The Trump administration’s effort to abolish the U.S. Department of Education leaves a key question in the balance: What happens to all the federal money sent from Washington to local school districts?
Texas public schools received about $14 billion from the federal government in 2022-23, the most recent year with available data, with most of the money covering student meals, support for higher-need children and pandemic recovery.
With school budgets already strained in Texas, partially due to no major increases in state funding for several years and rising costs due to inflation, federal money is a small but important piece of the pie.
Trump administration leaders have vowed to return power and money over education to the states, though they haven’t definitively said they would support maintaining current funding levels. Congress, which largely decides how much federal funding to give to schools and would need to approve eliminating the Education Department, also will have a large say about the future of Washington’s role in education.
Here’s what is at stake for Texas schools and how much federal money flows to them.
The state total
The Texas Education Agency’s main tracker of school district revenues and spending breaks up budgets into two large categories.
There’s “general funds,” which cover the costs of day-to-day school operations, including employee salaries, building maintenance and transportation. Federal funding accounted for just 4 percent, or $2.2 billion, of the money in general funds in 2022-23.
Then there are “all funds,” which cover general funds plus several other types of revenues and expenses. Those include school meals, federal money for serving students from lower-income and pandemic stimulus support. When adding in those other revenues, federal funding totaled 20 percent of all school funds, or $14.1 billion.
A pandemic bump
Federal funding for Texas schools held relatively steady for several years prior to the pandemic, hovering around $6 billion to $7 billion.
But that total doubled after Congress sent billions of dollars in COVID-19 relief money to local school districts in the first few years after the pandemic. Schools must have spent any pandemic stimulus money available to them by early 2025, so federal support for Texas schools will return closer to pre-pandemic levels this year.
The local look
On average, Texas schools received around $2,600 per student in 2022-23. However, federal funding to school districts varied based on factors like student poverty levels and other demographic information.
These factors explain why districts like Aldine and Houston ISD, which serve high shares of students from lower-income families, received much more federal funding than higher-income districts, such as Conroe and Katy ISD.
A new strategy?
Trump’s motivation for dismantling the Department of Education is rooted in returning education control to the states. One of his strategies is block grants.
Instead of funding programs through a national agency, block grants allow the federal government to designate large sums of money for specific state projects instead. This gives more spending freedom to the states, a strategy Trump previously proposed in 2020 to overhaul Medicaid funding.
Supporters argue that shifting federal program funding to block grants gives states more control, allowing them to tailor programs to local needs. However, critics argue that without a national agency overseeing the grants, states lack the necessary accountability to manage these funds.
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