How Trump’s Policies Are Already Upending Special Education

Parents of children with disabilities often struggle to grasp the complex array of services they’re entitled to demand from their school districts. That’s where people like Jennifer Donelli come in.

Donelli has served since 2020 as executive director of Parents Reaching Out, a nonprofit organization designated and partially funded by the federal government since the early 1980s as New Mexico’s “parent training and information center” for special education. Every state, by law, has at least one.

Donelli estimates she and her team of four full-time and six part-time staffers help hundreds of families a year: answering questions on the phone, shipping resources to their homes, even driving hours for home visits. Many of the families they serve live in rural areas or on Native American reservations, lack internet access, or don’t speak English.

But since President Donald Trump took office, Donelli’s job has gotten tougher. Some Hispanic families—including U.S. citizens and undocumented immigrants—fear sharing details about their circumstances could put them at heightened risk of deportation.

Meanwhile, a routine application for the federal government to reauthorize the organization’s longstanding annual grant of $250,000 has become a months-long ordeal with no end in sight.

Since March, the Education Department has rejected applications from Parents Reaching Out and its counterparts in other states; demanded every center fill out new applications with slightly adjusted questions; threatened to withhold funds for programs emphasizing diversity, inclusion, and equity; and hasn’t said when it will approve or reject proposals, weeks after the approvals typically have come through in previous years.

Now, on top of the stressful task of supporting struggling students and families with complex needs, Donelli is worried about contingency plans for staying financially afloat; keeping staff updated but not panicked or compelled to flee for other jobs; and watching the language she uses when describing her organization in order to stay clear of the federal crackdown on “DEI” efforts.

Most of all, though, Donelli worries about what the loss of an organization like hers would mean for the children she serves.

“There’s really no other program out there that does what we do,” she said. “I would be so concerned about where these parents are going to turn.”

Donelli’s experience mirrors the broader special education landscape since Trump took office in January.

Half a century after the federal government passed a monumental law protecting the rights of students with disabilities, the Trump administration has upended special education on multiple fronts: slashing grant funding; terminating research contracts; decimating federal staffing; and threatening further disruption.

Earlier this month, the latest shock came as the White House proposed merging separate funding streams for special education into a single “consolidated” grant program. Without going into detail, the proposal also emphasized that parents would “remain empowered to direct these funds,” and that the Education Department would withhold funding from “states and districts who flout parental rights.”

These changes would require Congress to rewrite special education law as it never has before—an unlikely prospect, even with Republicans holding razor-thin majorities in both chambers. Congress last reauthorized the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act more than 20 years ago.

But educators, experts, and advocates see the proposal as part of a multi-front campaign that could shrink the quantity and quality of available services for millions of K-12 students, even as those efforts are already stretched thin and perennially hurting for more robust investment.

“We seem like we’re one day away from an executive order or a major decision that could change a lot of things for us in the field,” said Joe Kwisz, executive director of Old National Trail Special Services, a cooperative organization that supports five rural public schools in Indiana. “That’s really hard to plan for when we have federally mandated services for students with exceptional needs that have to be provided.”

Special educators see reason for continued federal uncertainty

More than 14 percent of the nation’s 50 million K-12 students qualify for special education services under IDEA, including individualized education plans (IEPs) schools are legally obligated to follow no matter the cost. Another 3 percent qualify for some services under the federal Section 504 law.

Weeks after Trump won the 2024 presidential election, rumors began circulating on social media that students’ IEPs would be canceled and their special education rights dissolved. While those rumors were unfounded, they set the tone for pervasive apprehension that shows few signs of abating.

Parents and advocates protested in at least seven state capitols earlier this year as Republican-led states advanced a lawsuit that appeared to challenge the constitutionality of the entire 504 law, which prohibits disability-based discrimination in federally funded programs. In response, state officials have said in legal filings that they only want to roll back a Biden-era regulation under the law covering services for transgender people.

In the meantime, the Department of Education under Trump and Secretary Linda McMahon has nixed grant funding and contracts for special education research, workforce development, and student services. Dozens of Education Department staff attorneys who help uphold federal rights for students with disabilities in March lost their jobs in a mass reduction in force.

Later, Trump publicly mused in the Oval Office on March 21 about shifting special education oversight from the Education Department to the Department of Health and Human Services—a move also proposed in Project 2025. But administration officials haven’t laid out a timeline for or fleshed out that transition, which would be illegal without involvement from Congress.

More recently, a leaked budget proposal document for the federal health agency showed the White House was considering a proposal to eliminate several disability-focused federal programs, including a research institute that’s currently working on one of the first-ever nationwide studies of K-12 students’ experiences with 504 plans; and “protection and advocacy” agencies in every state that provide legal counsel to families with disabilities.

“I think everybody in the disability field is nervous,” said Meghan Burke, a professor of special education at Vanderbilt University. “Nobody feels safe.”

A spokesperson for the Education Department didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Turbulence from the federal government is delaying key special ed. staffing decisions

All the federal chaos is intersecting with turbulence at the state and local levels, too.

Districts across the country are raising alarms over special education spending as IEP eligibility grows. State lawmakers in Alabama, Connecticut, Idaho, New Hampshire, Oregon, Texas, Washington, and Wisconsin have grappled in recent months with plans to help offset or supplement those mandatory district investments.

Trump’s unprecedented tariffs on imported goods are causing prices for technology tools and school buses to spike, further squeezing districts’ tight budgets.

For Kwisz in Indiana, the process of analyzing student enrollment numbers and assessing staffing needs for the upcoming school year typically begins in early March.

But federal turbulence has made it almost impossible for him to know how much money his district will be getting when its annual federal funding allocations begin pouring in on July 1. Most recently, the routine IDEA funding allocations the federal government regularly sends states each year came weeks later than usual.

“If you are planning for having x number of staff and also x amount of cut in your budget, you’re going to staff less,” Kwisz said. “You cannot overstaff without guaranteed funding being there.”

But waiting to hire often means being too late to snap up qualified candidates before the school year begins.

“To build capacity after the school year has started is a recipe for disaster because it just simply doesn’t happen very easily,” Kwisz said.

Some fear Congress now has an invitation to let states circumvent IDEA

Congress allocated level funding for IDEA in the budget resolution it passed in March for the current fiscal year, which school districts should start receiving July 1.

Beyond that, it remains to be seen how lawmakers will respond to the Trump administration’s proposal for a “Special Education Simplified Funding Program,” in which all the annual dollars Congress allocates for IDEA go out to states in a single bundle.

The White House’s “skinny” budget document—for the federal money schools would receive starting in July 2026—describes the changes as “limiting the federal role in education by reducing the number of programs at ED, the number of staff needed to administer them, and the administrative burden on States so more dollars go to students instead of bureaucrats.”

But some experts see the brief and vaguely worded proposal as an invitation for Congress to let states circumvent IDEA regulations, relax costly oversight of programs for students with disabilities, and direct greater shares of federal funding for parents to spend on private educational options outside the taxpayer-funded public school system.

Condensing IDEA funding streams into a single grant would risk shortchanging services and programs that would get overlooked if not for the federal spotlight, said Myrna Mandlawitz, policy and legislative consultant for the Council of Administrators of Special Education.

Some IDEA grants go to states and schools by way of formulas, while others have a competitive application process. IDEA Part C funds for infants and toddlers with disabilities, meanwhile, typically flow to agencies other than local districts.

“The law has been designed so that each of the parts of the law work together and have very specific purposes,” Mandlawitz said. “To lump it all together for the purposes of greater flexibility is really going to reduce the impact of the law.”

The proposal also threatens to take funds away from states and districts that “flout parental rights” and includes language about parents directing IDEA funds—a concept prized by champions of private school choice.

“Parents have never been empowered to direct funds. That’s not what parents do,” Mandlawitz said. “Parents and their children are recipients of the services provided under IDEA. It’s up to school administrators to direct the funds. That’s what they’re paid to do.”

Research funding cuts could lead to a ‘gap in knowledge production’

Even if IDEA funding stays intact, special education researchers say, districts in the coming years will start to feel the effects of the Trump administration’s terminations of education studies already in progress.

When the Trump administration in February canceled scores of data collection and research contracts issued by the Institute of Education Sciences, the Education Department’s research arm, and later eliminated most of its staff, the National Center for Education Research and its smaller counterpart focused on special education were among the casualties. Existing research ground to a halt, as did efforts to evaluate proposals for future studies.

Jade Wexler, a professor of special education at the University of Maryland, had two projects under review there: one aimed at improving literacy instruction for all middle school students, including students with disabilities; and another investigating another investigating an AI tool to help teachers more effectively implement evidence-based literacy practices.

For the latter project, she had already reached agreements with several Maryland school systems to begin work soon at 48 schools. But that work is now on hold as she scrambles to secure state or foundation funding to keep a smaller version of the project going.

Meanwhile, Wexler and her colleagues have had to warn doctoral students whom UMD recently admitted to conduct research on special education that federal funding for their program could disappear at any time. Several of those students are teachers currently employed in public schools, Wexler said.

As part of Trump’s broader attacks on Columbia University, the administration in March also cut two grants that went to researchers at the Columbia University-Teachers College for in-progress efforts to study diversifying the pipeline of speech-language pathologists and improving services for students with hearing loss.

“There may be a gap in knowledge production, and resource production and dissemination because we won’t have money to do the research,” Wexler said.

The effects of those cuts may not come into focus for years. But some would have a more immediate effect—even before they’re confirmed.

Meanwhile, back in New Mexico, as Donelli strains to renew the funding for the parent information center she runs, she said the department project officer assigned to her organization advised her to spend all of its remaining federal money before its new fiscal year starts on Oct. 1, rather than carry some of it over into the new year as it has in the past.

If her organization doesn’t get federal funding in the coming years, Donelli mainly hopes she’ll at least have time to let her staff find other jobs before laying them off. That would also keep some services for families afloat, for a limited time.

“In uncertain times you might try to cut back to at least keep doing what we’re doing,” Donelli said. “It’s hard when you’re the one with people’s jobs on the line.”