The White House Budget Has Deep Cuts to Education
Trump wants to cut $9.2 billion, or 13.5% of the current budget, spread out across K-12 funding and federal student aid.
3 min readJun 11, 2017
What’s Affected
- The federal government would no longer subsidize interest on federal loans, adding thousand of dollars to the cost of a college education. This will primarily affect low-income students.
- The budget includes a proposal to simplify student loan repayment — this measure has bi-partisan appeal. Rather than choosing from a myriad of payment options, the proposal whittles those down to just one repayment plan, capping monthly payments at 12.5% of discretionary income. The balance for undergraduates would be forgiven after 15 years.
- The public service loan forgiveness will be phased out. This program erases student loans after 10 years of employment for the government or a qualifying non-profit.
Medicaid cuts will also affect public schools
- Special needs students along with millions of lower-income students receive services from vision screening to speech therapy from their public schools — this costs Medicare about $4 billion in reimbursements each year. To put that into perspective, that’s about 1% of all Medicaid dollars.
And, school choice
- Title 1 is the largest K-12 federal education program, supporting high-poverty schools. The new budget flattens regular Title 1 funding and adds another $1 billion to a new grant program for states that allow low-income students to choose their public schools. The money that is allocated for them goes with them, essentially redistributing federal money from poorer schools and districts to wealthier ones.
- $250 million will go for vouchers for private schools and $167 million for charter schools.
Other cuts come from a $2.3 billion program for teacher training and class-size reduction, a $1.2 billion after-school program, and a $190 million literacy program. Read more from the Washington Post:
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