Since former President Donald Trump won the November election, educators’ concerns have centered on his politically complicated pledges to cut federal education funding and dismantle the U.S. Department of Education, and what stamp former World Wrestling Entertainment CEO Linda McMahon, whom he plans to nominate to lead the U.S. Department of Education, might put on the agency.
But Trump’s vision for disruptive change crosses all Cabinet agencies, with potentially broad implications for K-12 schools.
That’s because many agencies beyond the Education Department have a toehold in what schools do and the policies that affect their students.
Trump’s Cabinet picks could affect everything from the food that’s served in school cafeterias to what school safety strategies are prioritized in federal grant programs.
Here’s a breakdown of how nine key officials could influence education.
Click on a cabinet agency to jump to the relevant section:
- Agriculture
- Commerce
- Defense
- Health and Human Services
- Homeland Security
- Interior
- Justice
- Other relevant officials
Agriculture
Former Trump policy aide Brooke Rollins, his pick to lead the U.S. Department of Agriculture, has not outlined public positions on one of the agency’s key K-12 responsibilities: overseeing federal school meal programs.
Rollins, a lawyer, served as the acting director of the Domestic Policy Council at the end of Trump’s first administration. She’s most recently served as president and CEO of the America First Policy Institute, which was formed in 2021 to advance Trump’s political agenda, and which has advocated for using public funds to send students to private schools.
If confirmed, Rollins will oversee the Agriculture Department at a time when many of Trump’s political allies, including the authors of the conservative Project 2025 agenda, a list of recommendations for every federal agencies spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation, have pushed for restricting or eliminating what’s known as the community eligibility program. (Trump sought to distance himself from Project 2025 during the campaign, but he has selected several of its contributors for positions inside his administration.)
Community Eligibility, created under the Obama administration, allows schools and districts to provide universal free school meals if at least 25 percent of students automatically qualify through participation in social safety-net programs, like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, commonly known as food stamps.
Anti-hunger advocates have credited community eligibility with driving down rates of child hunger and eliminating the stigma of eating free school meals. But conservative members of Congress have said it is too expansive, providing a free benefit to students whose families could afford to pay out of pocket.
The next agriculture secretary will also oversee implementation of new nutrition standards for school meal programs. Those rules, finalized by the Biden administration in April 2024, include a new, gradual limit on added sugars and phased-in sodium restrictions.
The first Trump administration criticized such heightened nutrition requirements. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s pick for Health and Human Services secretary, has called for an end to processed foods in school meals, but he would have limited influence over the program if confirmed to that role.
Commerce
Howard Lutnick, Trump’s transition co-chair and his pick to lead the U.S. Department of Commerce, would oversee preparations for the 2030 census as the leader of the agency.
The decennial population count has significant consequences for school districts. Census data are used to allot funding for more than 300 federal programs, including the National School Lunch Program, Title I grants for high-poverty schools, and Head Start early-education programs. Districts also use population data to set attendance boundaries and to plan for projected shifts in enrollment.
In his first term, Trump’s administration pushed unsuccessfully to add a question about citizenship status to the Census and to alter the population count to exclude undocumented people. Opponents of that plan argued it could have a chilling effect on responses from households afraid of federal immigration enforcement and threaten the accuracy of the final tally.
While Lutnick—a billionaire investor and CEO of investment bank Cantor Fitzgerald—has not offered a public position on the Census, Project 2025 recommends that Trump should revive efforts to add the citizenship question.
Defense
Trump picked former Fox News host Pete Hegseth to serve as secretary of defense, a role that includes oversight of a network of schools that educate children on military installations around the world.
The Department of Defense Education Activity operates 160 schools in 11 countries with a combined enrollment of 66,000 students.
Hegseth is a long-time proponent of purging schools of what he sees as leftist ideology and promoting instruction asserting Christianity’s role in the nation’s history and promoting patriotism, Politico reported in December. Leading the Defense Department would allow him to appoint a new director for the DODEA who could reshape things like teacher training and curriculum.
Project 2025 calls for a complete audit of the schools’ policies and curricula and legislation to create education savings accounts, which would allow military families to send their children to private schools.
The Pentagon is also currently collaborating with a group of state schools chiefs to make it easier for states to access data on students’ postsecondary enlistment. Including such information in college and career data could give states a clearer picture of graduates’ career paths.
Health and Human Services
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s pick to lead the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, has a long record of controversial positions on issues relevant to K-12 schools, including opposition to states’ school vaccine requirements and COVID-19 mitigation efforts.
If confirmed, the environmental lawyer would lead an agency that collects and reports data on student drug use, suicidal thoughts, exposure to violence, and other issues related to child well-being. In response to a parents’ rights movement that is frequently skeptical of student data collection, some states have withdrawn from that national Youth Risk Behavior Survey in recent years.
Kennedy’s vaccine criticism includes parroting debunked claims about the safety and efficacy of childhood vaccines. Leading the nation’s public health infrastructure would give him a new megaphone to share those ideas, even if he does not take any concrete policy actions.
The Health and Human Services Department includes the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which develops the immunization schedules that inform states’ school vaccination requirements. It also includes the Food and Drug Administration, which regulates the vaccines themselves.
HHS also oversees Head Start, an early-childhood education program for low-income children. Project 2025 calls for eliminating that program, calling it wasteful and ineffective, but Kennedy has not taken a public position on the matter.
The agency also oversees the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which has sought to make it easier for schools to seek Medicaid reimbursements for special education and mental health services.
As part of his “Make America Healthy Again” agenda, Kennedy has also called for removing processed foods from school meals. That program is largely the responsibility of the Agriculture Department, but Kennedy could influence it by rewriting a planned update of the national dietary guidelines that help shape nutrition requirements for school meals.
Homeland Security
South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Homeland Security, would be a key figure in the president-elect’s plans for a dramatic shift in immigration policy with strong implications for schools.
Noem, who once sent her state’s National Guard unit to Texas’ southern border, could help determine how immigration officials interact with schools, how mixed-status families are handled in deportation efforts, and public messaging about the administration’s plans. All of those choices would have consequences for undocumented students, and could affect school climate and student engagement in communities with large immigrant populations.
An estimated 5.5 million children lived with an unauthorized immigrant parent in 2019, representing about 7 percent of the U.S. child population, according to the Migration Policy Institute think tank. Of these children, 4.7 million, or 86 percent, were U.S. citizens; 726,000, or 13 percent, were themselves unauthorized.
Noem has said she supports aggressive immigration enforcement.
Trump plans to rescind a longstanding policy that has discouraged immigration agents from carrying out enforcement activities in places considered to be “protected areas"—schools, hospitals, churches, and other places where children gather, such as bus stops, after-school programs, and child care facilities, NBC News reported in December.
Trump’s aides have also pushed for a challenge Plyler v. Doe, a 1982 U.S. Supreme Court decision that made access to a free, public education a constitutional right regardless of a student’s immigration status.
Homeland Security also includes the Cyber and Infrastructure Security Agency, which coordinates a clearinghouse of school safety strategies and advises schools on security and preparation for natural disasters.
CISA also oversees federal efforts to help school and district administrators respond to the growing threat of cyber attacks.
Interior
Trump’s plans to appoint North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum as Secretary of the Interior were met with praise from tribal leaders in his state, the Rapid City Journal reported.
In addition to overseeing public lands, the Interior Department operates the Bureau of Indian Education, which operates or supports 183 schools on 64 reservations in 23 states, serving approximately 40,000 Native American students.
The agency has been criticized for poor academic performance, lax oversight of its schools, and failure to comply with the federal Every Student Succeeds Act. Project 2025 suggests offering education savings accounts to families with children in BIE schools, which would they could use to send their children to private schools.
Current Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, a member of the Pueblo of Laguna and the first Native American person to hold the position, launched an investigation into historical instances of abuse and neglect in federal Indian boarding schools from the early 1800s through the 1970s. An investigation Haaland released in July found that at least 973 American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian children died while attending federally operated or supported schools.
Justice
Pam Bondi, the former Florida attorney general and Trump’s pick for U.S. attorney general, has sided with the president-elect on some of the most contentious issues that affect K-12 education, including school safety measures and opposition to protections for undocumented students.
If confirmed to lead the Justice Department, she will oversee programs related to student civil rights, school safety, and funding for school police.
The agency’s office for civil rights often works with the U.S. Department of Education to interpret and enforce civil rights laws related to disability rights, LGBTQ+ status, race, ethnicity, and students’ national origins.
Trump’s first administration scrapped guidance issued under the Obama administration on preventing racial disparities in school discipline and on the rights of transgender students to use restrooms and pronouns that align with their gender identity. Conservatives criticized Biden’s positions on transgender students and school sports, and reversing those policies is likely to be a priority for Trump’s second administration.
As state attorney general, Bondi joined a multi-state case challenging Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, a policy former President Barack Obama created through executive action, which allowed undocumented people brought to the United States as children a pathway to remain in the country.
Bondi was Florida attorney general during the 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., in which a former student killed 17 people and wounded 17 others. Following that tragedy, she worked with victims’ families to pass a comprehensive school safety bill that included new funding for student mental health supports and security measures, like locks and cameras; required schools to establish threat-assessment teams to respond to concerning student conduct; and established a program that allowed trained, screened “school guardians” to carry guns campus.
That law also raised the minimum gun purchase age from 18 to 21 and included a “red flag law,” a policy supported by both Bondi and Trump that allows courts to suspend an individual’s access to firearms if they are deemed a threat to themselves or others. Those laws have faced some criticism from gun-rights organizations, but they’ve also been supported by school safety researchers citing research that mass shooters often signal their intention to harm in advance.
While school safety is largely governed by state and local policy, the Justice Department administers several programs that affect it, including the Community Oriented Policing grants that can be used to hire school resource officers, and violence-prevention programs.
Other key officials
Some officials in positions that aren’t Cabinet-level could also have dramatic impacts on K-12 schools.
Office of Management and Budget: Trump selected Russell Vought, a co-author of Project 2025, to direct the Office on Management and Budget, which helps prepare budgets that align with the president’s priorities.
Project 2025 calls for reducing federal education spending and consolidating programs into broad block grants, which Trump proposed unsuccessfully in his first term.
Vought previously led the office at the end of Trump’s first term.
Federal Communications Commission: Trump chose Brendan Carr to be chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, an agency that oversees the $4 billion E-Rate program, which funds school technology, cybersecurity, and internet access.
E-Rate is funded through the $9 billion Universal Service Fund, which collects fees from telephone and cable companies. The Supreme Court is considering a lawsuit contending those fees are an illegal tax.
Carr wrote the Project 2025 chapter on the FCC. In it, he says Congress should require Big Tech companies, like Google and Amazon, to pay into the Universal Service Fund.
As a current commissioner, Carr has supported a push to roll back net neutrality regulations, which were recently struck down by a federal appeals court.
