In Setback for Trump, Congress in Spending Law Rejects Call to Axe Education Department

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump’s attempts to dramatically slash funding for the U.S. Department of Education amid a broader push to dismantle the agency hit a major roadblock this week in the form of bipartisan approval of a spending law that gives the department a small raise.

The president signed a measure that funds the department at $79 billion this fiscal year — roughly $217 million more than the agency’s fiscal year 2025 funding levels and a whopping $12 billion above what Trump wanted.

Sen. Patty Murray of Washington state, the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee, wrote in a social media post after the signing that the law was a direct rebuke of several Trump priorities, including eliminating the department.

“Our funding bills send a message to Trump,” she wrote. “Congress will NOT abolish the Department of Education.”

The measure also rejects efforts to dramatically reduce or fully slash funding for a host of programs administered by the department for low-income and disadvantaged students.

Trump and his administration have sought over the past year to take an axe to the 46-year-old agency as part of a quest to send education “back to the states.” Much of the funding and oversight of schools already occurs at the state and local levels.

Those dismantling efforts included six interagency agreements with four other departments in November that would shift several Education responsibilities to those Cabinet-level agencies.

The department also saw mass layoffs initiated in March 2025 and a plan to dramatically downsize the agency ordered that same month — efforts that the U.S. Supreme Court temporarily greenlit in July.

The spending package also holds full-year funding for the departments of Defense, Labor, Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, Transportation, State, and Treasury. The measure includes a two-week stopgap measure for the Department of Homeland Security.

‘Inefficiencies’

The measure does not offer ironclad language to prevent the outsourcing of the Education Department’s responsibilities to other agencies, despite efforts from Senate Democrats to block such transfers.

However, in a joint explanatory statement alongside the measure, lawmakers expressed alarm over the “assignment of such programmatic responsibilities to agencies that do not have experience, expertise, or capacity to carry out these programs and activities and lack developed relationships and communications with relevant stakeholders, including States.”

Lawmakers added they were “concerned that fragmenting responsibilities for education programs across multiple agencies will create inefficiencies, result in additional costs to the American taxpayer, and cause delays and administrative challenges in Federal funding reaching States, school districts, and schools.”

Due to those concerns, the funding measure directs the Education Department and the agencies that are part of the transfers to provide biweekly briefings to lawmakers on the implementation of any interagency agreements.

The briefings are supposed to include information on “staffing transfers, implementation costs, metrics on the delivery of services,” and the “availability of technical support for programs to grantees,” among other matters.

The Education Department clarified when announcing the interagency agreements in November with the departments of Labor, Interior, Health and Human Services, and State that it would “maintain all statutory responsibilities and will continue its oversight of these programs.”

‘Necessary’ staffing levels

The funding agreement also mandates that the department “support staffing levels necessary to fulfill its statutory responsibilities, including carrying out programs, projects, and activities funded in (the law) in a timely manner.”

The department took heat last summer when it froze $6.8 billion in funds for K-12 schools and informed states just a day before the money was typically sent out.

The funds were eventually unfrozen, following bipartisan pushback in Congress.

Pell Grant spared

The measure also maintains the total maximum annual award for the Pell Grant from the prior fiscal year at $7,395, according to a summary from Democrats on the Senate Appropriations Committee. The government subsidy helps low-income students pay for college.

Trump’s budget request called for cutting nearly $1,700 from the maximum award for the 2026-2027 award year, a proposal that stoked alarm last year from leading House and Senate appropriators in both parties overseeing Education Department funding.

Funding levels maintained for TRIO, GEAR UP

The administration also called for defunding the Federal TRIO programs and the Gaining Early Awareness and Readiness for Undergraduate Programs, or GEAR UP, in fiscal 2026 — a move rejected in the measure.

The Federal TRIO Programs include federal outreach and student services programs to help support students who come from disadvantaged backgrounds, and GEAR UP aims to prepare low-income students for college.

Appropriators maintained funding for the programs at fiscal 2025 levels — with $1.191 billion for TRIO and $388 million for GEAR UP, per the Senate Democrats’ summary.

The administration also sought to axe funding for the Child Care Access Means Parents in School Program, which, according to the Education Department, “supports the participation of low-income parents in postsecondary education through the provision of campus-based child care services.”

Instead, the measure allocates $75 million for the program.

The Education Department did not respond to a request for comment on the funding package.

The administration expressed its support for the entire, multi-bill package in a Jan. 29 statement of administration policy that barely mentioned the education provisions.

by Shauneen Miranda, Virginia Mercury

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