Overview

The Administration's Theory of Education

President Trump laid out his agenda for education in no uncertain terms in the first days of his second term: expand private school choice and scale back the federal role in education. The animating premise is that federal bureaucracy, particularly through the Department of Education, has been used to impose ideological priorities on local schools, supplanting parents and communities in decisions about curriculum, discipline, and values. In the administration's telling, returning authority to families and states is simultaneously a reform of governance and a repudiation of what it characterizes as progressive indoctrination.

Within the first two weeks of his second term, President Trump issued three executive orders ending diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives across the government and in schools. These early actions established the ideological frame for everything that followed: DEI programs were recast not merely as misguided policy but as violations of civil rights law, making their elimination a legal imperative rather than a political choice. Critics dispute both that characterization and the procedural methods by which it has been applied.

Federal Authority, State Control, and Parental Rights

On January 29, 2025, President Trump issued an executive order titled "Expanding Educational Freedom and Opportunity for Families," stating that it is the policy of the current administration to support parents in directing the upbringing and education of their children, and tasking multiple cabinet secretaries to evaluate and propose plans for expanding opportunities for parents to choose where and how their children are educated. Rhetorically, this framing positions the administration as an ally of parental authority against an overreaching state. In practice, however, the exercise of that authority has been strikingly centralized.

The first year of the second Trump administration saw an unprecedented effort to repurpose federal anti-discrimination law to reverse longstanding efforts to promote equality in public life — including in education. Federal laws prohibiting racial and sex-based discrimination are being used to withhold federal funding from schools and colleges without even the facade of an investigation. Rather than withdrawing federal reach, the administration has redirected it: deploying the leverage of federal dollars to enforce its own cultural and policy priorities, much as it accuses prior administrations of doing.

The administration abruptly rescinded $2.5 billion in COVID relief grants previously authorized by Congress through the American Rescue Plan, though 41 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico had received extensions to use those funds through March 30, 2026, to address the long-term impacts of the pandemic on student achievement. Courts imposed temporary restraints, but the episode illustrated how executive impoundment of congressionally appropriated funds has become a primary instrument of education policy.

Curriculum, Identity, and Institutional Culture

In February 2025, the Education Department abruptly canceled dozens of Teacher Quality Partnership grants. A press release stated that taxpayer funds were being used to "train teachers and education agencies on divisive ideologies," with training materials said to include Critical Race Theory, diversity, equity, and inclusion, and social justice activism. The cancellation triggered litigation. A temporary restraining order reinstated the federal money in March 2025, but a Supreme Court ruling in April lifted the restraining order.

Apportionment documents published through mid-2026 show 35 Education Department programs with most or all of their fiscal 2026 congressional appropriations listed as "unallocated," with legally binding footnotes explicitly prohibiting the agency from spending the money until further OMB authorization. Most also carry footnotes requiring all spending to comply with Trump's executive order banning government spending on DEI initiatives, broadly defined. The cumulative effect is to make adherence to the administration's cultural preferences a condition of receiving congressionally enacted funds — a mechanism that critics argue violates the separation of powers.

Trump has taken multiple steps toward fulfilling his campaign pledge to revoke federal DEI initiatives, including pressuring top universities to sign compacts tied to federal funding, freezing multibillion-dollar infrastructure projects, and closing DEI offices. The administration's actions have been met with legal challenges, including a federal judge ruling that the Education Department overstepped its authority.

School Choice and the Future of Public Education

The federal government has made its biggest push yet for school choice under the Trump administration. A handful of early executive orders illustrated the message. Trump directed agency leaders to investigate how they could dispense public dollars for school choice, and called for the secretary of education to facilitate the dismantling of her own department. In roughly eight months, the Department of Education issued several pieces of guidance telling states how to use existing federal funds and provisions to promote public and private school choice.

The legislative vehicle for federally funded choice arrived with the passage of Trump's budget reconciliation package. A new federal tax credit program, starting in 2027, will bankroll scholarships for K-12 students that can cover private school tuition, home-school expenses in some states, and certain expenses for public school students. The program is structured as an opt-in for states, and early reactions have been divided along partisan lines. Whether the scholarship program will expand meaningful options for low-income families or primarily subsidize families who would have chosen private schooling regardless remains a central unresolved dispute among researchers.

The president's budget request proposes to decrease funding for the Department of Education by $12 billion, or 15%, with changes to federal policies and appropriations that will impact students across the country. The deep cuts would hit programs meant to ensure equitable access to education for underserved students and to protect their civil rights. Title I and special education programs would be reorganized into separate single grants aimed at letting states spend the money as they see fit. The Senate Appropriations Committee passed a bipartisan bill in July 2025 that largely rejected those cuts and instead chose to preserve existing programs.

Higher Education, Research, and Federal Funding

Higher education saw unprecedented policy changes in the first year of President Trump's second term. Billions of federal dollars were withheld from hundreds of institutions, including the nation's most prestigious, making 2025 a whirlwind for thousands of colleges and universities. The administration's approach combined targeted pressure on specific institutions with broader agency-wide funding restrictions and enrollment and immigration enforcement affecting international students.

In its anti-DEI crusade, the administration targeted specific universities — most notably Columbia and Harvard — and routinely justified its funding cuts by claiming it was protecting Jewish students from antisemitism that emerged in the course of pro-Palestinian campus protests and other activities supposedly violating federal civil rights law. Several prominent universities, including Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania, made headlines in a dizzying back-and-forth with the federal government. The administration cut large amounts of research funding, and some universities hatched settlements to get the money restored.

Four federal agencies — the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and the departments of Energy and Defense — introduced nearly identical 15% cap policies on indirect research cost reimbursements in quick succession during the first half of 2025. Research universities, higher education groups, and states sued over the changes, and federal courts have so far blocked all four policies. A federal appeals court upheld a lower court decision permanently blocking NIH's policy.

The slashing of billions of dollars from the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation will have consequences for years to come, with analysts foreseeing the potential weakening of American scientific capacity. The threats to research constitute, in one assessment, a "generational problem" that might allow other nations to surpass the United States in scientific discoveries. While the administration sought dramatic cuts to NIH, NSF, and NASA research funding for fiscal year 2026, Congress rejected those requests and produced what was essentially a level-funding picture for university research.

Student loan policy has also shifted sharply. The Education Department announced that roughly 8 million federal student loan borrowers would start to see interest resume on their debt balances in August 2025 after the Biden-era grace period had exempted them for about a year. Sweeping changes to federal student loans followed in July 2026, including new federal limits on graduate student loans. A group of Democratic state attorneys general sued in May over the new borrowing limits, which include a federal loan cap of $20,500 annually with a total limit of $100,000 for advanced nursing degrees.

The Test of Educational Opportunity

The administration's education agenda rests on a genuine tension it has not resolved. School choice, reduced federal regulation, and parental authority are coherent principles. But the instruments chosen to advance them — impoundment of congressionally approved funds, withdrawal of civil rights enforcement, and politically conditioned grants — have, in the assessment of many independent analysts, harmed the students the federal education system was most designed to protect: low-income children, students with disabilities, and those in historically underserved communities.

What is well established is that the administration has significantly disrupted funding streams, restructured or eliminated dozens of programs, and used the threat of fund withdrawal as a coercive tool in ways that have drawn repeated federal court challenges. Federal overreach and cultural attacks in education are not merely talking points; if they continue to hollow out public trust in higher education and weaken college autonomy, even well-intentioned policymaking will fall short of improving college access and affordability.

What remains disputed is whether the administration's approach will produce lasting structural change or whether congressional appropriators and federal courts will continue to constrain its most ambitious moves. Congress has already passed a budget that rejects the administration's proposals to slash billions of dollars from federal education investments. Whether school choice programs will scale equitably, whether research enterprise disruption will prove temporary or lasting, and whether legal challenges will ultimately narrow or validate executive authority over education spending are questions that will take years to resolve. The administration has clearly identified the terrain of battle; the outcome remains genuinely uncertain.