THE WAR ON LEARNING

HOW TRUMP DECLARED VICTORY OVER AMERICA'S KIDS

Project 2025's Most Destructive Wish Came True — And the Children Are Paying the Tab

There's an old saying that you should never pick a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel. Donald Trump, apparently, has never heard of it — because he picked a fight with something far more consequential: the children who buy crayons by the box. While the world watched for mushroom clouds over Tehran, the real war was being waged in school hallways in rural Appalachia, in special-ed classrooms in South Chicago, and in the overwhelmed offices of civil rights attorneys drowning in a backlog of cases that nobody in Washington has the staff left to read.

Welcome to Trump's other war. No aircraft carriers. No press briefings from generals. Just a slow, methodical, bureaucratic demolition job — carried out with the quiet efficiency of a wrecking crew working the night shift.

The Blueprint Was Never a Secret

Here's the thing about Project 2025's Heritage Foundation wish list: it wasn't subtle. Abolish the Department of Education. Return power to the states. Let the market sort it out. It read less like a policy document and more like a fever dream scrawled on a cocktail napkin at a libertarian fundraiser.

And yet, there it was — in black and white, 900 pages deep — the roadmap to dismantling one of the most consequential federal agencies in American history.

Trump, who famously claimed he'd never read Project 2025, proceeded to execute it with the kind of focused precision he has historically reserved for... well, almost nothing else. On March 20, 2025, he signed an executive order instructing Education Secretary Linda McMahon to take every legally permissible step to shut the department down. McMahon, to her credit, did not appear to need much convincing.

The strategy was elegant in its cynicism. Since Congress created the Department of Education in 1979, only Congress can formally abolish it. So the administration did the next best thing: it decided to hollow it out like a Halloween pumpkin and leave the shell on the porch.

Death by a Thousand Cuts (and One Very Large Chainsaw)

The dismantling unfolded across four brutal levers — each one designed to make the department functionally useless while maintaining the legal fiction that it still exists.

The Personnel Massacre

First came the staffing apocalypse. The department's workforce was slashed by roughly 50% — from over 4,100 employees to fewer than 2,200. But the cuts weren't random. They were surgical, targeting the offices that actually protected kids:

The Office for Civil Rights (OCR) — the federal body that investigates Title IX violations, racial discrimination, and systemic inequity — was gutted so severely that some regional offices reportedly lost up to 90% of their staff. Tens of thousands of active civil rights cases now sit in a backlog that a skeleton crew couldn't clear with a decade and a forklift.
The Institute of Education Sciences (IES) — the research brain of the department — lost over 90% of its internal staff, and DOGE canceled more than $800 million in research contracts. The nation's K-12 data pipelines? Effectively blinded. America is now flying its education system by feel, in the dark, over a mountain range.
Federal Student Aid lost half its workforce, creating spectacular friction in managing a $1.6 trillion student loan portfolio. One imagines the remaining staff staring at their screens with the quiet desperation of air traffic controllers who've been told half the tower is closed.

The Great Program Shuffle

Next came the bureaucratic sleight of hand: offloading 118 separate programs to other agencies through interagency agreements — no congressional approval required.

Title I (the $18 billion lifeline for high-poverty schools)? Shipped to the Department of Labor.
Office of Indian Education? Handed to the Department of the Interior.
International Education Programs? Tossed to the State Department.

The logic, apparently, is that if you scatter the pieces of a puzzle across enough different rooms, eventually nobody will bother putting it back together. It's not dismantlement — it's administrative entropy, weaponized.

The Budget Starvation Diet

Finally, the money. Congress passed a budget. Congress funded these programs. And then the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) simply... sat on the money.

Using an obscure process called "apportionment" — the routine step where OMB releases congressionally approved funds into agency accounts — the administration froze nearly $2 billion in education spending across 32 to 35 competitive grant programs. The numbers are almost comically lopsided:

Program	Budgeted	Actually Released
Education Innovation & Research	$235 Million	$65,000
American History & Civics	$23 Million	$200,000
Native Hawaiian Education	$46 Million	$350,000
Magnet Schools Assistance	$139 Million	$35 Million
Institute of Education Sciences	$765 Million	~$438 Million

$65,000 for Education Innovation and Research. That's not a budget. That's a rounding error. That's what a mid-sized law firm spends on printer cartridges in a quarter.

The cruelest part? More than $1 billion of this frozen money is tied to legislative expiration clocks. If OMB holds the line until September 30, the money doesn't go to schools — it evaporates back into the U.S. Treasury. The administration isn't stealing the money. It's just letting it expire, like a coupon for a grocery store that burned down.

OMB Director Russell Vought has argued, with a straight face, that this isn't technically "impoundment" because they haven't said they'll never spend the money. This is the federal budget equivalent of saying you haven't technically eaten the last slice of pizza because it's still technically in the refrigerator — while you stand in front of the open fridge, blocking the door, until it goes bad.

The Real Casualties: The Kids Nobody Is Talking About

Somewhere in the fog of executive orders and apportionment footnotes, it's easy to lose sight of what this actually means in a classroom on a Tuesday morning. So let's be specific.

Children with Disabilities

America has 8.2 million students receiving special education services under IDEA. The administration's plan involves transferring oversight of special education to the Department of Health and Human Services — an agency that, whatever its virtues, was not designed to enforce the intricate, legally mandated requirements of Individualized Education Programs. Families who once had a federal backstop when their district failed to provide speech therapy or assistive technology now have... a phone number for a different agency that doesn't know what an IEP is.

Low-Income and Rural Students

The abrupt termination of the Full-Service Community Schools grant — a $380 million clawback in late 2025 — didn't just cut a budget line. It cut the free tutoring. It cut the mental health counselors. It cut the after-school programs and the family engagement coordinators. In rural communities where the school is the only social infrastructure for miles, this isn't an inconvenience. It's an amputation.

Students Facing Discrimination

With the OCR reduced to a skeleton crew, students facing racial discrimination, sexual harassment, or systemic inequity have been left with a federal complaint process that moves at the speed of continental drift. This is not an accident. A civil rights office that can't process civil rights complaints isn't an office — it's a suggestion box that nobody empties.

This is the New Jim Crow in bureaucratic clothing. The administration didn't need to pass discriminatory laws. It simply defunded the office that enforced the non-discriminatory ones, and then left the states to do as they please. The effect is identical. The fingerprints are just harder to find.

Students in Mental Health Crisis

The administration halted roughly $1 billion in school-based mental health grants — citing conflicts with DEI requirements embedded in recruitment language. In the midst of a documented, generational youth mental health crisis, the federal government's response was to defund the school counselors, social workers, and psychologists. Particularly in rural areas and underfunded urban centers, these positions existed only because of federal grants. They are now gone.

The Voucher Hustle: A Masterclass in Misdirection

While the cuts were bleeding public schools dry, the administration unveiled its vision for the future of American education: a federal voucher program framework, established in the July 2025 budget reconciliation bill, designed to direct $30 to $50 billion annually toward private and charter schools.

Let's pause to appreciate the geometry of this. The same administration that:

Cut funding for low-income students
Gutted civil rights enforcement
Defunded mental health services for vulnerable kids

...is now proposing to redirect tens of billions of federal dollars toward private and religious schools — many of which have explicit policies discriminating against the very students the cuts hurt most. LGBTQ+ students. Students with disabilities. Students of color.

The federal voucher program doesn't just defund public education. It subsidizes the alternatives that exclude the kids public education was built to protect. It is, in the most literal sense, a government program designed to fund discrimination with public money while simultaneously dismantling the office that would investigate it.

The Reconstruction: What It Will Actually Take

Here's the uncomfortable truth: rebuilding the Department of Education after this will not be like flipping a light switch. It will be more like rewiring a house that someone has systematically stripped of its electrical infrastructure while also setting fire to the blueprints.

Policy architects and civil rights advocates point to four non-negotiable pillars of reconstruction:

1. The Legal Unwind

A future administration must issue an immediate executive order revoking the March 2025 directive and rescinding all education-related interagency agreements. The 118 programs scattered across the Departments of Labor, Interior, State, and Treasury must be repatriated — along with their data, their active grant files, and whatever institutional memory survived the exodus.

2. Radical Restaffing

The department needs a massive, targeted hiring campaign focused on the offices that were most devastated:

The IES must be rebuilt from near-zero to restore the nation's education data infrastructure — adopting frameworks like the 2026 Northern Report to rapidly rehire statisticians and stabilize the National Assessment of Educational Progress.
The OCR needs an immediate injection of hundreds of civil rights attorneys and investigators to clear a backlog that has been growing, unchecked, for over a year.

3. Financial Reconstruction

The new OMB director must immediately release clean, un-footnoted apportionments for every frozen program. And because over $1 billion in approved funding may have already expired back into the Treasury, Congress will almost certainly need to pass an emergency supplemental appropriations bill to restore and extend those timelines.

4. Regulatory Restoration

The anti-DEI funding mandates must be struck down through swift regulatory guidance. The voucher framework cannot be instantly dismantled without congressional cooperation — but the ED can immediately impose stringent accountability, data reporting, and civil rights compliance audits on every private entity receiving those federal dollars. Public money should meet public standards. Full stop.

The Deepest Scar

The hardest thing to rebuild won't be the budget lines or the org charts. It will be the institutional memory — the veteran program officers, the data analysts, the compliance experts who spent careers understanding the intricate machinery of federal education policy and who, when the reductions-in-force came, left public service and didn't look back.

You can pass a supplemental appropriations bill in a week. You cannot replace twenty years of expertise in a week. The people who knew how the machine worked are gone. The machine has been scattered across a dozen agencies. And the instruction manual was written by the people who wanted it destroyed.

The Final Word

Trump's war on the Department of Education was never really about bureaucratic efficiency or returning power to the states. States with money and political will already had power. The Department of Education existed, fundamentally, as a financial and civil rights safety net for the students that states and markets were most likely to leave behind.

Dismantling it didn't liberate anyone. It just removed the net.

The kids falling through it right now — the kid with dyslexia whose IEP isn't being enforced, the kid in rural Mississippi whose school counselor position was federally funded and is now gone, the kid who filed a Title IX complaint six months ago and hasn't heard back because the regional OCR office is running on three people — those kids didn't get freedom. They got abandoned.

History will not be kind to the architects of this particular war. Wars fought against children rarely age well.

The question isn't whether we rebuild. The question is how many kids we lose in the meantime.

Published June 3, 2026 | Education Policy & Civil Rights

Sources & References