ways—transferring, withholding, canceling,” Abernathy said. “This is really uncharted territory.”
2026-04-24 21:57:31
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