The NPR Politics Podcast - Trump Plows Ahead With Plans To Dismantle Department Of Education

Episode Date: July 17, 2025

Two dozen states are suing the Trump administration over its decision to withhold about $6 billion in federal education grants. And the Supreme Court says the administration can go ahead with layoffs at the Department of Education. We discuss the impacts these developments have on local school districts.This episode: senior White House correspondent Tamara Keith, education reporter Sequoia Carrillo and senior political editor and correspondent Domenico Montanaro.This podcast was produced by Casey Morell & Bria Suggs, and edited by Rachel Baye. Our executive producer is Muthoni Muturi.Listen to every episode of the NPR Politics Podcast sponsor-free, unlock access to bonus episodes with more from the NPR Politics team, and support public media when you sign up for The NPR Politics Podcast+ at plus.npr.org/politics.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

On this week's Wild Card podcast, comedian Mark Maron reflects on being content-ish. I can honestly say there's never been a better time in my life. And I'm not even sure this one is that great. I'm Rachel Martin, Mark Maron's on Wild Card, the show where cards control the conversation. Hi, I'm Duke from Lawrence County, California, and we're getting ready to go to New York to watch the Angels take on the Mets for my eighth birthday. This podcast was recorded at 1.08 p.m. on Thursday, July 17th. Things may have changed by the time you hear it, but hopefully the Angels will have swept the Mets. Enjoy the show.

Oh, well, happy birthday Duke. And now I will turn it over to our resident Mets fan for some thoughts. Also, by the way, great name. Yes. Like Duke Schneider. I mean, great baseball player. I think it's really cool that, you know, people are interested and want to go with their parents. My daughter recently got into the Mets, which I had already crossed out the idea that either of my kids would be interested in sports whatsoever. But she's super into it. But she's never seen a game at city field because we're basically away people now because we live in DC. Yeah. And we may go at some point. So, you know, good luck to the angels as well, because I feel like the angels similarly have like a in the shadows thing to that other LA team.

You mean my team? Like we have an in the shadows thing of that other New York team. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. And I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent. And NPR education reporter Sequoia Carrillo is here with us. Hello, Sequoia.

Hello. Happy to be here. Great to have you. And listeners, you may have heard President Trump talking about wanting to eliminate the Department of Education. Today on the show, we're diving into what it means in the classroom as the Trump administration seeks to reshape the federal government's role in public education. So Sequoia, I want to start at the very beginning with a simple question that I am pretty sure has a complicated answer. What does the U.S. Department of Education actually do?

Sequoia Cotter, Ph.D., Ph.D., Ph.D. Oh, I mean, this actually is a great question that a lot of people don't understand correctly. So one thing that it does not do is it does not tell schools what to teach or how to teach. There's a federal mandate preventing that. Primarily they deal with a lot of money. They normally kind of deal with two big pots of money. We have student loans and they're dealing with that from when you apply to student loans to when you're paying them off decades later and also federal funding for K-12 schools. And that includes Title I funding for lower income students as well as IDEA funding, which

is for students with disabilities. So they deal with money and then also they deal with civil rights. And these are mostly attorneys who are fielding complaints from parents, let's say, who would say, hey, a school discriminated against my child because of their race, sex, or disability. And so then these attorneys get on it, they go through that case. Also, what we've been seeing with colleges a lot recently with anti-Semitism, all of that is going through the Office for Civil Rights in the Education Department. So that is also a huge part of what the department does.

Danielle Pletka That was really helpful. So there was a Supreme Court decision earlier this week that lets the administration move forward with layoffs at the Department of Education. What does this ruling mean for local school districts around the country? It's a great question, and it's one I can't quite answer yet. We can kind of just look at where the clues are pointing us. So

the layoffs were for about 1,400 staff and they were primarily from three groups. That was from, like I said, the Office for Civil Rights, which is one of the big functions of the department. Those were mostly attorneys that were put on leave. And then also there was a big chunk of the office that oversees financial aid for students that got hit, which is terrible news for borrowers. They will be upset to hear things might slow down even more, which is not great because the student loan service is already not very fast. And then also we saw some education research teams really gutted with these layoffs. And so likely those are the areas where we'll see the hardest problems coming

up, but almost every office in the department got hit with these layoffs. SONIA DARA-MURRAY, D in Washington. It was a breakfast hosted by the Christian Science Monitor, and he was asked about the administration's goals. We are trying to eliminate the Department of Education. That does not mean we're going to take all of the education spending the department is doing and just send it straight to the states. Obviously, we're going to maintain Title I funding and special ed funding, but there's a lot of educational programs that American people would expect to be downsized. English language acquisition programs that don't actually prioritize the teaching of English, but in fact multilingualism. This is the first time that I'm hearing someone in the administration kind of try to temper the expectations of states around education funding, which is a little bit of a departure

from what I've heard the Education Secretary Linda McMahon do when talking about the president's proposed budget in front of the House and the Senate, where they were really trying to take away all the strings that come with federal money. In doing so, they're hoping to eliminate staffing, reduce costs there, kind of eliminate all of these different programs and instead give block grants to states. And part of that messaging has been that then the states will get more money due to the fact that they're kind of cutting out the middleman, that they're getting rid of all of these parameters.

So, Domenico, how do these moves fit into the administration's broader efforts to remake the federal government? Yeah. I mean, first of all, taking a step back, the Department of Education has been a GOP target for a very long time. Ideologically, you could hear there from VOTE, not really getting into the nuance of what some of these programs do, but sort of the more superficial idea of what it looks like. The conservatives will say that these programs do.

But I think to Sequoia's point here, that there are a few things that the Department of Education does that also fits into the broader restructuring goals ideologically of this administration. First of all, when you think about something like civil rights and having attorneys field complaints, there's a degree of accountability and a place for parents to turn. And it reminds me of a little bit of what the administration is doing with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, because if you've had an issue with customer service for whatever company that you have, and you just can't seem to get through to figure out how to fix

that problem, the CFPB was a place that people could go to then rectify that issue without having to hire a team of lawyers yourself. So that's the kind of thing that ideologically conservatives just believe that there shouldn't be necessarily those nanny state quote unquote things that, uh, the government does. If you ask any question to people about how they feel about government, nothing is a brighter line distinction on where people come down on their views politically, but whether or not you think the government should do more or you think the government's

doing too much. Well, I think that it also fits with something else that developed this week, which is there's this separate court fight where 24 states are suing the administration over its decision to withhold more than $6 billion in grants that should have gone out to local school systems. And I'm wondering, well, where does that money go? But also, does that fit in with what Vought is saying about, well, not all this money needs to go to the states?

Yeah. I mean, he's directly referencing one of the programs that they're withholding the money for right now, which is for English language acquisition for English language learners. And there's not really a through line between the programs that they've cut, other than the fact in their proposed budget, all of the programs, they're not requesting funding for them. So you're looking at things like funding teacher development, migrant education, English language learning programs, after school programs, and adult education.

And these are programs that impact rural, urban, suburban districts. These are programs that a lot of people like and that a lot of states are very upset to lose, especially without really any say in the fact and just sweeping executive motion. What is the department's justification for withholding these funds? Well, typically these funds are dispersed on July 1st and we see a lot of school districts going back to school during the summer. There was one in Arizona that is back this week. They started yesterday on the 16th. So on June 30th, one day before the deadline, states received a short email saying that they were under review and there was really

no timeline on when they would be released. And that's the biggest problem. It's the timing. Superintendents are kind of like CEOs of their districts. They know exactly what money is coming in and what's going out. And when you're this close to the start of a new fiscal year and someone else blows your budget and it's out of your control, but you're still on the hook for contracts that you've already signed, for teachers that you've already hired. A lot of these teachers are heavily unionized. Also, it's not as easy as just firing someone. And so I think that that's why we saw such a swift response here, first from Democrats, but also from Republicans and 24 states. Right, we're going to take a quick break and we'll have more in a moment.

Most people have some albums, some movies, some book from when they were young that helped shape how they came to see the world. That's no less true for the Code Switch crew. It's still really touching. I cried re-reading it. So there. Listen as we revisit some of our old faves on Code Switch from NPR or wherever you get your podcast. And we're back and we're talking about $6 billion in federal education grants that the White House is withholding.

Yesterday, 10 Republican senators sent a letter urging the White House to release the money. That letter includes these lines. This funding goes directly to states and local school districts where local leaders decide how this funding is spent because as we know, local communities know how to best serve students and families. So they sent a letter, but Domenico, this is funding that was approved by Congress. As senators, couldn't they do more than just send a strongly worded letter to the budget office? Not just as 10. And, you know, even if you included all the Democrats, that wouldn't be enough to overcome a filibuster, let's say, to be able to get this legislation passed. But more immediately, this is a need within these communities. I mean, there are

headlines all around the country that are about the millions of dollars that school districts and states are losing. There are attorneys general in many of these states that are suing to have this money unfrozen. So it is more of an urgent issue than just saying, let's maybe try to come up with something that restructures the federal government and considered it for many months. That's not something that's likely to happen. And frankly, there's a lot of Republicans who just don't want to cross Trump and they want to give him a win. I mean, they've been giving him win after win after win.

It doesn't seem like they've had a lot of will to do anything that he doesn't want done. Right. And, you know, you could even argue that there are people who wrote this letter that may not go along with that because they don't want to wind up being in Trump's crosshairs. So in order to really get any change on this, there's likely going to have to be a kind of public pressure and outcry. And I think that that's some of what you're seeing with so much of the local focus on this and with some of the Republicans and maybe even some of what you're hearing from vote walk a different kind of line than the strict ideological line that we'd heard previously from them. It's great. I do want to ask you, President Trump recently signed his massive tax and

spending bill this month, the so-called one big, beautiful bill. Did that include any funds that offset the cuts that the White House is making? No, not directly. When you look at the big beautiful bill, most education programs, if they didn't see direct cuts, which a lot did, they at least saw some shifting money. There's student loan changes, Pell Grant changes. There's a new K-12 school voucher program, which is like the first ever of its kind on a national scale. But the biggest challenge to schools from the new legislation

is going to be the cuts to Medicaid and SNAP. People often don't really think about it, but Medicaid helps fund school health professionals and other services at schools for students. And if a student qualifies for SNAP benefits, fund, school health professionals, and other services at schools for students. And if a student qualifies for SNAP benefits, they also immediately qualify for free school lunch. So the cuts to those programs are going to hit schools really hard when they go into

effect. Hmm. You're laying out a bunch of different areas where school leaders might be facing budget shortfalls and concerns. Can you sort of walk us through some of the examples that you've learned from talking to school officials about how all of these various cuts and changes related to the Department of Education might play out at the local level? Definitely. I've talked to a lot of superintendents at different times throughout this process,

this funding landscape that's changing like every week for these people. So, I mean, I talked to an interim superintendent of a rural district out in Illinois. She only has 200 students, so her budget is very small compared to a lot of the districts in the country. And she says, like, even the loss of $10,000, like something that would be so easy to write off if you were in, I don't know, even a big district

like Fairfax County in Virginia or obviously, something that would be so easy to write off if you were in, I don't know, even a big district like Fairfax County in Virginia or obviously like in New York City, she can't deal with that. That's a huge deal for her. So she's looking into supplemental federal grants to fill the gaps. But a lot of those have stipulations that she wasn't comfortable with. One of them, she had to be okay with allowing federal ICE agents on the premises of the school if they ever came knocking and she wasn't ready to do that. There's also a district in southeastern Montana that I've kept up with called Hardin Public Schools where the superintendent there has been really worried about the cuts to Medicaid.

I mean, he said this past year was the first time since he's been there that he was able to fully staff their school clinic with nurses and health professionals. And so losing that funding in the future will put his kids' health at risk. And schools are just this huge ecosystem far beyond the classroom. And I think that's what's hard to know when you're not interfacing with one every day. I also think that it has a lot to do with how conservatives view the role of schools and how liberals view the role of schools, because there has been this growing movement to take a whole-person approach to schools, because parents work long hours, they need

after-school care so that those kids don't get in trouble and that there's homework help. Things like healthcare, for example. Teachers only have some 40 minutes or so, depending on the school that they're in, to work with kids to be able to teach the subject matter that they're teaching. But kids come into those classrooms, as we know, with a whole lot of other issues, influences, things that are happening in their lives. And it can be powerless for a lot of teachers. And that's why there had been this movement and has been this movement to try to address

all of those issues or at least more of those issues than just the reading, writing, and arithmetic things that they could be getting outside of school that maybe they aren't like health care, food, and things like that. And, you know, when it comes to the most vulnerable populations, like special education students, for example, any disruption to the funding mechanism and the fact that there's already a shortage in special ed teachers, it makes it that much more difficult for an administrator in a school and for parents in those schools to know what to expect to be able to get done what they want to get done.

But what conservatives will say is that the family is where this needs to start and that it's a family's role to be able to take care of the things outside of the reading, writing, and arithmetic. Absolutely. And we've also seen a lot of this change since schools closed for the COVID-19 pandemic. I mean, that really shifted what people saw a school as responsible for. When I talk to superintendents now, a lot of them still talk about in 2020 and 2021 when their kids weren't able to get meals at home. They had to come to school to get their bagged lunches every day. They had to come sit in the parking lot of their school to get on the internet to do this virtual schooling that for so many is a given,

but it's not for everyone. And it's those margins that are really going to suffer under losing a lot of these programs that are held up right now, as well as just cuts to the department in the future. All right. Well, we have to leave it there for today. Sequoia Carrillo, thanks for being with us. Thank you for having me. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. And I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent.

And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.