Late last week, the Trump Administration released its FY2027 budget proposal. The otherwise austere document contained one major bright spot for advocates for students with disabilities: the administration has proposed $539 million increase for federal special education programs, bringing total IDEA funding to nearly $16 billion. For families who have spent decades fighting for even basic resources, any increase carries weight, and so, on the surface, this seemed like a huge win for special education professionals.
But, more money is not the same thing as more equity. And this budget, read in full, is not what it appears.
In my practice, I study special education through a DisCrit lens — a framework that holds race and disability in view simultaneously, bec
For these students, federal education policy is often the difference between a classroom that sees them and one that doesn’t, and this administration’s new budget funds the latter while defunding the former.
The same document that increases IDEA spending overall eliminates nearly $900 million from English language learner support, despite the fact that a significant share of students with disabilities are also English learners. It cuts over $400 million from programs serving students in migrant families and eliminates federal Equity Assistance Centers, which helped school districts examine and address racial bias in their own systems. It cuts teacher preparation programs that trained educators in culturally responsive practices — for the sixth consecutive year — citing their support for diversity and anti-racism as grounds for elimination based on the idea that cultural competency is a wasteful ideology. And it strips hundreds of millions from Minority-Serving Institutions, dismantling the very pipelines that produce the educators of Color who disproportionately serve these communities.
The budget also proposes consolidating six smaller, targeted IDEA programs into the State Grants block. The administration appears to be framing this move as one of “efficiency”, but the idea that folding funding for programs designed around the most specific and complex student needs into a larger block grant is somehow more “efficient” is silly. What this actually does is ensure that the most vulnerable groups of kids (e.g., students with very intricate needs or those from historically excluded backgrounds) get absorbed into the general pot of funding where their needs must now compete with everyone else’s and where there is no rule that anyone must consider their needs specifically when making decisions about funding.
We’ve seen this movie before, and *spoiler alert*: it doesn’t end well for the kids who were already being left behind.
There is also something critical this budget does not say. Federal special education law contains provisions requiring states to identify and address the overrepresentation of Black and Brown children in special education. These are among the most consequential equity protections in the law, and decades of research have proven that without oversight, states do not self-correct. The budget talks extensively about reducing paperwork and returning flexibility to states. It does not mention disproportionality once. It does not acknowledge that the “paperwork” most likely to be reduced is the federal accountability that protects children of Color from disproportionate special education identification, restrictive and exclusionary placements, punitive discipline, and more.
It is a fiduciary sleight of hand to fund special education at record levels and still somehow manage to completely undermine the programmatic infrastructure that makes any investment in special education meaningful and effective.
To be clear, I am not arguing that bigger government is always better, or that every federal education program has been well-designed or well-run. While I don’t think anyone would argue with the idea that there is certainly room for improvement, what this budget proposes is not a thoughtful reform. It is the removal of accountability for the most marginalized students, covered by a funding increase for the category they nominally belong to.
The ideological framing of this budget also deserves a direct response. Throughout the Department of Education section, approaches like culturally responsive teaching, diversity training for educators, and programs designed to address racial inequity are characterized not as evidence-based strategies they are, but as radical ideology and waste.
Programs are eliminated not because data demonstrated they failed students, but because the administration objects to the language they used. As a researcher, I find it telling that this budget does not engage the evidence. It does not refute it. Instead, it acts as though it does not exist altogether.
A budget is a moral document that tells us, in dollar amounts, whose children we have decided to protect, and whose we are prepared to leave to chance. By increasing the overall budget number while dismantling the infrastructure that would make that number most meaningful, this administration has set up a very expensive plan to abandon the kids who most need special education services and funding. This is what equity erosion looks like. This is not a victory for special education.
Kioshana LaCount Burrell is a workforce development and special education researcher currently pursuing her PhD at The Ohio State University. Her research examines special education programming and policy, with a focus on culturally responsive practice and the intersecting experiences of race and disability in educational settings.
