The Badger Herald

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.