President Donald Trump signed an executive order on March 20 directing Secretary of Education Linda McMahon to begin dismantling the Department of Education (ED). The Trump administration has also cut parts of the education-research branch of the ED, reduced its civil rights division and fired nearly half of the department’s staff.

As a result, student loan portfolios –– which include $1.6 trillion in loans –– originally overseen by the Federal Student Aid Office in the Department of Education, will now be moved to the Small Business Administration. Federal special education services will now be moved to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Similarly Trump ordered Pell Grants, Title I and funding resources for children with disabilities and special needs will be redistributed to various agencies.

The changes have many experts concerned.

Manish Naik, the director of legislation for the Council of Great City Schools — an organization that works to improve inner city education in 78 of the nation’s largest urban public school systems — said the original purpose of the Department of Education was to help students who were underserved by state governments.

“In general, there were pockets of students in this country who were not being well served by their states,” Naik said. “The United States has a very decentralized education system. Every state is responsible for its own system of standards, its own state testing and things like that. And a lot of that is even decentralized, even further to its individual school districts.

The Department of Education was first created in 1979 to collect information on schools and teaching in order to help the States create effective school systems. Its mission is to “promote student achievement and preparation for global competitiveness by fostering educational excellence and ensuring equal access.” 

However, former chairman of the Santa Clara County Republican Party Shane Patrick Connolly said people shouldn’t be so concerned. He said the Trump administration’s goal is to increase efficiency and prevent excessive federal influence.

“The idea here is that the administration is trying to eliminate the bureaucracy of the Department of Education without eliminating some of the key work of the department,” Connolly said. “There will still be grants, like Pell grants that are authorized by Congress. There will still be care for and support for disabled students. Those functions will continue. They’ll just be in a different department … It’s really about creating efficiency and reducing costs and also reducing federal influence on local schools.”

Michael W. Kirst, former president of the California State Board of Education, said one motivation behind the cuts is the national debt.

“There’s a huge deficit, and we’ve got to cut,” Kirst said. “It’s just, what do you cut?”

Title I of the Elementary and Secondary School Education Act provides $17 billion to 63% of public schools where at least 40% of students come from low-income families. 

“The way it works right now is Congress has authorized a law called the Elementary and Secondary Education Act that has a formula for how funding should be distributed to Title I schools,” Naik said. “So that formula, which is basically the calculation and how the big pot of money gets distributed to each of the individual states and then to each school district. Then districts determine how much goes to each school building.” 

While 83% of PAUSD funding came from property taxes in 2024, the district did receive $5.7 million from the Department of Education with $280,000 coming from Title I funding. Of PAUSD’s federal funding, $2.6 million is provided by the The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act for Special Education support. 

According to NPR, federal grants are essential to lower-income rural schools, providing staff salaries, supplies, and other basic services that low-income schools may not otherwise be able to afford.

PAUSD would not be as affected however, due to our high property taxes. Furthermore, during a March 25 board meeting on budget, Chief Financial Business Officer Charen Yu said the district does not have to worry about federal cuts affecting Title I and IDEA funding.

“According to the latest executive order that we have received, the federal government ensures the preservation of Title 1 and the IDEA Funding, however it is advisable to prepare for potential cost deferrals,” Yu said. 

Eliminating the Department of Education has been a recurring objective of conservatives since the 1980s. A year after the department was signed into law, former President Ronald Reagan tried to eliminate the department. Similarly, Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich (R-Georgia)  suggested abolishing the department in the ‘90s. Then, in the 2008 presidential primary, Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) and the then-governor of  Massachusetts Mitt Romney called for the same. 

U.S. Government teacher Caitlin Drewes said the order is a result of an ongoing debate between allocating political power to the federal or state government.

“Republicans have wanted to get rid of the Department of Education for a very, very long time,” Drewes said. “The complaint was like, ‘Education should be local. It should be at the highest level of the state. It should not be federal,’” Drewes.

But Naik said there is a common misconception that the Department of Education controls local school and state curriculum.

“There’s a very small amount of funding that the federal government provides, and a fairly small amount of strings,” Naik. “There’s very little they’ll be able to do more than they couldn’t already do now.”

Naik said federal funding can still be significant, though, especially to schools that do not receive much money from property taxes. In fact, roughly 13.7% of public school funding came from the federal level in the 2021-2022 school year, according to USA Facts. 

“It’s a small amount of funding, but it’s supplemental funding,” Naik said. “Every school district gets a certain amount from their states, but our local and state funding system is a little inequitable, often based on property taxes. So having an urban or rural district get supplemental funding for those students from the federal government, that money is very valuable to them, even if it’s just a small part of their budget.”

While the Department of Education can hold states accountable, Connolly said individual states can often decide what education systems work best for them. 

“The genius of our system was that states were the incubators of experimentation and success, so when you learn about good practices in one place, they can be replicated, but they aren’t forced on anyone where they don’t fit right,” Connolly said. “Different states have different complexions of population demographics, different, rural, urban divides, and so the learning situations may be different. A lot of states are doing innovative things like pure voucherization, where the dollars follow the child to let parents have a say in the best institution to have their child educated in, whether that’s homeschooling, religious, private school or a public school.”

However, Connolly said the lack of national standardization also has some drawbacks.

“The downside is that the states that are doing badly may double down on their bad policies where they’re not properly emphasizing core curricula and instead forcing on students kind of like social agenda pursuits that don’t have much to do with actually giving them the skills they need to be able to learn whatever they want,” Connolly said.

Ultimately, Connolly said the Trump administration’s goal of abolishing the Department of Education is to give states the freedom to do what’s right for them. 

“States will have more flexibility in how they spend the education dollars, so they can focus more of the dollars on what’s working and not just what some bureaucrat in Washington says they must spend on,” Connolly said. “My hope for California is that they start spending it more wisely and with a greater emphasis on core curriculum.”

Although Title I funding and other supportive resources might not fully go away, Naik said having no Department of Education leaves the states without accountability.

“With money, the federal departments do have some ability to get states to follow the law, because of the money and because of the appearance of authority; (prevention) for defying the federal department of education goes away a little bit,” Naik said.

Federal funding also plays an important role in supporting higher education research. However, on Feb. 7, the Trump administration proposed capping the rate of indirect costs at 15% for scientific research. The indirect cost rate is the rate of reimbursement for research expenses such as personnel, maintenance, equipment and accounting, and many labs rely on this federal funding to cover a large percent of their research costs.

“I have friends who are at Stanford, and one of my friends is working on a Ph.D./M.D., and her lab lost funding,” Drewes said. “I think they are really short-sighted. I think that we are known as a country that’s full of innovators, and if they’re cutting university funding, they’re cutting scientific research, cutting innovation, cutting medical possibilities and potential, and I think it’s dangerous and unfortunate.”

Stanford, in addition to many other top schools, has announced a hiring freeze until the situation becomes more clear.  

Beyond research, Senior and Paly Board Representative Samantha Fan said reductions in federal education funding and movement of financial aid programs could heavily impact the aid students receive to afford college. 

“The Department of Education manages a lot of different financial aid that allows students to receive higher education such as FAFSA,” said Fan. “This has serious implications as it limits the education that a lot of low-income students can receive. I think once again it aligns with this overall issue of keeping education out of reach for so many students within the United States, and breaking out of the cycle of poverty, as a lot of high-paying jobs do not hire you unless you have a degree.” 

Paly College Advisor Sandra Cernobori echoes Fan’s concerns. 

“Of course, this will have an impact,” Cernobori said. “The main thing is, with reduced staff and those relationships with the vendors to deal with fixes quickly, it could absolutely jeopardize processing and students getting their federal financial aid awards, if not this year next year. That’s (then) going to further reduce the number of low income students that can afford to enroll in college.”

Natalie Miller, a student journalist at the University of Southern California who has interviewed students applying for financial aid, said the indirect costs cap is also affecting undergraduate students. 

“The threats to cut research programs affect students across the board within STEM fields,” Miller said. “From interviews that I have conducted, I have learned that incoming students will be the most affected, as there will most likely be a halt or decrease in the amount of research positions made available. Current research students are at risk of having their labs or projects completely paused, harming their path to gaining their degree and finishing their studies.”

By splitting up educational programs, Naik said the Trump administration’s actions threaten smaller educational initiatives and federal education. 

“I think a combination of getting rid of staff and moving it to another agency puts the programs and the priorities and the authority of it at risk,” Naik said. “I think if you move Title I from the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education at the U.S. Department of Education, and if you move it five or six levels down to the Department of Health and Human Services or Department of Labor, you lose the kind of (federal) authority, the bully pulpit.”

Kirst said an example of this inefficiency is the disorganized downsizing of programs that are shifting without proper staffing plans. 

“They’re just cutting the Small Businesses Treasury as well as education,” Kirst said. “They’re cutting personnel without a clear plan to add staff to these places that would inherit the old Department of Education” 

Despite this, Connolly said the cuts are a necessary step toward reducing government overhead.

“The idea was to improve educational outcomes in America,” Connolly said. “Unfortunately, we’re spending billions of dollars and getting worse results at schools … And then the department has been misused as during the Obama administration, when they tied funding for policies like requiring bathrooms for girls to be accessible by boys who are claiming a different gender, or something like that. 

With the U.S. Fiscal Treasury Fiscal Data marking the current national debt at $36.22 trillion,  Connolly said reducing federal spending is critical. 

“We need to do everything we can to slow the growth of the national debt because pretty soon the debt, which already consumes more in interest payments than we spend on national defense, will be eating up resources that are needed for Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, things like that,” Connolly said. “We don’t want our federal government to be a pass-through just to pay off the debt.”

Even with debt in mind, Naik said the reason behind cutting funds from the education department in particular lacks clarity. 

“I haven’t heard anyone explain how this move would improve test scores,” Naik said. “Ironically, in that executive order, they say test scores are terrible, and we should close the Department of Education. First of all, they’re citing the Department of Education statistical analysis. You know, they actually fired a lot of the people that did the analysis.”

For Connolly, educational government reform has been long overdue.

“Our federal government has gotten way too big, way too moribund and ineffective, and is ripe for reform,” Connolly said. “Generally for the administration, I think that their efforts around modernizing, streamlining and cutting government at the federal level is a good thing.” 

Fan, though, said she has concerns with the precedent these cuts set for executive overreach. 

“Dismantling an entire department that is such a big part of so many American citizens is a really big overstep of presidential power,” Fan said. “If the current presidency is controlling so many of these different aspects of the government that are going to negatively affect so many citizens’ lives, then what else are they going to do?”

Fan also said shuttering the Department of Education will ultimately harm the country.

“The U.S. is just going to continue to go downhill in reputation and in just in general, because education is such a core foundation of what the citizens of the United States set out to succeed,” Fan said. “Without adequate support, innovative students who have the ability to create different ideas and different technologies might not be able to do that because they’re not going to receive the foundation that they need in education throughout their lives.”

And Naik said he worries that cuts will disproportionately harm vulnerable student populations.

“Our school districts, and (The Council of Great City Schools) represents the largest urban school districts in the country, have a lot of the students that the Department of Education was created to serve, such as low income, English learner, immigrant refugee students and students with disabilities … and we have doubts about whether or not the federal government is still able to do that with the staff cuts,” Naik said. “We feel that a nation should have a federal department of education. It should be a major priority of any important nation to improve the education of all students, but especially those that have often been disregarded or left behind.”