What could Trump’s move to dismantle the Department of Education mean for Pa. and N.J.?

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President Donald Trump signed an executive order last night calling for the dismantling of the Department of Education. Today, he said that he would transfer key responsibilities of the agency to other departments. It’s unclear whether those changes are possible without Congressional approval.

Trump’s executive order calls upon Education Secretary Linda McMahon “to the maximum extent appropriate and permitted by law, take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education” while still “ensuring the effective and uninterrupted delivery of services, programs, and benefits on which Americans rely.”

“I think of it as an announcement of his policy priorities,” Brookings education and inequality researcher Rachel Perera said of the executive order. “They’re certainly testing the boundaries in terms of how much they can reshape the work of the department.”

Trump and McMahon have repeatedly stated that critical funding streams that schools rely on will continue to flow to states. But experts say that promises to move these programs out of the Education Department and into other departments, as well as the 50% staffing cuts seen last week, threaten the security of those dollars.

What could be the potential impact on Pennsylvania and New Jersey?

Pennsylvania’s public schools receive about $4.67 billion in federal funding. New Jersey receives about $1.2 billion. That includes funding under Title I, which supports schools in low-income communities, as well as the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, also known as IDEA, which distributes funding for special education and related services for children with disabilities.

Thousands of jobs are reliant on these funding streams. According to Philadelphia Federation of Teachers President Arthur Steinberg, 1,449 jobs in Philadelphia alone are funded by Title I and the IDEA. New Jersey’s Education Law Center Executive Director Robert Kim said that 18,000 teaching jobs in New Jersey would be affected if federal education programs stopped operating.

“The idea that they would all still be operational, and that there would not be disruptions, delays or cancellations of a lot of these funding streams, is absolutely a fantasy,” Kim said.

Trump said today that the nation’s entire student loan portfolio would be transferred from the Education Department’s office of Federal Student Aid to the Small Business Administration. He also said that “special needs and all of the nutrition programs” would be moved to the Department of Health and Human Services, run by Robert F. Kennedy.

The announcement apparently references the IDEA as well as the Department of Education’s  Office of Special Education Programs. The department distributed about $15 billion nationally for students with disabilities in 2024.

Education Department changes are already here

Last week’s staffing cuts had a greater impact on the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights, or OCR, and Institute of Education Sciences, the agency’s arm for research, standardized testing and data.

The OCR previously operated 12 regional outposts throughout the country, including one in Philadelphia and another in New York. Both of those were shuttered as a result of last week’s cuts, leaving New Jersey and Pennsylvania parents without the free legal mechanism to pursue federal civil rights complaints that had previously been in place.

Finding outside legal assistance instead can be costly. Groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union often work pro bono, but have limited capacity. Perera of Brookings said she’s frequently seen the organization refer parents to OCR in the past. Parents may be able to pursue civil rights complaints on a state-level instead, although accountability mechanisms vary greatly state-by-state, she said.

In New Jersey, for example, parents may be able to seek recourse through the Attorney General’s Office or the state Department of Education’s Division on Civil Rights. But Kim said he foresees some problems with that approach.

“New Jersey state government is up to its eyeballs in being able to handle state-level complaints,” Kim said. “It’s a much smaller-scale, much more limited operation… even a well-resourced [state], relatively speaking, like New Jersey, does not have the resources and capacity to fill the gap left by the cuts to OCR.”

Deborah Gordon Khler, Education Law Center PA’s executive director, agreed that capacity could be a challenge on the state level in Pennsylvania as well. The state’s Human Relations Commission is charged with enforcing policies that prohibit discrimination based on race, gender, religion or nationality, but picking up where the OCR left off may produce challenges.

“It’ll be challenging to have the same expertise and depth of understanding of the issues now that that entire office has been terminated,” Gordon Khler said.

The future of testing and data gathering in the two states also remains to be seen. States have long been required by the OCR to collect and publish data on schools’ use of disciplinary practices and more in order to monitor for systemic discrimination, but that could now change.

“You could see, for example, in this particular district, how many kids are they expelling?” Gordon Klehr said. “And of the kids they’re expelling, are they disproportionately expelling Black students? Are they disproportionately expelling students with disabilities?”

With both OCR and the Institute of Education Sciences gutted, experts say it is possible that states’ requirements in this arena will either look very different or disappear entirely.

Neither New Jersey’s nor Pennsylvania’s state education departments responded to questions about whether they would continue these programs.

Kim, for his part, said he expects New Jersey to continue the same practices, even if not federally mandated.

“What I’ve seen is New Jersey has an independent desire to kind of make sure that we’re tracking data and keeping good data on the education trends of our students,” he said.

David Matthau contributed to this story.