President Donald Trump pledged to eliminate the Department of Education and is now taking concrete steps to do so — including a March 11 announcement that the department would be firing half of its workforce and a March 20 executive order to close the department.

The official elimination of the department requires an act of Congress and Trump’s order will surely be litigated in the courts. 

Republican Gov. Joe Lombardo praised the move in an op-ed for Breitbart News, noting that increasing the federal agency’s funding has not been correlated with improved student achievement in public schools.

“By reducing the size, bureaucracy and power of the U.S. Department of Education, we can create more opportunities for parents to choose the best educational setting for their children,” Lombardo wrote. “Parents should always have the final say in their child’s education – not Washington D.C. bureaucrats.”

The Nevada Democratic Party held a press conference on Friday to oppose Trump’s executive order, during which Ford, a presumptive gubernatorial candidate, said that Lombardo “just sold out Nevada’s kids and their futures” to curry favor with the president and his supporters.

“Lombardo is out here pretending about local control, but in reality it’s about him looking out for himself at the expense of our children,” Ford said.

Nevada education advocates are bracing for impact after the order. Between staffing cuts, the Trump administration’s efforts to cancel federally appropriated spending and congressional Republicans’ budget blueprint — which calls for $330 billion in cuts to education and workforce spending over 10 years — federal education funding in the state could be in jeopardy.

Tom Clark, a lobbyist for the Nevada Association of School Boards, said it’s too early to tell which or whether services will be affected by the personnel cuts. But he said school board members across the state are beginning to assess what programs may need to be sacrificed in the event that federal funding does get cut.

“Our school boards are very, very nervous about everything that’s happening,” Clark said. “The scarier thing isn’t necessarily the cuts, [which] haven’t happened. It’s the speculation on what could potentially happen, and how that is going to affect education budgets across the board."

Clark added that school boards will be at a loss about how to replace federal funds, likely necessitating budget cuts to rely only on state programs and local revenue. 

“There isn’t anything to replace it, from a money perspective,” he said.

What Nevada receives from the department 

Nevada schools receive more than $990 million annually from the Department of Education, translating to about $2,052 per student, according to the Education Data Initiative. 

In 2024, per the department, that included more than $160 million for Title I schools serving low-income students, more than $100 million in grants for special education, $200 million in Pell Grants and more than $400 million in direct student loans. Cuts to special education, in particular, could be drastic, given that the federal government pays for up to 40 percent of its cost in public K-12 schools. 

Smaller line items include grants for adult literacy education; funds for school districts on federal lands, including tribal lands; teacher recruitment and retention; and career and technical education programs.

In fact, federal spending as a share of total education spending is higher in Nevada — which has one of the lowest per-pupil K-12 public school spending levels per state — than the national average. According to a USA Facts study based on National Center for Education Statistics data, 16.2 percent of public school revenue in the 2021-22 school year in Nevada came from federal funds, compared with the national average of 13.7 percent.

Of school districts in Nevada, Lander County had the greatest reliance on federal funds at 28.4 percent, while Eureka County had the smallest at only 5.3 percent. In the Clark County School District, where most of the state’s student population resides, 17 percent of the budget is federally sourced.

Dawn Etcheverry, the president of the Nevada State Education Association (NSEA) said cuts to any of these federal funding streams would exacerbate the educator shortage in Nevada — already a significant problem, with nearly 3,000 vacancies at the start of this school year.

And the effects of cuts could be most potent in rural counties, according to Etcheverry, because the geographic distance that students travel and the small sizes of school districts mean that per-pupil spending is often higher in rural communities.

Parents of children with disabilities are especially concerned. The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), the law that ensures equal access to education for students with disabilities, is funded and enforced by the Department of Education. IDEA mandates that school districts create Individualized Education Programs (IEP) for students who meet federal or state disability standards, regulates evaluations for special education eligibility and establishes a process for parents to dispute decisions regarding their children.

Michelle Booth, the communications director for Educate Nevada Now, an organization that advocates for equitable education funding, is concerned about what a future without the Department of Education would mean for her as a parent of a child with autism. If she wanted to elevate a concern about her son’s public school education beyond the district or the state, she’s worried that the lack of federal recourse would leave her “at the mercy of local politics.”

“Education is local for the most part, but for special education and Title I funds, which are [for] our most vulnerable students — low-income students and students who have special needs — they get federal funding,” Booth said. “The idea that that's just going to be cut is outrageous to me. It would be detrimental to my family.”

How the department works

The Department of Education does not set curricula or education standards, which are developed at the state level. Its functions include providing financial aid (including Pell Grants), work study and student loans for higher education students, distributing grants to school districts with high percentages of low-income children, funding special education programs for students with disabilities, conducting educational research and enforcing civil rights laws in schools.

Per Thursday’s executive order, Education Secretary Linda McMahon is in the process of dismantling the department. 

McMahon has said that the firings won’t affect the department’s ability to deliver on congressionally mandated grants and funds to states, and a dismantling or closure of the department does not necessarily mean an end to programs such as federal student aid or Title I funds, which could get folded into other departments. The executive order closing the department promised there will be an “uninterrupted delivery of services, programs and benefits on which Americans rely.” 

Education Department leaders are still using offices that are undergoing significant cuts. Despite the layoffs of more than 200 employees at the Office of Civil Rights (OCR) and the closure of more than half of its regional offices, OCR opened an investigation into over 50 universities, including UNLV, over purported racial discrimination as part of Trump’s efforts to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion programming.

But proponents of the department and its mission worry that staffing cuts will impair services. NPR reported, for example, that all of the attorneys who work with states and school districts on compliance with Title I and IDEA funds were fired. 

“All the programs being administered — the civil rights issues being fought, the student loan issues being dealt with — all of that's going to come to a screeching halt because there's just not the workforce to deal with it,” said Nevada State Education Association (NSEA) spokesman Alexander Marks.

Politics

Nevada Democrats have railed against the staffing cuts — but given that the firings were done at the executive level, there’s not much they can do. 

Rep. Susie Lee (D-NV), who spent decades working in education-focused nonprofits before her congressional career, is rallying with parents of children with disabilities in Las Vegas on Saturday. Sen. Jacky Rosen (D-NV) joined Senate Democrats in a letter to McMahon laying out an impassioned defense of the department’s work and expressing outrage over the cuts.

And at the state level, NSEA hosted a “walk-in” at the Capitol building in Carson City Tuesday to protest the cuts alongside Attorney General Aaron Ford, highlighting that more than 250,000 Nevada students are covered by Title I. 

But any substantive resistance will likely need to come from the courts. On that front, Ford is part of a lawsuit with 20 other attorneys general arguing that the firings are so detrimental that they prevent the department from fulfilling its statutory obligations, and are therefore illegal. 

If cuts do come down, can the state fill in the gap? 

Etcheverry said the federal uncertainty is imperiling the Legislature’s capacity to set policy — because of the potential for cuts — and has teachers bracing for larger class sizes.

“It's causing — already — this tiered effect for all of us,” she said. “School boards are just passing their budgets, so they're all talking about reduction in forces. [For] our students with special needs … that's where the funding comes from.”

Notorious for chronically underfunding K-12 education, Nevada routinely ranks in the bottom 10 among states in per-pupil spending. The governor’s biennial budget calls for an increase of $93 million in K-12 education spending for 2025-26; if Congress slashes Title I or special education funding, it would create a significant state budget hole.

Advocates are worried about cuts to special education funding, in particular, because the federal government pays for such a large share of the state’s special education programs.

Clark said if Nevada receives less federal funding for education, school districts are undoubtedly going to need to make cuts.

“We’ve relied on getting those federal resources,” Clark said. “It hasn’t really been contemplated that the state would have to fill that gap, to find the resources … We will see cuts to programs across the board, whether you’re urban or rural.”

Updated at 12:25 p.m. on 3/21/25 to add comment from Attorney General Aaron Ford. Eric Neugeboren contributed to this report.