Learn more about the Department's top education priorities and progress achieved in the first year of the Trump-Vance Administration.
Returning Education to the States
In the first year of the Trump-Vance Administration, ED has advanced President Trump’s goal to return education to states.
In the first year of the Trump Administration, U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon made significant progress in fulfilling one of President Trump’s most ambitious campaign promises: returning education to the states. Since its inception in 1980, the U.S. Department of Education (ED) has spent $3 trillion, yet recent national test scores show that just 35% of high school seniors are proficient in reading – these are the lowest scores on record. Under the leadership of President Trump, Secretary McMahon is breaking up the federal education bureaucracy and prioritizing students and families.
ED Took Concrete Steps to Return Education to the States and Empower Parents in Their Child’s Education By:
- Partnering with several agencies to break up the federal education bureaucracy and refocus programs and activities to better serve students, including: workforce development programs, and K-12 programs, and postsecondary programs;
- Touring a variety of public, private, charter, magnet, and micro schools in 24 of 50 states to empower families and hear from students, teachers, and leaders on best practices in their own communities;
- Awarding $500 million to the Charter Schools Programs, the largest investment in the program ever;
- Championing the largest federal expansion of education freedom in history;
- Urging states to expand education choice by using up to 3% of their federal Title I allocation to support education choice initiatives;
- Encouraging states to continue to maximize parent options for choosing the safest school setting for their children.
- Providing guidance to states so that they can prioritize school improvement dollars to districts that will turn around underperforming schools and give students school choice options;
- Advising states to use waiver to maximize opportunity and improve students’ academic achievement;
- Releasing additional guidance on how states might provide equitable services for students enrolled in private schools in more efficient and effective ways to best meet students’ needs; and
- Issuing guidance to states on the Ed-Flex option to encourage local innovation.
ED Removed Bureaucratic Barriers and Invested in Education By:
- Realigning the federal government’s investment of taxpayer dollars in education to evidence-based literacy, school choice, and meaningful learning;
- Awarding over $208 million directly to states and school districts for increasing the number of credentialed psychologists in schools;
- Awarding over $167 million to states and school districts to improve literacy nationwide;
- Withdrawing two burdensome and misaligned Notices Inviting Application (NIA) for charter school programs;
- Reversing a Biden-Harris reporting scheme that burdened states and local Career and Technical Education programs to comply with unnecessary reporting requirements; and
- Reining in the federal government’s influence over state Charter School Program grant awards.
Rightsizing Higher Education
In the first year of the Trump-Vance Administration, ED took significant steps to make college more affordable, increase transparency, and restore merit.
In the first year of the Trump Administration, U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon took significant steps to make college more affordable, increased transparency for students on the value of their education, and restored merit in higher education. These are reforms that conservatives have championed for decades – and in just one year, we’ve made them a reality. As the student loan portfolio nears $1.7 trillion, the Administration has also restored fiscal sanity and returned to repayment after three years of illegal student loan bailouts and false promises to millions of student loan borrowers.
ED Restored Civil Rights, Merit, and Accountability to Universities By:
- Striking historic deals with seven institutions of higher education: Columbia University, the University of Pennsylvania, Cornell University, the University of Virginia, Brown University, Northwestern University, and Wagner College. These deals have enforced federal civil rights laws, rooted out DEI, restored merit by ending unconstitutional race preferences, acknowledged sex as a biological reality in sports and the protection of intimate facilities, and obligated schools to consistently apply disciplinary policies; and
- Announcing an upgraded, state-of-the-art foreign funding reporting portal to end the secrecy surrounding foreign dollars and influence on American campuses.
ED Realigned Civil Rights Enforcement with the Letter of the Law By:
- Enforcing the 2020 Title IX rule and reversing the Biden Administration’s damaging 2024 re-write;
- Partnering with the Department of Justice to create a Title IX Special Investigations Team consisting of expert attorneys and investigators to ensure consistent investigations and expeditious enforcement for Title IX violations;
- Prioritizing the backlog of complaints alleging anti-Semitic harassment and violence that were ignored by the Biden Administration;
- Launching scores of Title IX investigations, both into institutions of higher education and K-12 schools, amid allegations that they allow men to compete in women’s sports and invade women-only intimate spaces;
- Investigating long-ignored Title VI alleged violations of race-based and national origin-based discrimination.
ED Halted Biden’s Attempt to Pass Debt to Every Taxpayer & Rooted Out Waste, Fraud, and Abuse By:
- Putting an end to the Biden Administration’s illegal student loan bailout agenda and reaching a proposed agreement with the State of Missouri to end the illegal SAVE Plan;
- Restarting student loan collections to ensure no taxpayer is forced to pay a debt that is not their own;
- Preventing more than $1 billion in Federal Student Aid fraud this year;
- Introducing identity verification to ensure every student receiving federal aid is a real person, not a fraudster;
- Restoring key accountability measures to root out waste, fraud, and abuse across the student loan portfolio.
ED Improved the FAFSA® Form & Delivered for American Students By:
- Announcing the earliest FAFSA program launch in history following years of mismanagement under the previous Administration’s leadership; and
- Launching a new earnings indicator in the FAFSA to support students and families in making informed college decisions.
ED Strengthened Accreditation By:
- Informing institutions of higher education that they will no longer undergo a lengthy process before changing an accreditor.
ED Fulfilled President Trump’s Commitment to HBCUs:
Awarding Historically Black Colleges and Universities and Tribally Controlled Colleges and Universities a historic one-time investment of $495 million to support student success.
