What Trump’s Threatened Education Cuts Mean for Students, Schools
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Yesterday, the Trump administration announced that it was firing more than 1,300 workers from the Education Department, nearly 50% of its employees, in effect gutting the agency. This comes as the department has led the way in cutting $400 million in grants to Columbia University for its alleged failure in handling claims of anti-Semitism on campus. And 60 more universities, including UC Berkeley, have been notified they are being investigated on similar grounds.

We'll talk with education reporters about what these mass layoffs and investigations mean for education in the U.S. All that right after this news. Welcome to Forum. I'm Grace Wan, in for Alexis Matricle. Yesterday, the Education Department announced it would be firing 1,300 employees, nearly half of its workforce. The mass layoff put into question whether the department will exist only as a skeleton of what it once was.

Meanwhile, the department has spearheaded the cancellation of $400 million in grants to Columbia University, alleging that the school did not properly address anti-Semitism on campus. And it placed 60 other colleges, including UC Berkeley, Davis, and Stanford, on notice that they would be investigated for similar claims.

Here to help us understand what is happening and its impact on education in the U.S., we're joined by Erica Meltzer, national policy reporter for Chalkbeat, a nonprofit news organization focused on education news. Welcome, Erica. Thanks for having me. We also have Eric Kelderman. He's a senior writer for The Chronicle for Higher Education. Eric, welcome to Forum. Thank you.

Great to be with you. Thanks. We're so happy to have both of you here. And Erica, I wanted to turn to these layoffs. I mean, 1,300 employees constitutes nearly half of the department. Do we know who has been laid off and what divisions have been impacted? This information is still coming out, but it looks like some of the hardest hit sections were the folks who work in financial aid, attorneys that support civil rights investigations, and

And we're hearing about very significant impacts to the Institute for Education Science and the National Center for Education Statistics, which manages a lot of testing and education research and helps push out information about what works in schools and tracks the progress of students. And so these cuts are striking to some pretty core functions of the department. Eric, there are also individuals who took early retirements and buyouts.

Is that subsumed in the 1300 number or is that additional employees who have left the agency? That's additional to the announced layoff. So basically the Ed Department, according to its information, was at about 4,100 employees a few weeks ago when Donald Trump took office. And now it's down to, I think, about 3,000.

about 52% of that number. So the 1,900 that are now absent from the department are a combination of the layoffs yesterday and folks who took a buyout offer from the department for $25,000 and then others who took the

the sort of early resignation offer that was offered by the administration in January. And I think some probationary employees were fired as well, right? I'm unclear about that, actually. I don't know that specifically. Are these layoffs immediate, Eric, or are employees going to get time to gather their things, complete projects, you know, clear out their desks?

The department announced that the layoffs will become effective on the 21st. So folks who have gotten the notice that the job is ending will have some time to go back into the office, collect their things up. And that's consistent with what Education Secretary Linda McMahon said during an interview yesterday on Fox News.

Erica, let's go back to, so half of the workforce is gone. And, you know, to understand what the Department of Education does, let's take a step back and maybe describe a few of the things that they do and what the Education Department doesn't do.

So the education department, it doesn't make curriculum decisions. It doesn't set teacher salaries. A lot of the things that people associate with their local public schools are managed locally, and that will continue to be the case.

What the education department does, they're responsible for some pretty large and important funding streams that go to high poverty schools to support English learners, to support students with disabilities, to support teacher training.

They also manage financial aid and Pell Grants for college students. They do education research and push out those findings to support schools improving their practices. And they also, one of their most important functions is civil rights enforcement and making sure that school districts are doing right by students.

And that's an area where I think we're seeing a pretty significant shift in approach under this administration. And we can talk more about that. Well, we've heard early reports that in the civil rights division, I mean, these are not all employees that are in the D.C. area. I mean, we're hearing that in San Francisco, some people in the Department of Ed who work civil rights are losing their jobs. Right.

Yeah. What we heard last night is that it's potentially half of the field offices for civil rights could be closed. Some pretty big hits to the civil rights division. It's the smallest cabinet agency in workforce and maybe budget. Tell me.

Tell me why is it that they're laying off these employees now when Donald Trump has said he'd like to just shutter the entire agency? So why, Eric, do layoffs now if the intent is to just close the agency altogether?

Well, the administration has acknowledged that they can't close the agency entirely. It was created by an act of Congress under President Jimmy Carter in 1979, and it would require an act of Congress to abolish it. And it would also require legislation essentially to move many of the core functions to other agencies. And so this is their way of really, you know,

weakening the department's authority and reach. And to be honest, you know, this is not, Trump is not the first Republican to call for this. I mean, in 1980, President Ronald Reagan campaigned in his first presidential campaign, talked about, you know, the Education Department being sort of a boondoggle, and it's been a goal of conservatives ever since to get rid of the department.

Staying on that, I mean, what is it about the agency that the GOP doesn't like? Is it just the amount of money spent on education, Eric, or are there other issues that the GOP and Trump generally have with the Department of Education? I mean, the rhetoric coming from Republicans has consistently been that the department, you know, has too much control over education and they want to send both authority to control education and money back to the states.

As Eric explained, it's not really how the way it works. The department doesn't really have any control over what happens in the classroom. Colleges and universities are governed either by state-appointed boards or publicly appointed trustees, etc. So the department's reach is really on these sort of key measures of really civil rights, sort of financial rights.

regulations. Colleges have to show that they're financially stable in order to be eligible for the amounts of money that they get through loans or Pell Grants, things like that. But to be clear, Trump has had a really sort of contentious relationship with higher education in particular. Beginning in his first term, he threatened to cut off

federal student aid to colleges that weren't, I guess in his view, upholding free speech rights, things like that. And so

You know, he's really, in a way, sort of, I think, carrying out a long-held goal of his to sort of get back at higher ed. Erica, what do you think about that, this idea to get back at higher ed and to kind of address, I think, some oversteps that, you know, conservatives believe the Department of Education has taken, particularly with civil rights?

Yeah, I think at least going back to the Obama administration, there was an approach on civil rights that a lot of conservatives objected to. For example, they initiated civil rights investigations around discipline practices if a school district was disproportionately suspending or expelling certain student groups. Like often this was black boys with disabilities were often being suspended at very high rates.

And they would pursue these sort of systemic claims of discrimination and push school districts to reform their discipline policies. They also pushed for much more explicit protections for transgender students and for all LGBTQ students. And we saw that even more so under the Biden administration with the new Title IX rules. And these were things that a lot of conservatives objected to at the

at the state level. And then I think more broadly, especially since COVID and with the big increase in focus on school choice at the state level, the Department of Education has almost become a symbol where if you support traditional public education, you support the Department of Education and you want it to continue. And if you see yourself as someone who supports parents' rights and school choice,

then you think that you need to get rid of the department to advance that agenda, when in reality, a lot of these things are more determined by state level policies, and less so by the Department of Education. And is this idea, though, that civil rights is something that the Department of Education looks at? Why is that a mandate of the Department of Education versus the Department of Justice, Eric?

Well, in the statute that creates the Department of Ed, they're required to monitor civil rights. There are also several sections of the Higher Ed Act and other education laws that require schools to protect civil rights. And Erica mentioned Title IX, which is meant to prohibit sex discrimination in schools and colleges. That's probably the biggest one that everybody's aware of.

So that would be where the mandate comes from, from the department. Well, we're talking about the mass layoffs at the Department of Education, which fired 1,300 workers yesterday. That same department cut $400 million in grants from Columbia University. It's issued a list of 60 other universities that may also have grants cut. Those include UC Berkeley, UC Davis, UCLA, Stanford, and seven other California universities.

To talk about this, we're joined by Erica Meltzer, a national policy reporter for Chalkbeat, a nonprofit news organization focused on education news, and Eric Kelderman. He's a senior writer for The Chronicle of Higher Education. And we're listening to your comments and questions. What are your concerns about these cuts to the Department of Education? Are you an educator? And what concerns do you have about these cuts and how they might affect your job and your work? And how

Have you or might you, your family be affected if funding for special education or other programs that are administered by the department are rolled back? Give us a call now, 866-733-6786. That's 866-733-6786. Or email your comments and questions to forum at kqed.org. You can find us on social media. We're at Blue Sky, Instagram. Look for us at KQED Forum. Or, of course, join our Discord community.

I'm Grace Wan, in for Alexis Madrigal. More about the Department of Education after this break. In the current climate, too many companies are just waiting to get to the other side. At IDEO, we partner with audacious leaders to build more courageous futures that take organizations from basic growth to real innovation. Discover more at IDEO.com. That's I-D-E-O dot com.

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Welcome back to Forum. I'm Grace Wan, in for Alexis Madrigal. We're talking about the mass layoffs at the Department of Education, which fired 1,300 workers yesterday. It's not the only agency that the Trump administration has targeted with layoffs, but it is one that affects millions of

students, both K through all the way up to college. And here to tell us how this is going to impact students across America, we're joined by Erica Meltzer. She's a national policy reporter for Chalkbeat, a nonprofit news organization focused on education news. We are also joined by Eric Kelderman. He's a senior writer at the Chronicle for Higher Education. And we want to hear from you. What are your concerns about these cuts to the Department of Education? Are you an educator? What

concerns do you have about these cuts and how might they impact your work? You can give us a call now at 866-733-6786. That's 866-733-6786. Or email your comments and questions to forum at kqed.org. Or find us on social media. You know where we are. We're at KQED Forum.

Before the break, Erica, we were talking about the civil rights issues that the Department of Education looks over and oversees. One of the big ones that has come out in the last couple of days is the department's focus on anti-Semitism on campus. Last week, the department announced that it was helping to spearhead $400 million in grant cuts to Columbia. And, you know,

This is something that happens, you know, looking at civil rights issues. Why are they looking to cut grants from universities like Columbia? Eric, are you there? Let's take that to Eric. Eric, tell me why Columbia is a target for the Department of Education.

Well, I think in part because Colombia was maybe one of the most publicized places for protests against the war in Gaza after the October 7th attacks in – I'm struggling to remember the year. It's so long ago now, 2023. You know, students took over a building there. The university had to call the police to expel them. It was very high-profile situation.

sort of situation and I think that made them something of a target. High profile donors and alumni have spoken out against a number of sort of Ivy League schools and put them in the crosshairs of conservatives and then there were of course the really damaging congressional hearings where presidents of Columbia and Harvard and others

came and really did a less than stellar job explaining how they were addressing anti-Semitism on campus. Now, this is an unusual situation because normally when the department does these sorts of investigations, it takes months, and the department is required to follow certain procedures like monitoring

making the findings public and giving the university a chance to come to a resolution agreement before it cancels any sort of funding. In this case, the administration took just four days after the investigation was announced to announce that it was also canceling that amount of funding. And so it's a very extraordinary situation facing Columbia. And I should note, too, that, you know, the University of Maine system is facing, you

some similar penalties, $100 million in USDA grants.

were announced, was announced, they were canceled not long after Maine's governor, Janet Mills, a Democrat, in a meeting with the president announced that she would not bar transgender athletes from high school sports. I guess there's a handful of folks that are doing that. And so the administration has sort of taken on Maine now as being in violation of their

their interpretation of Title IX. You know, it's interesting. I mean, on the one hand, the agency is cutting its staff and it's taking a big hit in civil rights. On the other hand, it's going forward with these claims, not just against Columbia, as you point out, Eric, against the state of Maine. Sixty other universities are on notice. I mean, Erica, how

It seems like there's a, you know, a yes and I guess going on here. It's like we're cutting our staff, but we're also going forward with these civil rights actions. Can you explain the dichotomy here?

Yeah, I think there's some real tension between the administration's claim to want to return education to the states and a much more aggressive or assertive approach to trying to change local policy through these threats of withholding funding. And it is worth saying that that's always the threat that kind of underlies civil rights enforcement. That is the lever that the federal government has for any kind of policy change. That's why

The threat of withholding federal funds is why we have the same drinking age across the country. But it's been very rare, perhaps has never happened, that federal funding has actually been withheld as a result of a civil rights investigation. Usually some sort of resolution is reached. But I think what Eric said about how...

Notably short, these so-called investigations are is significant when we think about the cuts that are being made to the Office for Civil Rights. If you're actually going to do an investigation and go in and talk to lots of people and really try and get a nuanced understanding of what happened and how that intersects with the law, then you need staff to do that. If you're going to go largely on public information and make a finding in four days, then you

you don't really need a lot of staff to do that, presumably. And is there any sense, I mean, the, the,

types of grants for Columbia, at least, the $400 million. I mean, they include grants from the DOJ, from Health and Human Services. They come across the board. I mean, you were noticing, you were saying, Erica, that it's very rare to cut funding. I mean, is there any regulations or rules, Eric, in making sure that the grants that are pulled have something to do with the civil rights violation itself? Or can the government just choose to pull grants and to pull money as it wants to?

I mean, it's never really, as Erica points out, it's never happened. I mean, there's similar processes and procedures around Title IX and

My understanding is that the government is required to offer the university a chance to come to a resolution. So usually the way it works is the government comes in, does its investigation, finds a number of violations or ways that the university could improve its civil rights enforcement on campus or upholding student civil rights, and then it more or less dictates to the university what its steps going forward will be.

I suppose if the university agreed to accept that, it would end up in perhaps some funding being cut.

That's never happened. So we're really, in some of these situations, I feel like we're really in uncharted territory. And so, you know, the administration is clearly sort of pushing the boundaries of what may be acceptable under the processes. And Eric, if you're a university that's on this target list, like Davis or Stanford or Cal, what is a way in which they're responding? Have we heard from any of them?

No. I mean, I think the position of most universities at this point is to sort of keep their head down, to stay out of the press as much as possible, even to the extent that they would come out and sort of justify their actions under these protests, right? We've seen a number of institutions take actions to, in fact,

that would seem to sort of ameliorate any sort of backlash from the administration by forming task forces or looking into their own policies and procedures. I think probably behind the scenes, if I were to speculate here, what's going on is

Presidents and their general counsels are combing through their response, combing through their policies that they have on the books. Did they follow them? They're probably in touch with their members of Congress and the associations that represent them in Washington and trying to use those channels to find out.

You know, what can we do? What are next steps? I imagine that's probably a lot of what's going on right now. Well, let's go to the phones. Barbara from San Francisco. Welcome to Forum. Hi, thank you very much for having me. Yeah. What's your what's your what are your concerns this morning?

Well, I think a comment and a question. So I live in San Francisco, so I've had my child go through the San Francisco school system. I work up in a public school, a high school in Marin.

I want to comment that I've already noticed in the past year, even prior to the election, a more conservative trend in our school board in Marin. And that's definitely been affecting both things like decisions about course acceptance and how we

are beginning to be asked to teach in the classroom, and where there's definitely a tension between the board and the administrators and the classroom teachers. So I guess that's my comment. My question is, I know we're focusing mostly today on college-level education because of the grants issue,

withdrawals that happened as of yesterday, as well as the firings. However, I am wondering about the subsequent effect on high schools in California. And if you could add, if you could

kind of talk to us about the relationship between the federal Department of Education and the State Department of Education and how both changes in policy at the federal level as well as perhaps cutting off funding will affect schools differently. So, for example, my school is a rather privileged school in that we get funding from

local taxes. But San Francisco, for example, where I live, gets our funding from the students and the number of people who are in it. So could you talk about how that might be affected with subsequent changes? Oh, that's such a good question, Barbara, and thank you for being a teacher. I mean, Erica, I want to take that to you because you are K-12 specialist. I mean,

What is that relationship between the Department of Ed and maybe a state board of education? And what changes might these cuts have on a local level at a high school like the one that Barbara teaches at and the schools that her children go to? Yeah, absolutely. That's an important question.

So the administration has, um, they've signed a number of executive orders and they've also sent out a dear colleague letter warning schools against, um, practices that, that they deem, uh,

radical indoctrination, which can mean teaching about race or history in ways that the administration does not approve of. And there was also this Dear Colleague letter warning schools against diversity, equity and inclusion practices. And there's been a lot of concern and confusion about what that's actually referring to. They did walk it back a little bit in some clarification that came out after the initial letter.

there's litigation going on right now about that guidance, but it's this big fuzzy area that I think a lot of, um, school communities in more progressive areas are concerned that they may run afoul of the administration. That's something that they're teaching, um, could be deemed as casting a too negative, a light on American history. And, um, the state of California, for example, has put out some like very robust, um,

language saying we are going to follow our state laws. We are going to protect the civil rights of our students. We don't think this guidance has any basis in law and we're going to keep doing what we're doing. And so we're going to see if the administration is able to follow through on threats to withhold federal funding and what that would actually look like.

It is important to understand sort of on average, most school systems are locally and state funded. About 10% of K-12 funding comes from the federal government. The rest is provided by local property taxes and other sources. At the same time, that federal funding, it is larger in high poverty communities. And it is a really important supplemental source of funding that I think that school districts would miss.

There's also a lot of legal and logistical challenges to withholding these really big pots of money like Title I and IDEA, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act money that supports special education. It's a lot harder for the federal government to take that back. And I think that's actually one of the reasons that you're seeing, for example, in Maine, they threaten federal funding, but they're going after some isolated funds.

grant programs because that's a mechanism that's more readily available to the administration, whereas withholding Title I funding would actually be pretty challenging. Well, you mentioned that disabled students are a group that the department kind

kind of focuses on and also supports. And there is this law, the IDEA, that she mentioned, which I think Linda McMahon didn't know what it was. She's the education secretary. What would the impact be for disabled students with more cuts to funding in the Department of Education, Erica? This is really hard to say because at her confirmation hearing, Linda McMahon did promise that IDEA funding would not be

cut. IDEA has actually never been fully funded. It's far, far from what it is supposed to be funded at. She did say that it wouldn't be cut, but there's also been a lot of talk of taking all of the federal funding and turning it into block grants for states, which would give states more flexibility in how to spend it, which would

Might be good, but a lot of advocates are also worried, well, maybe the money wouldn't go to special education then if it just all went into a lump sum to the states. And all of this is very much sort of in flux and we'll see what kind of plan the administration comes up with and also sort of what happens in the budget process, which is, of course, complicated.

ongoing and very contentious. Yeah. And when we talk about students with disabilities, what kind of disability are we talking about the full range of disabilities, both physical and cognitive, Erica? Yeah, I mean, these could be students with dyslexia, these could be students with autism, it could be a student who is hard of hearing or visually impaired. It could be a student with a disability around emotional regulation. It really covers a very wide range of students. And

And the role of the federal government has to have been to ensure that these students get the free public education that they are entitled to by law. Let's go back to the phones. Whitney from San Francisco, welcome to Forum.

Thank you. My questions are about, as a former Davis student in the last 10 years, how might student loan debt be affected? And then the second part is, when this current administration term ends, will the jobs that have been cut to the Department of Ed be reversible?

Oh, these are really good questions. Eric, I'm going to take the federal loan issues to you. I mean, dispersing federal loans is one of the big jobs of the Department of Ed. What might happen to student loan repayment and student loan disbursements?

Well, I think student loan repayment now is, you know, very much up in the air, especially if you are signed up for an income-based repayment plan. So the department has several plans where you can sign up and your loan repayment rate, your amount is set based on your income. The department has now shut off all applications for those repayments.

for those programs following a federal circuit court of appeals decision that struck down a Biden administration plan, a new plan called SAVE that was more generous, more favorable for borrowers. That was deemed by the judge not to be legal. But in response to that, the department has shut off all applications to those plans. So that's a big concern that the

The president has also issued an executive order on the public service loan forgiveness plan. This was a plan created by Congress under President Bush. And at first, as many of you may know, it was kind of a mess when after 10 years and people were supposed to start getting their loans forgiven. It hadn't been well managed and the Biden administration had to sort of fix that program. And they did so quite successfully, actually. The president has issued a

some sort of order saying that

the people that should be eligible for PSLF should be those who are not engaged in illegal activities or supporting terrorists, in quotes, terrorist organizations. So he's, in theory, trying to place some limits on the political activities of people who are eligible for the plan. That's likely not to go anywhere. That seems a pretty obvious violation of the First Amendment. In terms of

Well, let's take that second question about whether these employees can be rehired after the break. We're talking about the mass layoffs at the Department of Education. We're joined by Erica Meltzer and Eric Kelderman, both reporters in the education space. I'm Grace Wan, in for Alexis Madrigal. More on these mass layoffs after this break.

Welcome back to Forum. I'm Grace Wan, in for Alexis Magical. We're talking about what's happening at the Department of Education. Yesterday, nearly half of the workforce was laid off. There are civil rights actions against Columbia University and 60 other universities are on the target list of Trump for anti-Semitism on campus to help us make sense of everything.

everything that's going on in this space. We're joined by Eric Kelderman. He's a senior writer for the Chronicle for Higher Education. And Erica Meltzer, she's the national policy reporter for Chalkbeat, a nonprofit news organization focused on education news. We're hearing your calls and your comments about your concerns about these cuts to the Department of Ed. And if you're an educator, what concerns you have in particular about how this might impact your work

You can give us a call at 866-733-6786. That's 866-733-6786. Or you can email your comments and questions to forum at kqed.org. Before the break, we had our caller, Whitney, asking whether or not these employees who've been laid off could be rehired by the Department of Education. And Eric, you were just about to answer that. Yeah. Well, my answer is going to be very short, and it's going to be, who knows? Yeah.

That's really uncertain. It depends on who's elected president in 2028 and the budget situation and a whole lot of other things that we can't possibly predict at this point. I will say this, that I think if there's a problem in dispersing federal financial aid for the incoming class in the fall, for the incoming college class in the fall, I think

There will be a lot of hue and cry about that. If it disrupts the student loan and the Pell Grant process, a huge impact nationwide and could cause the administration to rethink its strategy. But again, that's a long ways off. We have a comment from Liz who writes, "...funding for children ages three and beyond is the responsibility of one's local school district."

Early intervention for children with special needs, birth to age three, is provided by funding from the federal government. I retired from 50 years in special education, some of those years in a program for infants, toddlers, and families offered through the San Mateo County Office of Education.

Cutting funding to these services will impact one child, one family at a time. No hyperbole when I say the potential for damage is life changing. I am scared and physically sickened when I think of the consequences of this action. How many students, Erica, are being supported by the special ed funds through the Department of Education? Do we know?

That is a good question. I think the most recent numbers that I saw were about 13 to 15 percent of students have an identified disability. And that number has been increasing in recent years for a variety of reasons, some of which have to do with changes to how students are identified, but also because we have

more students, excuse me, more children who, for example, are born very premature and have various challenges that come with that, you know, are surviving, which is wonderful. And then they need more support when they come into the school system.

The federal funding has never met either its legal obligation or the actual need. And so local school districts and states have been covering a lot of that cost the whole time. I don't think anyone in the school system thinks that special education is adequately funded. And so if there were, in fact, cuts to federal funding, I'm sure that that would be felt. Well, let's go to the phones. Zainab from Brentwood, California. Welcome to Forum.

Thank you for having me. Can you hear me? I can hear you just fine. Yeah, thank you for having me. So let me read this volume. Yeah. So my question is, I don't know, Barbara, you were just talking about how only 10 percent of local high schools or elementary schools are funded by the federal government.

Okay, my concern now is that 10% coming from the federal government is extremely huge. So how does that affect class sizes? Because we already have, especially in California, where elementary school, I think the class sizes is what, 30 kids or 33 kids per teacher and an assistant, if you're even lucky. So imagine eradicating that 10% that the federal government is helping with. How does that affect class sizes? Yeah, that's a really good question. I mean, I think...

Erica, I mean, Zainab is referring to Barbara, caller Barbara's commentary. I mean, there is going to be a waterfall effect. The loss of federal funding will mean that states and localities will have to make it up, right?

They'll have to make it up or they won't make it up. You know, we are we said we're in a period of a lot of economic uncertainty. And typically when we have a recession, school funding suffers because local tax revenues are lower. The other thing that's playing into this and sort of exacerbating the problem is a lot of school districts are losing enrollment. And because they're funded based on how many students they have,

A lot of times class size actually goes up as the student count goes down because maybe they have to let a teacher go. And instead of three fourth grade classes, now they have two larger fourth grade classes. And so there's a lot of cascading effects. I do just want to...

we don't actually know what's going to happen with the federal funding. I think it's very reasonable to be concerned about it. But we don't actually know at this point.

That changes to the apartment will necessarily mean, for example, less Title I funds. There's a lot of different factors involved. And Eric, on the higher ed level, we're seeing and in hearing, you know, universities, Harvard said it was going to have a hiring freeze in anticipation of grant cuts, even though none have been announced yet.

So we have a couple of questions from listeners like Teresa who says, I'm wondering how these federal cuts to universities could affect graduate school, especially PhD programs. How should potential grad school applicants be approaching this? Any thoughts on that, Eric? Yeah, I think the potential freezing of NIH grants in particular, competitive science grants coming from the government,

That will have an impact on grad student placements. In the fall, we're already seeing colleges saying they're not going to hire grad students or canceling their contracts with grad students who are going to come in to do research. We've seen colleges cancel faculty searches or freeze

uh... freeze faculty hiring and staff hiring largely over the concern the uncertainty let's say about what's going to happen to NIH grants that's a big pot of money and um... you know large research universities uh... rely on that and then of course on top of that there's this uh... you know this effort to cap the amount of money that the the federal government pays for facilities and administration on top of the grant so

That's, you know, it averages about 30 percent. The government is trying to cap that at 15 percent. That's now on hold per judicial order. But so all of that will affect the research, you know, the research enterprise at large universities in particular. Well, Chris writes, as a grandparent that benefited from free community college in California and their UC relationship, I see this as a move by Trump to make college education only available to the elite.

I mean, Eric, are these funding cuts at DOE related to making it harder to go to college? That's a really good question. I don't think in particular that's the goal. I think the administration and conservatives in general want to remake higher education in a way that seems more favorable to them to eliminate parts of higher education that they don't support.

I think that would be the goal. I think the administration has been particularly sensitive to the fact that they need to get out federal student loans and Pell Grants in the fall. I'm told that from sources within the department and folks who have recently left. And so I don't think that's actually the goal. I think

Could that be the outcome? Perhaps that could be an outcome, but I don't think it's quite so clear. Well, the department last year got into a lot of trouble with its rollout of the financial aid form, the FAFSA. And now we're hearing about cuts in the agency itself. What

Do we think that the rollout of a financial aid like FAFSA is going to be seamless? And if the Department of Ed's not going to do this work, what agency would do this work? Well, the department has to do the FAFSA at this point.

I would say it's mostly done. There are a few technical issues that are left to be addressed, really, really sort of inside baseball technical things about sort of computer matching with the Social Security Administration and things like that to identify people who are applying for aid. That said, you know,

Yeah, I think, you know, it's possible that with cuts to the Federal Student Aid Office that things will not go smoothly in the fall. We don't know. It's going to take a while to sort of see how the work progresses. One of the reasons that FAFSA did not go smoothly was, in fact, you know, because they didn't have the staff to get it done in time. And so, yeah.

Yeah, they are sort of conflicting issues here with staff cuts and their desire to sort of try and operate these core functions as normal. You know, Erica, the department, as we're hearing, it just covers so many students from K through college. And there was a recent national scorecard that found that most eighth grade and fourth graders in 2024 still perform below pre-pandemic 2019 levels in reading and math and

You know, to, you know, take a counter argument here. I mean, given those kinds of scores, given that kind of achievement level on a national basis, I mean, is there some argument to be said, well, maybe the Department of Education isn't working and isn't doing what it needs to be doing if kids' scores are still not where they should be? Yeah, that's certainly been the conservative argument that we still have. We still have

for academic performance across a number of measures. We still have these achievement gaps that have been very persistent and pervasive in American education. And I don't, I think to some degree, I would have to agree that the Department of Education has not magically solved these problems. And I think there has some pretty complex root causes.

At the same time, I have heard Education Secretary Linda McMahon go on some of the talk shows and talk about, well, the role of the Department of Education is...

to get out of teachers' way and let them do what they do best. But we also have a lot of evidence that teacher preparation programs have not always equipped teachers with the best practices. And one role of the department is to hold up best practices and disseminate those to states and school districts. And they've just cut a lot of the people who do that work. And so I think it just...

Is there a helpful role for the federal government to play? I guess people, you know, would disagree about that. But it seems like we're sort of moving in a direction where we're just going to let the states do their thing. And I think President Trump last year on the campaign trail said, you know, some states are going to do a good job and some states are not. And that's just how it's going to be.

Well, that kind of leads into some of the comments that we're seeing here. Scott writes, what is the purpose of eliminating the Department of Education? Homeschool? For-profit charter schools? Honestly, what's the end game for the right? And another listener writes, the situation happening now frightens me for the future of public education overall. The Trump administration wants to destroy government and public education, a scary future.

Eric, taking that question to you, I mean, what is the end game here from your perspective in terms of what the conservatives and Donald Trump wants out of public education, if that's something that they want at all? That's really hard to know. I mean, I think broadly there is there has been a move to to.

privatize education both at the K-12 and in the higher ed level. We saw in the first Trump administration, you know, policy changes that benefited proprietary for-profit colleges, for instance.

you know, and I guess if I were to take a state example, I would look at, say, the state of Florida, right, and its attempts to remake new college, a public liberal arts college, by, you know, overhauling the board and putting conservatives in charge there and trying to root out what they see as sort of liberal progressive excess in higher education. I think that's, if I were to land on anything, I think it would be that, right? We hear this talk about sort of getting rid of

woke policy and it's really hard to define what that is, but I think

In general, what they're referring to is what they see as sort of the excesses of progressive policy that require colleges or encourage colleges to try and make outcomes equitable for people across racial and gender and income lines. Erica, I'm going to let you pick up on that as well. I mean, what is the end game here in cutting and actually –

kind of gutting the Department of Education. Where is that going to lead us? And I mean, are we looking at universal choice? Are we looking at, as Eric said, states get to every state gets to decide how it wants to be? Yeah, I mean, I think the concerns that that your listeners raised are really widespread concerns. And we do see, particularly in Republican led states,

a real rethinking of what public education means, where there's a lot of support for just put some money in the hands of parents and if they want to homeschool, that's fine. If they want to combine that with their own money to take their child to a private school, then that's fine. And we don't have... It's sort of a shift away from this idea of education as a collective good and much more towards an individual good. And...

There are a lot of concerns that we're going to see a real erosion of the public education system as we've understood it for the last 50 to 100 years. But I think I think there's just a lot to see sort of how this how this actually plays out on the ground. And what are you looking for in terms of next moves? Like what what are your concerns, Erica?

I mean, I think things that we're watching for are how the federal government exerts its power over, as much as we're talking about returning education to the states, we also see this administration using federal power in some ways that they have, has not been used before. And so I think we're watching to see sort of how the federal government tries to shape what happens on the ground, particularly in states and communities that are not aligned with his vision. And I think we're also looking to see

you know, who complies with this vision and who resists. And then there's also, there's a lot of conservative Republican-led states where people are cheering this on and saying, give us the flexibility and we'll show you what we can do and how we can innovate. And it will be interesting to see if that is

if that in fact happens. And Eric, in the minute we have left, what stories are you looking at and what concerns do you have? Well, I think, you know, overall, actually the biggest concern for higher education is the economy in general. If we see, for instance, major budget cuts to Medicaid at the federal level through the reconciliation process or something like that, that's going to hit state budgets hard and that will impact education

institutions across the sector, from big public research universities to small and probably particularly local community colleges and things like that. That will actually have a much larger impact than many of the things that we've talked about today. So that's the thing that I'm looking for.

Well, we've been talking about the mass layoffs at the Department of Education, which fired nearly half of its workforce yesterday. We were joined by Erica Meltzer. She's a national policy reporter for Chalkbeat, a nonprofit news organization focused on education news. Thanks so much for joining us, Erica.

Thanks for having me. We also had Eric Kelderman, senior writer for the Chronicle for Higher Education. Eric, thanks for being here. Yeah, glad to do it. Thanks. And thanks to all our listeners for their calls and comments. And thanks for joining Forum this morning. I'm Grace Wan, in for Alexis Madrigal. Stay tuned for another hour of Forum Ahead with Mina Kim.

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