Trump's Ed Department Stiffs Schools Billions of Dollars

This week, schools across the country were supposed to receive billions of dollars in aid. It was approved and designated by Congress. 

But the day before the money was supposed to go out, the Education Department, in one of its special unsigned emails, told states, "Nah, we don't want to."

The five targeted programs:

Title I-C for migrant education ($375 million)
Title II-A for professional development ($2.2 billion)
Title III-A for English-learner services ($890 million)
Title IV-A for academic enrichment ($1.3 billion)
Title IV-B for before- and after-school programs ($1.4 billion)

Plus a last-minute addition of adult basic and literacy education

The six programs had been targeted for the axe in the department's 2026 budget request. The justifications for the cuts tells us where the regime's thinking lies. For example, migrant education should be cut, they say, because "This program has not been proven effective and encourages ineligible non citizens to access taxpayer dollars stripping resources from American students." Several were to be incorporated into the department's new "Do whatever the hell you want with this small pile of money" grants to the states, but of course that's not what's happening here.

This appears to be another use of "impoundment," an illegal means by which Congress uses its Constitutional power of the purse and the President just refuses to hand the money over. Russell Vought, the guy who helped write Project 2025 and now runs the Office of Management and Budget, has been pushing this technique for the regime. It's a perfect fit for Trump, who famously has a history of simply refusing to pay what he owes to contractors. 

States are working out the costs, which are huge. Kris Nordstrom, senior policy analyst at the Education and Law Project, has worked out the details for North Carolina, and they are huge. $154 million  for the state (enough to hire 1,960 new teachers). Or you can figure it as the hundreds of dollars per students. Nordstrom points out that the districts that will be hardest hit are the poor ones. Expect that to be true across the country.

I don't know that there's anything new to learn from this. The regime has been clear that it does not want to provide supports for public education or (certain shades of) immigrants or any programs run by the Department of Education. The callousness displayed toward the fate of actual human post-fetal children in this country is such an omnipresent feature of this regime that it's hard to take it all in. 

In many states, these cuts come right after the district budgeting cycle, meaning that some schools will be scrambling to figure out what their shortfall will be. Meanwhile, expect lawsuits over this funding cut to join all the other lawsuits over illegal funding cuts (e.g. the billion-dollar cut of school mental health services).

That could help. Of course, first they'd have to win, then someone would have to force the regime to honor the court's judgment. Good luck with all of that.