The U.S. Department of Education's headquarters building in Washington, D.C. The department announced in mid-March that it will reduce its staff by nearly half. (Win McNamee/Getty Images)
The U.S. Department of Education’s headquarters building in Washington, D.C. The department announced in mid-March that it will reduce its staff by nearly half. (Win McNamee/Getty Images)
Almost from the moment it was created in 1979, the U.S. Department of Education has faced calls for its elimination from conservatives, who have argued that it gives the federal government too much sway over what should be a state and local matter.
President Donald Trump has revived those efforts. A draft executive order directs his newly confirmed education secretary, Linda McMahon, to prepare the department for closure, while acknowledging that actually dissolving it would require an act of Congress. (Asked directly if the United States needs her department, McMahon said, “No, we don’t.”) The department already has shed around 2,000 staffers – nearly half its workforce – through layoffs and buyouts, and canceled dozens of research contracts.
As the main conduit for federal aid to public K-12 schools and a major lender to college students, the Education Department’s work directly or indirectly affects millions of American families. Here are answers to some common questions about the department, including:
With the future of the U.S. Department of Education under the Trump administration in question, Pew Research Center conducted this analysis to learn more about what the department does, how much money it spends, and how Americans feel about it.
Our main sources were Education Department annual financial reports covering fiscal years 2016 through 2024. For additional information and context, we used the annual reports of the Federal Student Aid program for fiscal years 2017 through 2024, and the department’s annual performance report for FY2024. (Fiscal 2025, the current fiscal year, began on Oct. 1, 2024.) We last accessed all these reports online on March 13, 2025.
To situate the Education Department’s budget in the broader context of federal spending, we used historical expenditure data from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). More precisely, since OMB’s website was inaccessible at the time of this analysis, we used an archived version of the office’s “Historical Tables” publication, accessed via the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.
Information on the number of Education Department employees came from the Office of Personnel Management, specifically its FedScope data portal. Data on federal education spending as a share of state and local K-12 school budgets came from the Census Bureau. We also drew from the Education Department’s fiscal 2024 appropriations bill and supporting documents.
To get a sense of the public’s views of the Education Department, we relied on a 2024 Pew Research Center survey on federal agencies’ favorability. Information on how those surveys were conducted, the questions used, and the underlying data can be found by following the links in the main text.
What does the Education Department do?
Most of the department’s work involves distributing grants and loans to institutions and individuals. It provides grants to help local public K-12 schools educate disadvantaged and disabled students; assists low- and middle-income college students; and funds work-study programs, rehabilitative services, school improvement efforts, education research and much more.
The department also is the largest source of loans for college students, and enforces civil rights and equal access laws involving education.
How many people work at the Education Department?
A bar chart showing that, until recent cuts, Education Department workforce had been mostly stable for years.
As of last September, 4,209 people worked there, according to the Office of Personnel Management. That equated to about 0.2% of overall federal employment last year. The Education Department has the fewest employees of any Cabinet-level agency.
The department’s workforce has fluctuated over the years, peaking at 4,930 in 2000. But the ups and downs have been small overall: In fact, the department employed almost exactly as many people in September 2024 as it did 15 years earlier (4,218 in 2009).
How much does the Education Department spend each year?
That depends on how you measure it, and it varies considerably from year to year. That’s partly because much of the department’s gross costs are offset by student loan repayments and other “earned revenue,” and because accounting rules require the department to re-estimate the overall cost of its direct loan program each year.
A bar chart showing how Education Department spending has changed in recent years.
In fiscal 2022, for instance, the department’s reported costs rose sharply following the Biden administration’s expansion of student loan forgiveness programs. After courts struck down many of those expansions, the department’s reported costs fell just as sharply.
In fiscal 2024, the net cost of the department’s operations was $218.4 billion. Net outlays – a related metric that incorporates certain accounting adjustments – totaled $267.9 billion that year. That latter figure is about 3.9% of total federal outlays, according to archived data from the Office of Management and Budget.
What sorts of grants does the Education Department give out?
In fiscal 2024, the department’s grant spending totaled $150.3 billion, according to its annual financial report.
At the elementary and secondary levels, the department provides grants to schools, districts, agencies and other institutions, rather than to individuals. In fiscal 2024, its major grant programs included:
$18.8 billion for schools with large numbers of poor, neglected, delinquent and other “educationally disadvantaged” students
$15.5 billion for special education programs for students with disabilities
$5.5 billion for a wide variety of school improvement efforts, such as making teachers more effective, funding high-quality after-school programs, and making better use of classroom technology
$3.8 billion for adult rehabilitation services
$2.2 billion for career, technical and adult education
It has also spent billions of dollars to help schools and students recover from the COVID-19 pandemic. In fiscal 2024, the department provided $55 billion in COVID-19 grants to pre-K programs, elementary and secondary schools. Since fiscal 2020, it has granted $186 billion in such aid. The money has funded, among other things, tutoring, after-school and summer programs aimed at redressing pandemic-era learning losses; extra training for teachers; efforts to bring back students who dropped out during the pandemic; recruitment of new teachers; and mental health and counseling services for students.
The department also granted $260 million in fiscal 2024 through its research arm, the Institute of Education Sciences. (The Trump administration recently canceled $900 million in IES contracts, some of which cover multiple years.)
When it comes to higher education, nearly $33 billion in grant money in fiscal 2024 came in the form of Pell Grants, which are need-based grants intended mainly for first-time college students.
An area chart showing the breakdown of the Education Department's grants for college in the U.S.
Other grants available for college students include:
Supplemental Educational Opportunity Grants, which are awarded through schools’ financial aid offices
Teacher Education Assistance for College and Higher Education grants, which are available to students who agree to teach math, science or other specialized subjects in a “high poverty” school for at least four years after graduating from college
How big is the federal role in funding local public K-12 schools?
Nationally, the federal government provided about 13.6% of total funding for public elementary and secondary schools in fiscal 2022, according to the most recent available Census Bureau data. That figure includes some non-Education Department programs, such as school breakfasts and lunches (which are managed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture).
Which states and cities rely most on federal funding for local public K-12 schools?
A bar chart showing which states and school systems rely the most on federal K-12 aid.
Federal funding for local schools varies considerably from place to place. Mississippi’s schools, for example, collectively get 23.3% of their funding from federal sources, while just 7.2% of school funding in New York state is federal.
Nearly half of Detroit’s school funding (48.6%) comes from the federal government. That is by far the highest share among the nation’s 100 largest school systems. Shelby County, Tennessee, which includes Memphis, is second at 28.5%. The affluent district of Loudoun County, Virginia (located outside Washington, D.C.) receives the smallest share: 5% of its funding is from the federal government.
How many college students receive grants and loans from the Education Department? How has that number changed over time?
A line chart showing that fewer U.S. college students are
receiving federal aid than in fiscal 2017.
In recent years, the total number of students receiving some form of federal aid – whether grants or loans – has hovered around 10 million each year. That’s down from where it had been: In fiscal 2017, for instance, 12.9 million students received federal aid. (Some students get more than one type of aid.)
While the number of grant recipients has fallen over time, the total amount of grants given out has risen. In fiscal 2024, 6.3 million people received $33.9 billion in grants, while in fiscal 2017, 8.3 million people received $27.7 billion.
An area chart showing that total federal aid for U.S. college students has ticked up in recent years.
The Federal Work-Study Program – which enables students to work part time while they’re enrolled – is quite a bit smaller, but it still paid out $1.1 billion to around 600,000 recipients in fiscal 2024. Similar to the grant programs, a smaller number of Work-Study students are receiving more money than in years past: In fiscal 2017, for example, the program paid out $948.8 million to 634,000 students.
On the loan side, both the number of borrowers and the total amount borrowed have fallen. In fiscal 2024, the department loaned $85.8 billion to 6.7 million people. In fiscal 2017, it loaned $93.8 billion to 9.8 million people.
Related:5 facts about student loans
How many student loan borrowers owe money to the Education Department? How much do they owe?
In addition to its other roles, the department is the single largest lender to college students – operating in some ways more like a bank than a government agency. The department draws funds from the U.S. Treasury to make loans and returns them as borrowers repay their loans.
Charts showing that a record number of college borrowers in the U.S. owe nearly $1.5 trillion to the Education Department.
At the end of fiscal 2024, the department’s direct student loan portfolio stood at $1.47 trillion – $1.37 trillion in principal and $104.4 billion in accrued interest – owed by 38.2 million borrower customers. (Those figures exclude people who borrowed in the past but no longer owe anything on their loans, as well as some smaller loan programs that are no longer offered.)
Unlike a bank, the department isn’t a profit-seeking entity, and it has (up to now, at least) various programs enabling borrowers to have chunks of their student loan debt forgiven. In fiscal 2024, for instance, it canceled $59.8 billion in principal and interest.
A stacked bar chart showing that nearly a fifth of U.S. student loan debt is late or unpaid.
Still, the department does want money it’s owed, if for no other reason than that it affects how many new loans it can make. Of the $1.47 trillion currently owed on student loans, $189.2 billion (12.8%) is delinquent, meaning that the borrowers are 31 to 360 days behind in their payments. Another $98 billion (6.7%) is either in default, bankruptcy proceedings or is otherwise going unpaid. The remaining loans are either current (27.8%) or subject to one of several types of deferments (52.7%).
How do Americans feel about the Education Department?
A diverging bar chart showing that the education Department was among the least favorably regarded federal agencies in 2024.
About four-in-ten U.S. adults (44%) said they had a favorable opinion of the department in a 2024 Pew Research Center survey conducted online, while another 45% had an unfavorable opinion. That put it near the bottom of the 16 federal agencies and departments we asked about in terms of favorability, along with the Justice Department and the IRS.
Opinions about the Education Department showed a marked partisan split in the 2024 survey. Around six-in-ten Republicans and Republican-leaning independents (64%) viewed it unfavorably, while nearly the same share of Democrats and Democratic leaners (62%) viewed it favorably.
How did things work before the Education Department was created?
Congress created the first “Department of Education” in 1867. However, its mission was limited to collecting statistics about schools and disseminating what would today be called “best practices” on teaching methods and school organization.
But that “department” was downgraded to an “office” the following year, and for more than a century afterward it was lodged – under different names – within various other executive branch departments. It ultimately wound up inside the massive Department of Health, Education and Welfare (HEW) when that department was created in 1953.
The office’s role remained fairly small until the late 1950s, when the launch of the Soviet Sputnik satellite spurred a big increase in federal education spending. It grew further following the passage of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act and the Higher Education Act in 1965, two pillars of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s “Great Society” program that vastly increased the amount of federal aid to schools, colleges and other educational institutions. In 1979, Congress split off the current department from HEW.