Education Week

The constitutional principle known as “the power of the purse” has been a fixture of American history classrooms for generations. Federal law explicitly prohibits the executive branch from overriding Congress’s spending decisions. But with a cascade of unilateral federal funding changes in the last year, President Donald Trump has challenged those principles more directly and aggressively than any leader in the nation’s 250-year history—and the education field felt the effects early and often. Education Week has spent the last year building a running—and increasingly sprawling—tabulation of the individual grant cancellations and broader funding disruptions affecting education as they’ve happened. During the first year of Trump’s second term, Education Week found that the federal government bypassed Congress and disrupted more than $12 billion for K-12 education that lawmakers had already allocated, much of it before Trump took office.

Note: Limited free articles, then requires a subscription.