WASHINGTON (AP) — The Education Department is moving more programs and grants to other federal agencies and announced two new deals on Monday, bringing the Trump administration closer to its goal of shutting down the department.
Under an interagency agreement, the Department of Health and Human Services will take over the grant program to provide millions of dollars to schools for safety and community engagement efforts. Another called on the State Department to take over a portal that tracks foreign gifts to universities.
“As we continue to break down the federal education bureaucracy and return education to the states, our new partnership with the Departments of State and Health and Human Services represents a practical step toward greater efficiency, greater coordination, and meaningful improvements,” Education Secretary Linda McMahon said in a statement.
Republican President Donald Trump and McMahon acknowledged that only Congress has the authority to shut down the Department of Education entirely, but both said its core functions could be distributed among different federal agencies.
The agreement with the Department of Health and Human Services transfers a small portion of funding to health agencies but does not involve the Department of Education’s special education efforts. McMahon has long suggested that special education programs should also be moved to the Department of Health and Human Services, and as recently as last December, she told supporters that she still intended to move those programs out of the department.
Yet the issue has proven politically volatile for McMahon, whose special education plans have even come under grilling from some in her own party. The latest agreement makes no mention of the department’s Office of Special Education and Rehabilitation Services, which manages billions of dollars in grants and oversees state compliance with the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.
Last year, the department signed seven similar agreements, moving significant work to the Labor and Interior departments in addition to the State and Health and Human Services departments. The agreements cover billions of dollars in federal funding streams for programs such as Title I that support low-income students.
The union representing department staff said the latest deal would shift jobs to institutions without education expertise.
“This is not efficiency – Secretary McMahon is creating chaos in schools and colleges, eroding public trust, and harming students and families,” AFGE Local 252 President Rachel Gittleman said in a statement.
“It is an affront to the tens of millions of students who rely on the Department of Education to guarantee access to a quality education, and to taxpayers who rely on federal oversight to prevent waste.”
Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., said the agreements will hurt students and families.
“These illegal agreements not only create meaningless new bureaucracies that burden our already overworked teachers and schools; they also actively jeopardize the resources and supports that students and families rely on and are legally entitled to receive,” Murray said.
Under the new agreement, the State Department will take a greater role in data collection, reporting and enforcement of Section 117, which requires colleges and universities to disclose gifts of $250,000 or more annually.
The agreement with HHS will send six projects to the Administration for Children and Families, which will take over grant competition and technical assistance for those grants.
But the future of these projects is already uncertain. The Trump administration said in its 2026 budget request that it wanted to zero out the budgets for five of the six programs transferred to HHS. In December, some recipients of Promise Neighborhoods and Full Service Community Schools grants, which provide students with academic and after-school enrichment opportunities, were told that their funding would no longer continue in 2026, bringing much of their work to an abrupt halt. ___
Associated Press writer Colin Binkley contributed to this report.
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