Trump’s Proposed Education Budget Would Slash Title I and Establish Vouchers. It is Likely Dead on Arrival.
President Trump released his Fiscal Year 2021 federal budget proposal on Monday. A president’s February budget proposal describes federal appropriations the President would like to see enacted for the next fiscal year, which begins on October 1st. Congress will deliberate on the President’s budget proposal and, if recent years are any indication, delay enacting a budget by passing a series of continuing resolutions. Then, if the past three years are any indication, Congress will appropriate federal funding for a different set of priorities than the ones proposed by President Trump. It is a good thing that President Trump’s new budget proposal is largely a fantasy designed to appeal to his base in an election year. Taken seriously, it would be a nightmare.
Nobody believes Congress will enact a budget that reflects the priorities expressed in the President’s budget proposal—slashing domestic spending on Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act over ten years by $1 trillion, cutting food stamps and Temporary Assistance to Needy Families, reducing funding for public housing by 43 percent below its FY 2020 level, and eliminating the Social Services Block Grant. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities describes these proposals in more detail.
Alarmingly, the budget for the U.S. Department of Education would slash funding and, at the same time, restructure the purpose and operation of Title I, the Department’s largest and most essential program to support school districts serving concentrations of children in poverty. The proposed budget would collapse 29 programs, including Title I, into a single Elementary and Secondary Education for the Disadvantaged Block Grant (ESED). Education Week‘s Andrew Ujifusa and Evie Blad report that the proposal “would cut the Education Department’s budget by $5.6 billion, reducing it to $66.6 billion, a 7.8 percent decrease. Its new Elementary and Secondary Education for the Disadvantaged Block Grant, meanwhile, would represent a $4.7 billion cut from the current funding levels for the 29 programs that would be merged.”
The federal government’s analysis of the budget proposal explains that the Elementary and CONTINUE READING: Trump’s Proposed Education Budget Would Slash Title I and Establish Vouchers. It is Likely Dead on Arrival. | janresseger
