There’s been a lot of chatter around recent cuts to the Department of Education (ED) since President Trump announced a 50 percent reduction in the ED’s task force. On the left, teachers and administrators worry that a dip in funding will disproportionately affect low-income and disabled students, citing an unclear future when it comes to student success records. On the right, critics of the ED assert that student success has little to do with education funding and that SAT scores have been tanking even with increased ED spending under the Biden administration. And while there is a good argument to be made in favor of abolishing federal educational responsibility and returning priority to the states, allowing them to focus on their unique needs, the truth is that these cuts will have little if any effect on test scores, disabled students, or low-income areas.
The fact is, the ED doesn’t spend that much money on secondary education in the first place.
[RELATED: Conservatives Must Save the Liberal Arts]
It is, of course, undeniable that the ED plays some role in helping disadvantaged students access educational resources, and students in marginalized communities will indeed see a reduction in funds under the Trump administration’s budget cuts. However, the numbers for ED spending tell a slightly different story than the New York Times might have you believe—and are little cause for concern. Under the 2025 Fiscal Year plan, $14.8 billion will go to “Elementary and Secondary Education” with $11.1 billion of those funds allocated to “Disadvantaged Education.” In contrast, in 2024, the ED was allocated $241.66 billion in budgetary resources across all its sub-components. Of those resources, only $28.7 billion went to “Elementary and Secondary Education” with $19.3 billion of those funds going towards “Disadvantaged Education”—a mere 7.9 percent. While these cuts will still represent a 42 percent decrease in funding for lower-income and disabled students, the $14.8 billion in funds to secondary education will actually represent a much higher percentage of the overall budget than in previous years—14.4 percent out of the new $102.24B proposed budget for the ED.
Are you in favor of shutting down the Department of Education?
— Liza Libes (@pensandpoison) March 15, 2025
But if Secondary Education spending only accounts for 7-14 percent of the ED budget, where does all the money go?
With all this talk about cuts to the ED and its effect on secondary education or marginalized students, it is easy to ignore the elephant in the room: the primary purpose of the ED is to fund federal student loans.
A whopping $179 billion was granted in federal student loans in the 2024 Fiscal Year, representing nearly three-quarters of the ED budget. The ED does not, therefore, primarily fund secondary education—it simply gives out student loans. And with the student loan budget set to decrease to $68.7 billion in 2025, the government will be forced to become pickier about what sort of student it deems worthy of loans. As Ben Shapiro—a good representative voice for the anti-ED conservative right—remarks, a reduction in federal aid would represent a much-needed shift towards private loans, positively affecting four-year degree seekers “because then you would be actually be forced to consider whether you need a degree in ‘Lesbian Dance Studies.’” And while I am no proponent of the “Lesbian Dance Studies” degree, Shapiro, going on to praise “useful” degrees in STEM, hints at a broader ideological agenda guiding many of the ED budgetary cuts—the disdain for the liberal arts education.
[RELATED: The Disappearance of the Bookish Kid—and What Colleges Must Do]
Shapiro has disparaged the English degree in the past—a degree that, though ideologically charged today, has provided me, a recipient of two Ivy League English degrees, with an invaluable foundation that has allowed me to outearn many of my peers in STEM through starting a business of my own and creating a robust social media platform to promote the literary arts. Yes, many of my fellow English degree seekers do end up serving me coffee at Starbucks, but many more go on to be lawyers, consultants, public intellectuals, or entrepreneurs.
Yes, the humanities are currently deeply ideologically captured, but bereft of ideology, a liberal arts education creates worthy American citizens and fierce intellectuals. To bar students interested in the humanities from pursuing their degrees will only push a greater number of intelligent people away from the humanities, sending them into STEM fields they are less likely to succeed in due to intellectual mismatch and further reinforcing the ideological capture of fields like English and history—an outcome that I doubt Shapiro himself would be fond of. And the more humanities students become disincentivized to take out college loans, the fewer competent lawyers, businesspeople, and creatives we will have in our society, affecting us all.
I sympathize with claims that academia has been taken over by the far left—that’s my whole schtick, after all. But the attack on the ED is incredibly misguided. The solution is not to abolish the liberal arts education—as Shapiro and many other conservative commentators seem to be suggesting. The solution is to inspire a greater number of smart people to pursue liberal arts fields and to save the liberal arts from ideologues—for that will push up test scores and create a sounder base of American intellectuals, eradicating the “woke” educational agenda that conservatives despise. The more conservatives wage war on the liberal arts, however, the more we’ll be left with an increase of ideologues in these fields, for these fields aren’t going anywhere—they’ll just be pushed further left. And the more ideologically captured academia becomes, the less people will be able to think for themselves.
So think twice before attacking the Department of Education.
Follow Liza Libes on X
Image: “Department of Education sign Washington DC” by G. Edward Johnson on Wikimedia Commons
