By: Evie Beaumaster

With a new president there are many new laws and budgets that affect education for millions of people in the United States. Donald Trump is the new president of the United States and he has a lot to say about education and how much money is spent on it and how the government should be allowed to interfere with education.

In the fiscal year of 2025 the budget request for K-12 education will be 82.4 billion dollars. However, only 52 billion was approved in this past year. This budget comes from the US Department of Education and can be accessed on their public website. There are 95,852 public schools in the United States in 2025, and while that may seem like a lot of money for so few schools, that budget is shockingly low for how much money our public school system needs in America. The cost per student per year is about $17,280. Students are usually in school for 13 years and usually a year or two of preschool. This budget is very low for the 50 million students that attend public school in America.

Compared to the budgets of other things that get government funding, education is among the lowest. In comparison, the US military, as a whole, gets 15% of government spending. The highest category for government spending is Social Security, which gets 21%. Education is only the fourth highest spending category out of the 11 categories.

The quality of education is also an area of concern among Americans. The White House also recently released a presidential action that asked for the end of schools indoctrinating their children with “[R]adical, anti-American ideologies while deliberately blocking parental oversight”. The action then goes on to say that children are forced to assume different identities and “wonder if they were born in the wrong body”. This shows how the government we have in place doesn’t think of education first, it thinks of “radical” ideas that children may pick up in school. According to article 19 from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers”. This article shows that children’s ideas and personal beliefs are a human right and it doesn’t matter if they are picked up at school.

The school system in America is currently being set up for failure and it is heading towards a dark place of censorship and terrible underfunding.

Recently, President Trump has vocalized his plans to dismantle the Department of Education. This would be a very bad thing if passed by congress. According to their website, The Department of Education oversees many things concerning the education system including, the federal role in education, annual performance reports, and promoting the quality of education. The education department is also responsible for making the budget for public schools. When President Trump was asked about this he said “We are ranked number one in cost per pupil, so we spend more per pupil than any other country in the world, and we are ranked at the bottom of the list”. This is a really bad sign because other countries may spend less money on education but that could be because in other countries a lot of education is paid for privately. Trump also added that he “wanted the states to run schools”, meaning that the education budget would not be coming from the federal government but from the state government which would not actually have enough money to properly sustain the school system.

Public schools in the US are often shunned and called terrible, but maybe it’s not the people that are to blame; it’s the funding—- or the lack thereof. This overall will be a very bad thing for students because this education system will be effecting the whole world. Millions of people go through these public schools, and it will educate the future generations that will eventually lead this country.

For more information, please visit:

• https://www.ed.gov
• https://www.ed.gov/sites/ed/files/about/overview/budget/budget25/summary/25summary.pdf
• https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=84
• https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/federal-spending/
• https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/2024-03/2024_0311_fy_2025_budget_in_brief.pdf
• https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cga/public-school-enrollment
• https://educationdata.org/public-education-spending-statistics
• https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/ending-radical-indoctrination-in-k-12-schooling/
• https://www.ed.gov/about/ed-overview
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UwxEsLG812U