The Trump administration’s unprecedented push to reshape American education has affected schools and campuses nationwide, driving sweeping changes to education rules, culture and funding.
Using investigations, executive orders, new regulations and threats to cut off federal funding, Republicans have forced schools to abandon many diversity efforts and protections for transgender children, begun dismantling the Education Department and made other key changes to long-standing policies as Democrats seethed in the background.
Now, Democrats have a chance to take meaningful action with control of both the House and Senate. Across the board, they are expected to use investigative hearings and oversight levers to try to reverse President Donald Trump’s course.
But will it be enough to undo — or even slow — his agenda?
Even with large majorities in both chambers, Democrats face formidable challenges. Their ability to reverse policy depends on securing some Republican votes, using budget reconciliation or negotiating bills Trump will sign.
Party leaders are eager to wield their power in the final two years of Trump’s tenure, and they feel emboldened by voters who gave them control of the legislature.
“Instead of funding disastrous foreign wars, Democrats are going to fight to make affordable child care a reality for every working family, invest big in kids and schools across the country, and help students afford a higher education,” said Sen. Patty Murray (D-Washington), who is poised to lead the Senate Appropriations Committee.
The power of the purse and oversight are the party’s strongest near-term tools, and they could yield some gains. Within hours of Democrats seizing control of Congress, Rep. Bobby Scott (D-Virginia), the House Education and the Workforce Committee’s longtime top Democrat, told the administration to preserve all records.
The Trump administration fired back Friday, saying Democrats are rushing to “shield a broken bureaucracy.”
“It is policy malpractice to defend a status quo where roughly 70 percent of students have fallen behind in reading and math,” said Savannah Newhouse, the Education Department’s press secretary. “Yet, instead of answering for these failures, some Congressional Democrats would rather plot to prematurely sabotage Secretary [Linda] McMahon’s ongoing efforts to put students first and parents back in the driver’s seat.”
The Washington Post spoke with advocates and Democratic lawmakers to gauge what’s possible, what’s probable and what’s out of reach in key areas affecting education now that the power dynamics and priorities have shifted in Washington.
The unraveling of the Education Department
McMahon has long said one of her top goals is to fulfill a Trump’s campaign promise to close the Education Department and eliminate her own position. She has already slashed the number of employees in the department, moved the headquarters to smaller office space in D.C., and signed agreements to outsource much of the work to other agencies.
“The moving of federal responsibilities to other agencies is illegal,” said Rep. Jahana Hayes (D-Connecticut), who is vying for leadership of the House Education Committee. “We have to get to work to put these responsibilities back where they go.”
Hayes said lawmakers will need to bring Education Department officials before Congress to assess the damage of the administration’s actions. She said Democrats could advance bills, including her own, to protect the department from being restructured, underfunded or dismantled by the president. Those bills, she said, must be included in budget negotiations.
Those budget negotiations will be key. Because the Democrats will hold the majority in Congress, they will be in position to negotiate education appropriations contingent on policy changes.
Jonathan Fansmith, senior vice president for government relations and national engagement at the American Council on Education (ACE), said Democrats could include language in appropriations bills prohibiting the use of Education Department funds for interagency agreements, program transfers, staff details or office closures.
Returning education to the states
McMahon has toured the country as part of what the department calls its “Returning Education to the States” initiative, touting its efforts to reduce federal regulation. As part of this stated mission, the Education Department has allowed at least eight states to combine certain federal grants, giving them more flexibility in how to spend some of the money and waiving some federal restrictions.
Jonathan Butcher, a researcher at the conservative Heritage Foundation, said “left-leaning lawmakers” may try to restrict that, but Trump could veto any legislation.
“What Secretary McMahon has done already, she has done under her existing authority,” Butcher said.
Frederick Hess, director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), said that the slogan of returning education to the states is mostly “rhetorical flourish.”
Public schools are already largely regulated by states and local school boards, rather than the federal government. And, he said, simply closing or shrinking the agency won’t eliminate federal education statutes, regulations and programs that have been adopted over time.
“The idea that this fundamentally was empowering states or changing Washington’s role in a meaningful way was always a gross exaggeration by Republicans, which is also why the sky-is-falling rhetoric from the Democrats was also always exaggerated,” said Hess, whose think tank generally advocates limited government.
Discretionary grants
Appropriations could also play an important role in restoring funding for federal grants, some of which were cut because workers at the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) said they included diversity, equity or inclusion provisions that the administration has deemed illegal. Among the cuts were teacher-training and child care grants the Education Department said conflicted with its priorities, and funds earmarked to increase college access were reallocated to workforce training.
Fansmith at ACE said members of both parties took issue with some of those unilateral grant decisions.
“There’ll be a lot of interest in getting back to very clear delineation of what the money’s intended to be for,” he said.
Democratic leaders are also calling for larger investments in grant programs that support low-income students.
Hayes said one of her priorities is to bolster funding for high-poverty schools and English-language learners.
Rep. Suzanne Bonamici (D-Oregon), another contender for the top spot on the House Education Committee, wants to prioritize robust investment in the Pell Grant, one of the largest federal grant programs for low-income college students. Shoring up Pell, which is facing a projected $17 billion shortfall in 2027, is a pressing need and an objective that has bipartisan support.
Research funding
Many major universities have been particularly alarmed by the Trump administration’s efforts to freeze or reduce federal research grants, injecting uncertainty into what has long been a stable partnership with the federal government.
Several lobbyists said there are still a lot of unknowns, but they are hopeful the new majority in Congress can help steady research funding with less outright hostility to academia.
Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-California) said this week that she will seek the chair position of the House Science Committee and that her top priority will be stopping Trump’s politicization of science funding. “We will hold this administration accountable for the damage they have done to the American scientific enterprise,” she said in a press release.
Tobin Smith, senior vice president for government relations and public policy at the Association of American Universities, said that historically, federal research funding has benefited from bipartisan backing, and that will continue to be important. But the Trump administration is expected to continue to shape science policy through executive actions, regulatory decisions and the veto power, so the policy landscape for scientific research remains complex.
On research funding, he has cautioned people, “Don’t think this flips a switch and all of a sudden the money starts flowing.”
Higher education investigations
The Trump administration launched a blizzard of investigations of universities, scrutinizing issues such as whether they failed to counter antisemitism on campus or comply with the administration’s interpretation of federal civil rights laws after the Supreme Court banned race-conscious admissions.
Agencies demanded additional admissions data and accused schools of discriminating against White and Asian applicants. The administration also investigated many schools for violating civil rights laws by earmarking scholarships or programs for women or students of color or offering in-state tuition to undocumented students.
Congressional hearings and investigations brought significant pressure on university presidents and institutions, and those are likely to lessen if not stop, experts said.
And one of the key people who was behind the administration’s efforts is gone — Harmeet Dhillon resigned last week from her role as assistant attorney general for the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department.
But Kiersten Pels, a spokesperson for the Justice Department, said that neither election results nor Dhillon’s resignation changes the fact “that the Supreme Court held in SFFA v Harvard that universities accepting federal funding are not allowed to discriminate on the basis of race in admissions.”
The Civil Rights Division, she said, “will continue to prioritize enforcing that decision.”
Graduate student loan limits
Republicans last year imposed new federal student loan limits for graduate and professional degree programs, with a tiered system that lets students in some fields borrow more than others.
That process for determining which students classify as “professional” has been the subject of several successful lawsuits from health care groups who want their degree programs to qualify for higher loan limits. Raising the loan limits would be difficult because Democrats would have to find a way to offset the cost, said Jared Bass, a former staffer on the House Appropriations Committee and now executive director of the Committee for Education Funding.
Lawmakers could codify the list of programs that qualify for the higher loan amounts and include more fields, such as social work and education, he said.
Federal vouchers
Democrats could also try to limit or roll back a controversial new voucher-style federal school tax credit designed to fund scholarship programs for local schools.
The tax credit, adopted as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill, allows taxpayers to claim a tax credit up to $1,700 for contributions made to scholarship organizations in participating states. That money in turn can be used to help families pay for private school tuition, tutoring and other K-12 education expenses at eligible public, private and home-schools.
But the tax credit has faced opposition from education unions and many Democrats, who argue it could divert money from public schools to private education. The Joint Committee on Taxation estimated that the program could reduce federal revenue by about $26 billion over 10 years.
Even before the election, Sens. Mark Kelly (D-Arizona) and Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii) led an effort to eliminate the tax credit, with more than 30 co-sponsors. A companion bill in the House attracted more than 100 backers.
“I do believe that the new incoming Congress will consider passing a bill to either restrict or remove the tax credit program,” said Robert Enlow, chief executive of EdChoice, a nonprofit that supports voucher programs.
Though Trump could veto a stand-alone bill to dismantle the tax credit, Congress could insert the provision into a broader bill that has bipartisan support, making it more difficult to block.
Democrats could also negotiate with the Trump administration to shift the money to a child tax credit or another measure that both parties can support, said Jon Valant, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a center-left think tank.
Or Democrats could wait. If Democrats win the White House in 2028, the tax credit could be “one of the first items on the chopping block,” Valant said.
Civil rights investigations
Historically, the Education and Justice departments have investigated discrimination complaints involving students of color, children with disabilities, as well as allegations of sexual violence and harassment.
But critics say the Trump administration has neglected many of those cases,while concentrating on a narrower set of priorities important to conservatives, including alleged discrimination against White and Asian students in admissions and scholarships, antisemitism and policies to protect transgender students. The Trump administration also laid off many investigators, contributing to a backlog of complaints.
“We have a civil rights crisis in education right now,” said Columbia law professor Suzanne B. Goldberg, who served as acting assistant secretary for civil rights at the Education Department in 2021. “The departments have dropped nearly all of their basic protection of students in service of a few select priorities.”
Goldberg said she expects Congress will hold hearings and issue subpoenas to gather information about the issues.
“Congress will be very interested in gathering information to see what exactly the departments have been doing with taxpayer dollars,” she said.
Bonamici told The Post in a statement that she wants to hold hearings to investigate why the department closed several of its regional offices and to force officials to “answer for the lack of action on pending cases and the disturbing number of case dismissals.”
In addition to holding hearings, the new Congress could also try to include restrictions in appropriations bills on how the departments use federal civil rights enforcement funds, though the executive branch generally has broad discretion to decide which cases to prioritize.
“Congress will no longer be a bystander,” said Hess at AEI. “They’ll be holding hearings. They’ll use oversight. They can try to attach language to spending.”
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