Making Sense of Trump's K-12 Budget Slashing

Behind the decision to withhold $6.8 billion in funds to K-12 schools lurks an ugly worldview

In case you missed it, the Trump Administration decided this week to turn off funding to K-12 schools across the country, to the tune of $6.8 billion. The money, which was supposed to start flowing yesterday, is earmarked for migrant students, students who are still learning English, professional development for teachers, and an array of other programs that support public schools. Mark Lieberman of EdWeek has been doing a heroic job chronicling the ‘what’ of the cuts, including a breakdown of just how much schools in each state stand to lose. I want to focus on the ‘why’ behind Trump’s latest move.

The cuts are significant—every state stands to lose at least 10 percent of their federal K-12 funding overnight; Vermont and Washington DC stand to lose 20 percent. For some perspective on the amount of money we’re talking about, consider that in North Carolina, the $154 million that’s now in jeopardy, is enough to hire 1,960 new teachers or provide existing teachers with a 3 percent pay raise. And in typical fashion, news of the cuts arrived at the last minute via a bloodless missive. On the eve of the day before states were set to receive the funds, a ‘not gonna happen’ email went out, along with a request that ‘stakeholders’ direct any questions, not to the Department of Education but to the Office of Management and Budget, run by Trump’s budget-slasher-in-chief, and a contributor to Project 2025, Russell Vought.

This combination of orchestrating chaos while demonstrating callous disregard for the outcome is now familiar—think USAID or the savage cuts to NIH. (Note that funds to those agencies were also being ‘reviewed.’) Also familiar by now is the blatant effort to steamroll the separation of powers. Congress, not the president, carries the nation’s purse, and for the past 50 years the president has been required to spend the money that Congress appropriates. But Trump et al don’t share that view and have instead essentially invented an inherent Presidential power to ‘impound’ money that has already been promised to projects, policies or people the administration doesn’t like. Which is how we arrive at the $6.8 billion in cuts to public education, an institution which, if you’re just tuning in, these folks hold in extremely low regard. Nor is it a coincidence that the harshest cuts will fall on the neediest students, as EdWeek’s Lieberman points out.

Districts with high concentrations of low-income students and English learners are likely to be hit hardest by the sweeping cuts, which largely touch programs allocated to states and districts via formulas designed to account for high concentrations of poverty and need.

The roaring return of race science

As I’ve been writing here, once you look beyond the chaos and the callousness, the same themes keep emerging, one of them being the roaring return of race science, or as its adherents like to call it, ‘human biodiversity,’ which sounds better but ultimately ends up in the same place: not all racial or population groups are equally intelligent. So what does this have to do with slashing spending on programs like migrant education, services for English Language Learners and basic education for adults? The answer comes to us via writer S.C. Cornell, who, in a recent piece for the New Yorker, summed up what’s so dangerous about the resurgence of the obsession with race science and IQ more neatly than I ever could:

“If the world really can be divided, biologically, into people destined for great things and people doomed to menial labor, there’s no reason not to abolish the Department of Education, as Trump has said he will, and to distribute the saving to the pet projects of the billionaires who got him elected. There’s nothing objectionable about the fact that the world’s fify richest people have the same total amount of wealth as the four billion poorest. Any effort to bridge the gap between these groups–universal pre-K, immigration, income tax, foreign aid–well that’s just DEI.”

Exactly. If you view inequality as not just inherent but desireable, then anything aimed at making the world less unequal is a waste or misguided ‘social engineering.’ That’s why the Trump folks are obsessed with keeping the ‘wrong’ people out of college, whether by using federal money as a cudgel to get elite institutions to admit students solely on the basis of ‘merit,’ or making higher education more costly for low-income students. And it’s why they don’t have a thing to say about legacy admissions, which give a leg up to those who already have a leg up. In other words, give those with the most more while taking from those with the least because they’re not going anywhere anyway. Anything that smacks of trying to make the world a more fair place, ‘well that’s just DEI.’

I’ll be writing and podcasting more about the dangerous reemergence of ‘human biodiversity’ in the coming months because I’m convinced that it deserves far more attention than it’s gotten. I’ve even started re-reading Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s odious book The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life. (For an antidote, I highly recommend Angela Saini’s smart and readable book Superior: The Return of Race Science.)

Now for something a little less grim

One of the things I try to do with this newsletter is share glimmers of hope in these dark times. And while a post that combines education budget cuts with the return of race science might seem uniquely inhospitable to any such glimmers, allow me to leave you with two momentous court rulings this week. First to Ohio, where a judge ruled that the state’s private school voucher program, now closing in on $1 billion a year, is unconstitutional. In a scathing decision, the judge took aim at the rhetoric of the school choice movement, in which ‘vouchers’ are called ‘scholarships’ and school funding should ‘follow the child.’ Beneath the slogans, argued Judge Jaiza Page, is a clear violation of Ohio’s constitutional ban on the state establishment of religious schools. (For more on this, follow Ohio’s in-house expert on all things voucher related, Stephen Dyer.) Since 37 states have constitutional language similar to Ohio’s, this one could have implications well beyond the Buckeye State.

Finally, to New Hampshire, where the state’s Supreme Court just ruled that NH has been underfunding its public schools so severely that it is not meeting its constitutional obligation to provide for an adequate education. Ah that pesky constitution again… While NH officials have been trying to make the case that ‘extras’ like heat, transportation, people to run the schools or take care of the kids when they’re sick aren’t required to provide youngsters with an adequate education, the state’s highest court didn’t buy it. And while what happens next is unclear, what is clear is that the court understands just how key public schools are to the state and to democracy. Attorney John Toobin, I give you the last word:

“The decision really soundly and vigorously reaffirms that education is a state responsibility that is essential to maintaining a free government, and therefore it's really important in the courts not wavering from that.”