Overview
- Education Secretary Linda McMahon, who testified Tuesday before the Senate spending panel, defended the 2027 budget and said the department is still weighing whether to move special education programs under IDEA to Labor or Health and Human Services.
- The proposal would fold 17 K–12 grants into a $2 billion Make Education Great Again block grant, eliminate about $1.2 billion in Federal TRIO college access programs, and reduce the Office for Civil Rights to roughly $91 million, a cut of about 35 percent.
- Republicans and Democrats, led by Appropriations Chair Susan Collins, objected to scrapping TRIO and warned that bundling rural and other targeted supports would weaken proven help for low‑income and remote communities.
- Sen. Patty Murray warned that shifting special education out of the department could erode 50 years of protections for students with disabilities under federal law and could run afoul of statutory requirements.
- Service breakdowns featured heavily, with a Sanders report finding zero 2025 OCR resolutions on sexual harassment, racial discrimination and restraint after deep staff cuts, and senators citing 88,000 borrowers stuck in Public Service Loan Forgiveness reviews as the department transfers more than 100 programs to other agencies.