The Trump administration has targeted the U.S. Department of Education (ED) since the president’s inauguration in January and has floated its elimination. Project 2025, a federal policy agenda published by former Trump administration officials, also explicitly calls for the elimination of the ED, which distributes federal funds for special education programs and oversees states’ compliance with federal laws.
University of Wisconsin rehabilitation psychology and special education professor Andrea Ruppar said the elimination of the ED would be potentially devastating to disabled students. Ruppar said moving oversight of these laws and programs to another body like the Department of Health and Human Services not only disrupts the research conducted by the USDOE on strategies for education students, but would also bring some worrying implications.
“When we think about kids with disabilities in schools, we think about them as learners, not as patients,” Ruppar said. “We work with students where they are and our goal is to teach.”
Ruppar said the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act is the basis for access to education for disabled children. The bill was passed by Congress in 1975 and creates the funding structures for states to distribute fund for special education.
Federal funding for IDEA Part B, the section concerning the education of disabled children, is appropriated by Congress. These funds are then sent to states who allocate these funds to their schools districts. Ruppar said the majority of IDEA Part B funds are spent on the personnel who create individualized education program with parents and students each year.
Allocation of resources within school districts is already thin, and competition over resources broadly has already lead to smaller Wisconsin school districts closing, Ruppar said. Schools already have to dig into their own resources to bring themselves into compliance with federal laws and civil rights for disabled students, she said.
The IDEA publishes yearly reports to Congress detailing statistics and key findings. The latest report from 2024 stated over 7.3 million students aged 3 to 21 were served by IDEA through the fall of 2021.
Ruppar said not following or ignoring this law risks stepping back into a world were disabled students are prevented from attending schools.
“Before 1975 [disabled students] didn’t have a right to go to school, any school could say ‘no you can’t come here you have a disability,'” Ruppar said. “We can’t go back to that.”
