The Trump Administration’s efforts to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education are appearing to gain new momentum, amid reports that the White House has drafted an executive order calling on Education Secretary Linda McMahon to shutter the agency.
While Trump has not yet signed an order, according to draft text obtained by Education Week, it would direct McMahon to “take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education.”
Concerns over the messaging of the announcement and resistance to it may have factored into White House delays in taking action on it, according to reports.
Despite those delays, it’s clear that the Trump administration wants to make sweeping changes in federal education policy, including calling for a significant reduction in headcount at the education agency and the elimination of different kinds of programming, including resources and staffing devoted to diversity, equity, and inclusion.
The administration has also stated its intention to move significant parts of the department’s work to state education departments, with other responsibilities possibly falling to other federal agencies such as the Treasury and Justice departments.
It’s uncertain exactly what changes Trump will pursue—and how legal challenges could affect those actions. But it’s likely that if his proposals were carried out, they would have significant downstream implications for education companies that provide an array of products and services to schools.
EdWeek Market Brief spoke to analysts, academic experts, and advisors to education companies about what changes the Trump administration is likely to make to the education department and the billions of dollars in K-12 funding it oversees, and how product providers should be ready to respond.
There are proactive steps education organizations can take to position themselves—and their district customers—for change. But education organizations should also be measured in how they view the disruptions, and try to take the long view.
“Wait things out for a little bit. Don’t overreact,” said Morgan Polikoff, professor of education at the University of Southern California’s school of education and faculty co-director of its EdPolicy Hub. Polikoff’s research has focused on curriculum, academic standards, and assessments.
“I don’t see it as very likely they will be successful at cutting the department of education, even if they do break it up in certain ways.”
Here are four critical takeaways that providers of products and services should keep in mind, as the drama in the nation’s capital plays out.
1. Vendors Can Play Key Role in Helping Districts’ Navigate the Many Unknowns
While the impact that eliminating the department of education or reallocating some of its responsibilities may ultimately have on districts’ day-to-day operations remains is unclear, the short-term downside for some K-12 vendors is the chilling effect the moves may have on districts’ willingness to make big purchases.
“Things are so uncertain, which tends to lead folks to batten down the hatches and not make decisions,” said Doug Lynch, senior fellow at the University of Southern California’s Rossier School of Education and director of its ed-tech accelerator program.
Districts leaders may have doubts — justifiable or not — about whether federal funding such as Title I will actually continue. Education companies should be prepared to offer guidance to the school systems they serve as those districts work to assess how changes on the federal level will affect their budgets.
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To get ahead of any complications generated by disruptions coming out of Washington, Lynch said vendors need to get creative, and offer districts contract terms and conditions that make it easier for them to move forward with a deal. Those could include longer-term contracts with larger payments built into later years when the vendors and K-12 decision-makers have a better sense of future budget scenarios.
Being flexible in contract structure might also be an especially good option for startups and smaller companies that have enough backing from venture capital or private equity funding to not have to rely heavily on cash flow, Lynch said.
Securing long-term contracts with districts may also help smaller companies bring in new investment funding and show existing investors’ there is long-term interest in the product.
“Rather than a two-year contract that’s payable upfront, have a five-year contract where there are payables in years four and five,” he said. “If an investor sees that you have signed contracts, even if you don’t have cash, that’s worth funding to help keep your doors open.”
For example, a company that signs several millions of dollars worth of deals but isn’t getting paid for 18 months will still likely be able to get bridge funding to support those efforts, particularly because the need for K-12 education is “not going to go away,” he said.
Education companies also now have the opportunity to help amplify district voices, said David DeSchryver, senior vice president and co-director of research at Whiteboard Advisors, and make it clear how federal funding has supported their goals and maximized the impact of state and local funding.
Providers in the market should be “helping districts on their messaging to convey the work that they do,” he said. School districts “have a lot going on, they don’t necessarily always have the communications and the PR that a vendor may have and that’s something that they can bring to the conversation,” he said.
Vendors that align with school districts on those fronts will build goodwill with districts that lays the foundation for a long-term relationship, he said.
It’s going to be important that companies help districts communicate the work that is accomplished through federal funding, to parents, in a “very local and very meaningful way” – which he knows isn’t an easy task. “There’s going to be a lot of lot of noise that they have to work through.”
2. Title I, IDEA Funding Likely to Shift – Not Disappear
There are many questions surrounding the possible closure of the department of education. The most urgent one for many companies in the K-12 space what is what impact it would have on the administration and regulation of billions in federal grant funding for K-12 districts and schools.
Those include the $18 billion Title I program that directs funding toward helping students in poverty, and the $15 billion Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, or IDEA, program that supports students with special education needs.
There are many other federal programs that face an uncertain future, too — including Title II, which supports professional development; Title III, funding devoted to helping English learners; and Title IV, which backs ed tech and safe and healthy schools.
While the draft executive order could result in oversight of Title I and IDEA funding moving to another federal agency, such as health and human services, or it being distributed through block grants to states—something Trump proposed during his first term in office —there is no apparent political appetite for doing away with the funding.
One factor is the programs’ political clout is that Republican-led states rely on Title I and IDEA funding to a greater degree than those led by Democrats.
A recent analysis from the National Education Policy Center, for example, found that states that have the highest percentage of their education budget coming from federal sources overwhelmingly voted for Trump in the 2024 election. Nineteen of 20 states with the highest percentages of education funds coming from the federal government voted in support of Trump. The center has published analyses critical of the Trump administration’s proposals on DEI and other areas.
Similarly, blue states make up the majority of states that rely the least on federal funding to support their education budgets, with 15 out of 20 of those with the lowest percentage voting to support former Vice President Harris.
“Massachusetts can walk away from Title I tomorrow and they will be OK. Alabama cannot. Mississippi cannot. ,” said Derek Black, a constitutional law professor at the University of South Carolina.
3. Remember That States and Districts Already Have Broad Authority on Spending Federal Education Funding
Advocates of a smaller federal footprint in education argue that Trump’s changes have the potential to reduce federal oversight and give states and school districts more flexibility in how they use dollars coming out of the Department of Education.
Neil McCluskey, director of the educational freedom center at the CATO Institute, a libertarian think tank, said it’s possible districts would find new and innovative ways to spend federal money through Title I and other programs, if the money was distributed through block grants or other means, as some Republicans have advocated.
Ideally, that change could create more “bang for the buck” and fewer dollars would be spent on compliance costs, he added. It’s still too early, he said, to know which types of federal education funding would shift to block grants.
Yet it’s not evident how a change in how grants are distributed would create new flexibility that does not already exist in Title I, which is known for having a vast range of applicable uses, from academic supports like math and English intervention programs to efforts to boost community and family engagement.
Title I funds are distributed to state education agencies, which then distribute and manage the funds in line with the state’s educational goals.
Districts that receive Title I funds are then allowed to use the dollars within the parameters set by the state to address the districts’ top priorities.
In addition, many federal education programs are specifically designed to supplement K-12 priorities that states and local districts are already doing, DeSchryver said.
For those calling for more states and local officials to be given more freedom in how they spend federal funding, “for most of these programs, the financial requirements already do that,” he said.
So the reality is “these funds are already very flexible,” the Whiteboard official said. If the question is “can you use this [money] in a wide variety of ways? And the answer is absolutely.”
Recent EdWeek Market Brief research offers a window into the breadth of how districts spend money through major programs like Title I.
A survey conducted last year of district and school leaders found that the largest portion of respondents said their systems spend Title I money on reading programs. But support for paraprofessionals and support staff was the next-highest priority, and a diverse array of uses, including spending on math programs, high-dosage tutoring, social-emotional learning, followed.
4. Broad Effort to Close Department Likely to Face Uphill Battle, Constitutional Challenges
Republicans have sought to shutter the department for decades, and Trump promised to make it happen during his 2024 presidential campaign.
Leaving aside that sweeping goal, since taking office, his administration says it has cancelled hundreds of millions in contracts related to research projects and data collection at the department, and issued orders designed to end programs related to diversity, equity, and inclusion.
The U.S. Department of Education was established by an act of Congress, and there are doubts about whether he could eliminate the agency without action by federal lawmakers. And it’s difficult to predict what changes the White House could bring to the department through an executive order.
Legislation introduced in the U.S. House and Senate seek to bring about some of the changes Trump envisions to the department, but so far, there haven’t been “any big indications that there is a constituency in Congress” to support a total elimination of the department of education, said Derek Black, a professor of law at the University of South Carolina.
“The department is a creature of Congress. Only Congress can unravel it. Only Congress can move it around and put it in different places,” said Black.
Of course, he added, those limits are based on the assumption “that people will follow the rule of law.”
Sara Kloek, the vice president of education and children’s policy for the Software & Information Industry Association, said one of the indirect benefits the Department of Education brings to to the K-12 sector is its “convening power,” which would be missed if the agency is gutted.
She pointed to the department’s role in giving digital providers ideas about effective strategies — including during Trump’s first term, when its ed-tech office provided suggestions about how to deliver education during the pandemic.
The agency has been “particularly thoughtful about how to implement technology in classrooms and providing best practices without making it a top-down approach, Kloek said.
The draft executive order is largely asking McMahon to take actions that the administration had already begun implementing anyway, said Rick Hess, director of education policy studies of the American Enterprise Institute think tank and an Education Week columnist. Those include reducing employee head count, shrinking some programs, and moving elements of the department to other agencies.
McMahon acknowledged herself, during her confirmation hearings, that the department can’t be shuttered via executive order, Hess added.
“What’s being called an executive order here is really just a fancy email,” he said.
Companies that were affected by the cancellation of $300 million in teacher preparation contracts, as well as contracts that were terminated as the administration began dismantling the Institute of Education Sciences, the research branch of the education department, have experienced a significant impact. But for “the lion’s share of people working in or with K-12 school systems,” Hess said, so far “there’s no evidence that there’s going to be significant cuts that will have an impact on them.”
Staff Writer Emma Kate Fittes Contributed to This Report