Throughout the last year, the Trump Administration consistently focused on education by advancing a range of priorities and actions largely unprecedented compared to any prior administration of either party.
These actions have significantly shifted the current federal role in education and in many cases caused confusion, disruption, opposition, and impact across early childhood, K-12, and higher education.
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In the year ahead, with midterm elections approaching, the administration is likely to continue and deepen its efforts — moving from Executive Orders (EOs) to an increasing focus on using regulations, guidance, grantmaking, and enforcement to advance its priorities. The year ahead will also see greater implementation of the education-related provisions of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA).
This document — also embedded below — updates and expands on EducationCounsel’s earlier analysis of “The First Six Months” to summarize the last year in federal education policy. We continue to organize it across 10 overlapping Trump Administration priorities that remain the core areas of its focus thus far. The first nine priorities have dominated the federal education agenda; the 10th includes a number of additional areas in which the administration took notable actions during its first year.
- Eliminate the U.S. Department of Education and reduce capacity of other agencies.
- Minimize the federal role in education and transfer responsibility to states.
- Reduce federal education funding and programs for public schools and safety net.
- Expand funding for private school choice, including for religious schools.
- Dismantle DEIA and reverse civil rights enforcement.
- Redefine gender equity rights.
- Disrupt and remake higher education.
- Decrease immigrant students’ rights and benefits while increasing immigration enforcement.
- Limit education R&D and data.
- Advance additional education priorities.
For each priority, we provide a brief overview of the Trump Administration’s goals, a factual list of related executive (and sometimes legislative and legal) actions, and a brief prediction of how the administration may approach the priority over its second year.
In this document, we do not discuss in detail the immediate or potential long-term impacts of these actions. For more analysis, including likely impact, please review our related resources linked throughout the bulleted lists included in the document. Those resources and others (collected here) also include more comprehensive information about additional related actions — especially agency enforcement and relevant litigation — that are not included in detail in this highlights document.
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