Students with disabilities and their families could experience significant ripple effects from the incoming Trump administration’s pledges to dramatically scale back the federal government’s role in education policy.
But the policy proposals that have emerged so far raise a plethora of doubts about whether the administration has a coherent and complete vision for overhauling special education, experts say.
For the last half-century, federal law has enshrined a right for students with disabilities to receive an education on par with that of their peers without disabilities. The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, or IDEA, signed into law under a different name by President Gerald Ford in 1975, requires schools to work with staff and parents to craft individualized education programs (IEPs) for all eligible students with disabilities who need additional services and accommodations.
There’s no evidence that IEPs are at risk of being eliminated
The number of students nationwide who are protected under IDEA has doubled since then to roughly 7.5 million, or 15 percent of the overall K-12 population. IDEA also supplies billions of dollars for schools nationwide to support those students, and establishes procedures for parents to hold schools accountable in court when they fall short of their legal obligations.
Neither Trump nor anyone in his orbit has proposed eliminating IEPs, contrary to what some users have claimed without evidence in social media posts that have gone viral in recent days. Nor has anyone associated with Trump signaled a desire to overturn IDEA, the decades-old federal law that makes them mandatory.
Lindsey Burke, the education policy director for the conservative Heritage Foundation who wrote much of the education section of the widely circulated federal policy proposal document called Project 2025, told USA Today on Nov. 15 that the document “doesn’t touch IEPs at all” and won’t prevent school districts from maintaining them.
Even so, Trump and influential conservatives who have worked with him have published several education policy proposals that could, if implemented, result in reduced funding for schools to support students with disabilities, fewer opportunities for parents to advocate for their children’s rights, and heightened confusion over how to ensure students with disabilities can access an appropriate education.
Trump has said he wants to “abolish” the U.S. Department of Education. If that agency goes away or shrinks, or if its functions move to other agencies, federal efforts to scrutinize school districts and states that violate special education law could be compromised. There could also be less funding for research that supports improving instructional practices and technology tools that benefit students with disabilities, special education experts say.
If Republican lawmakers in Congress execute Trump’s promises to slash the federal budget and cut spending on education, states and districts could be forced to dedicate a larger share of their finite budgets to the costs of serving students with disabilities, at the expense of other crucial priorities.
And the impacts on America’s large population of people with disabilities could be far-reaching. If Trump acts on plans to slash federal Medicaid funding, K-12 students and adults with disabilities could face steeper hurdles to accessing affordable health care.
“Disability itself cuts across all backgrounds, and impacts most people in the country,” said Meghan Burke, a professor of special education at Vanderbilt University. “Everyone should have a vested interest in making sure we’re still providing services and supports to students with disabilities.” (Meghan Burke is not related to Lindsey Burke from the Heritage Foundation.)
Educators are awaiting a fully formed education policy from Trump
The key word for all of these scenarios is “could.” Close readers of Trump’s education policies have found numerous inconsistencies and gaps that suggest an education policy strategy that’s less than fully formed.
For instance, Trump’s team has said it wants to shift control over K-12 schools almost entirely to states and local districts.
But Trump and many Republican lawmakers also want the federal government to spend up to $10 billion a year on tax credits for a new nationwide school choice program. That effort would instantly become one of the costliest line items in the federal budget for K-12 education.
Project 2025, the conservative policy document crafted by many of Trump’s allies and former aides, proposes to allow states to divert IDEA funding meant for public schools to parents for spending on private education instead.
But many parents who choose to accept that money may find that private schools in their area can’t adequately serve or won’t even admit their children with disabilities, because federal law doesn’t require them to do so.
Plus, a program that provides grant money for schools to spend on many students at once wouldn’t neatly convert to providing enough money for a parent to cover even a fraction of the expenses that come with their child’s private education. Schools typically combine IDEA funding with money from state and local sources to cover special education expenses, which can be tens of thousands of dollars a year per student.
“When we’re making this assumption that all of these kids with special needs would go to private schools, I think that that requires not only changes in the law but some big logical leaps,” said Julia Martin, legislative director for the Bruman Group, an education law firm based in Washington that represents states and school districts.
The effects of abolishing the Education Department are up for debate
Trump’s high-profile and much-discussed intention to “abolish” the U.S. Department of Education has drawn a wide range of reactions: excitement among some conservatives who believe the federal role in education should be more limited, alarm among public education advocates, and bewilderment among even the most knowledgeable policy analysts.
During a Nov. 15 hearing on special education staffing shortages at the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, an independent federal agency, prominent education experts clashed over whether eliminating the department would harm efforts to improve instruction for students with disabilities. Eric Hanushek, an economist for the Hoover Institution think tank at Stanford University, argued eliminating the department “wouldn’t do much.” Jessica Levin, litigation director at the Education Law Center, said the move would represent “an attack on institutions that protect civil rights in this country.”
The proposal may not draw unanimous, enthusiastic support even among Trump’s fellow Republicans in Congress, Martin said.
The political battle will be especially tough, she said, if he aims not simply to relocate and trim its functions, but to eliminate the department’s functions altogether.
Many lawmakers represent districts with substantial populations of students in schools that benefit from federal K-12 programs. Some even have personal experiences that have led them to strongly support funding for students with disabilities.
Bill Cassidy, a Louisiana Republican who is the incoming chair of the Senate’s committee on education, has a daughter with dyslexia. Cathy McMorris Rogers, a Republican member of Congress who’s been in office for nearly two decades, has a son with Down syndrome. Both lawmakers have advocated for a bigger federal role in giving students the tools they need to succeed.
Shifting Education Department functions to other agencies could be messy. Project 2025 proposes moving the Education Department’s office for civil rights to the U.S. Department of Justice.
On paper, that makes sense, as the two agencies often work together, Martin said. But the Department of Justice tends to operate with a more punitive approach that might clash with OCR’s typical posture of collaborating with school districts to improve their special education practices, she said.
Another Project 2025 proposal to move the office of special education programs to the Department of Health and Human Services could further strain OCR, whether it’s under the DOJ or at a revamped version of its current home, said JD Hsin, an assistant professor of education and civil rights law at the University of Alabama School of Law who worked as senior counsel in the Education Department’s OCR during the first Trump administration.
Those two offices often collaborate closely and would struggle to maintain productive relationships from two different agencies in different buildings and on separate teams managed by different people, he said.
Even if the Department of Education is completely gone, IDEA would still be in effect unless Congress separately acts to revamp it, which would be the kind of complex, months-long process that lawmakers are often eager to avoid, said Nate Stevenson, an associate professor of special education at Kent State University.
“It would just be kind of chaotic figuring out how it is that those provisions are going to be enforced,” he said.
Public school parents would still be entitled to due process for special education lawsuits even if the Education Department isn’t the agency tasked with enforcing the law. Schools would still be held accountable for Child Find, which requires them to actively identify and support students with disabilities in early childhood, regardless of cost.
And every state has its own set of special education laws and practices that use federal law as a foundation for their more granular policies.
States typically look to the U.S. Department of Education for guidance on interpreting regulations so they’re consistent across the nation, said Betsey Helfrich, a special education lawyer who represents school districts in Missouri and Kansas. Instead, “there would be less uniformity” as states make their own interpretations or take policy matters to the courts, Helfrich said.
Some of the department’s lesser-known functions also play a crucial role in supporting families navigating the special education process.
The agency devotes a small amount of money each year to efforts to address longstanding and widespread staffing shortages for special education teaching positions that affect nearly every state.
Research studies made possible by federal funding have contributed to an evidence base for technologies that serve students with disabilities and the broader public. Text-to-speech software, now ubiquitous on personal electronic devices, gained prominence in part because federally funded research affirmed its effectiveness, Stevenson said.
Federal funding supports technical centers in nearly every state that provide information to parents about their rights and those of their students, said Meghan Burke from Vanderbilt.
“Just that in and of itself would be a really big setback for families of kids with disabilities because there’s not another agency that fulfills that need,” said Meghan Burke. “There are a lot of things that the DOE does. Where would those tasks then go?”
Will education actually become a focus area for Congress?
Education is one of only several major areas where Trump has indicated he wants his administration to focus. It could easily fall by the wayside if legislative debates over tax policy and immigration take center stage.
Still, even with a president who has publicly mocked people with disabilities and used the word “retarded,” a slur in the disability community, some special education experts see the potential for productive work on federal education policy.
The Biden administration has been working for years on updating regulations for Section 504, a portion of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 that protects civil rights for students with disabilities.
The education portion of the regulations hasn’t been substantially reworked since the law passed. And if the Biden administration’s education department doesn’t publish its long-promised update in the remaining weeks of the president’s term the Trump administration could choose to pick up that task.
That law protects 1.6 million U.S. children on top of the nearly 7 million who qualify for IDEA, according to federal data.
“There’s so much schools deal with in the modern age that we didn’t see as much in 1977 that I think needs to be updated,” from the proliferation of technology to the uptick in violence on school grounds, said Helfrich, the special education lawyer. “I think schools need a lot of clarity.”
Similarly, IDEA hasn’t been reauthorized since 2004, and it hasn’t been substantially altered since its inception half a century ago.
Procedures for identifying children with disabilities have changed substantially since then, as has the role of technology in school operations. The share of America’s K-12 children with disabilities has swelled substantially, from 8.3 percent in 1976 to 15.2 percent in 2022.
Researchers in recent years have also highlighted major components of the IDEA funding formula that ultimately put students with disabilities from bigger districts, and districts with more students with disabilities, at a major disadvantage.
Currently, the federal government allocates special education funding to states using a complex formula that aims to account for the number of children and the amount of poverty in each state.
But only a portion of the money goes through the formula that accounts for present-day conditions. The rest consists of a base amount that was determined in 1999 and hasn’t been updated since.
As a result, funding allocations vary significantly from state to state, and states with bigger present-day needs don’t always see corresponding increases. Using the formula twice—once for allocating money to states, and then again for allocating money to districts—compounds those inequities, according to Tammy Kolbe, a principal researcher at the American Institutes for Research and one of the nation’s leading experts on special education finance.
Another Project 2025 proposal would convert IDEA into “no-strings-attached block grants” that go to districts. In Kolbe’s view, allocating federal money directly to school districts could be an improvement.
“If in fact a new Congress and a new administration is interested and thinking about the IDEA funding, I do think the formula is ripe for revision,” she said.
But several experts also pointed to several proposals from the incoming administration and congressional leaders that they believe would widen inequities.
The federal government currently spends roughly $13 billion a year on IDEA grants for states to send to schools—well short of the federal government’s long-unfulfilled commitment to cover 40 percent of the excess costs schools incur to provide services for students with disabilities.
House GOP leaders this year proposed a federal budget that would cut IDEA spending by 25 percent. Following through on such a plan would mean schools with tight budgets might have to cut staff or programming that serves all students in order to make room for mandatory services.
A proposal to conduct a sweeping rollback of federal programs that aim to prioritize funding and services with racial and socioeconomic equity in mind could exacerbate efforts to ensure students with disabilities from low-income families, or English learners with disabilities, don’t suffer relative to their peers who don’t belong to multiple vulnerable groups, Meghan Burke said.
Still, Hsin said he’s optimistic that federal support for services for students with disabilities will persist regardless of presidential administration.
He worked at OCR during the Trump administration under acting assistant secretary Kim Richey, and watched as she led aggressive investigations of three districts and a state over allegations they’d failed on a widespread basis to serve students with disabilities.
Biden appointed Catherine Lhamon to replace Richey in 2021. Lhamon continued those investigations and secured resolutions for two of them.
“I’ve always seen this issue as an area of almost total consensus. I hope we can all work from that premise,” Hsin said. “We really do have common ground here. What we’re trying to figure out is what system works best for children with disabilities and their families.”
