White House Releases FY27 Budget with More Cuts for Language Education Priorities

On Friday, the White House released its proposed FY27 budget, which consists largely of top line goals and select program increases and eliminations. Overall, the Trump Administration is seeking to increase defense spending by $1.5 trillion – a whopping 44% increase – and to partially pay for this increase through a 10% cut in non-defense programs, including education. Interestingly, the budget proposes relatively limited cuts to the Department of Education, seeking to reduce spending by 2.9% (or $2.3 billion) in total. The two largest K-12 programs are protected under the budget, though, with Title I receiving level funding and special education receiving a $539 million increase. Full details about the exact funding levels for each program were not provided. 

Already Congressional Democrats are assailing the budget, suggesting a long fight on funding awaits. Senate Appropriations Committee Ranking Member Patty Murray (D-WA) said in a statement: “After passing the largest cuts to health care in American history, all to fund billionaire tax breaks and give ICE more money than most militaries, President Trump now wants Congress to defund dozens of programs that help students so that he can send other people’s kids to fight a war with no justification.”

The Department of Education’s FY27 budget again takes aim at language education programs. In K-12, it would eliminate Title III English Language Acquisition and Migrant Education, both of which last year’s budget sought to zero-out. The budget justifies deleting the $890 million Title III program and $428 million Migrant Education program using a mix of rhetoric related to illegal immigration, low test scores and federal overreach as grounds. For Title III, the budget documents state:

“To end overreach from Washington and restore the rightful role of State oversight in education, the Budget proposes to eliminate the misnamed English Language Acquisition program, which actually deemphasizes English primacy by funding non- governmental organizations and States to encourage bilingualism. The historically low reading scores for all students mean States and communities need to unite—not divide—classrooms using evidence-based literacy instruction materials to improve outcomes for all students. Examples of waste include:

• The Biden Administration used the program to fund educating illegal aliens and promote

divisive ideological indoctrination in the classroom;

• A “newcomer toolkit” that describes illegal immigration as a “healthy contribution to democracy” was shared with school districts for illegal students entering schools; and

• New York Public Schools used these funds to promote illegal immigrant advocacy organizations.”

For Migrant Education, the budget documents assert that these funds have “subsidized the open border crises by incentivizing more aliens to come here, at the expense of American children and workers” and “supported woke activities.”

In higher education, the Department of Education’s budget would eliminate and reprogram all funding for the Higher Education Act’s Title VI/Fulbright Hays. These international and language program grants sustained a $5 million cut in last year’s final appropriations bill, leaving them with $81 million. The budget bases these cuts on allegations that the grants “have funded woke and wasteful projects, including:

• A dissertation to research transgender surgeries in Taiwan; and

• A dissertation on Queer and Transgender Community Building in Czechia and Slovakia.”

Separately, the budget is silent on the status of funding for the State Department’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, which contains a number of major academic, cultural and business exchange programs, including the well-known Fulbright Scholars program. Proposals to cut some of these programs may yet be forthcoming as the budget proposes to eliminate $13.9 billion or 29% of the Department’s overall funding.

The Department of Education’s budget also proposes to consolidate seventeen K-12 programs into a single “MEGA grants program, allowing States to fund those activities based on their needs without Federal prescription.” The budget does not identify those programs, but they likely include Title II, the $2.19 billion professional development grant program; Title IV-A, the $1.29 billion flexible block grant; and Title IV-B, the $1.33 billion after school program. All three of these programs were proposed for consolidation in last year’s proposed budget, a proposal that Congress rejected ultimately in the final FY26 appropriations bill. All three also had their funding allocation held up last summer for more than three weeks.

In another assault on educator training programs, the budget would eliminate the $70 million Teacher Quality Partnerships program, “for the sixth time as past grantees have spent taxpayer funds to train teachers and education agencies on divisive ideologies.” 

Finally, the budget proposes to codify the transfer of Career and Technical Education (CTE) programs to the Department of Labor (DOL), which has been administering this $1.5 billion program under a contract with the Department of Education since last fall. Media reports have indicated that DOL’s management of CTE has not been without problems, including state struggles to draw down funds from the DOL’s funding system. While this proposal is not a surprise, it is interesting that the budget does not propose making permanent the transfers of virtually all other education programs to DOL and other federal agencies, which were announced last year and are in progress.

The President’s budget is by no means final and will require Congressional approval. Indeed, this budget kicks off a process, through which Congress will produce 12 FY27 funding bills covering all federal agencies.  When Congress returns from its two-week recess on April 13th, this process will begin in earnest with Congressional hearings that will feature agency heads defending their parts of the proposed budget. This step will be followed by each chamber’s appropriations committee introducing, marking-up and approving their versions of funding for each agency. Once both the House and Senate have approved their versions of these bills, they will negotiate final bills that must be approved by both chambers and signed by the President. This process is supposed to conclude by the start of the federal fiscal year, September 30th. Given that this is a midterm election year, the parties are closely divided and this process is starting late, in all likelihood final approval of all FY27 spending bills will not occur until much later this year or early next year. And, once again, Congress will have to approve temporary spending measures to keep the federal government operating after September 30th.