Linda McMahon is breaking the federal promise to fund the neediest kids and hiding the receipts.
My daughter Eva started kindergarten three weeks ago at a Philadelphia public school that runs on Title I money. Title I is the federal program that sends roughly $18.4 billion a year to schools where most students come from low-income families. That works out to about $730 per kid. Seventeen hundred and thirty dollars across a school year buys a reading specialist who catches a first-grader before she falls behind. It buys a classroom aide who makes a class of twenty-eight first-graders survivable. It buys the after-school program that keeps a child safe until her mother gets off work at five-thirty.
McMahon has spent eighteen months dismantling the system that delivers that money. She moved the offices that manage Title I grants to the Department of Labor. Labor’s system was not built for education grants. Education Department staff tried twice to send Title I money through Labor’s platforms. Both attempts were halted after states complained about technical problems and untrained staff. The October payment — the one that pays for the reading specialist, the classroom aide, the after-school program — is going through Education’s old system. The department says it will try Labor’s again next year.
Read that again. A federal agency that manages one of the biggest pools of grant money in the government tried twice to move it through a system that was not designed for the job, failed both times, and plans to try again. If you ran a household like that, someone would stage an intervention.
My parents raised three children on a postal supervisor’s income and sent all three through Catholic school. That was possible because the systems their generation built were designed to outlast the people who built them — the parish schools, the federal education commitments, the labor arrangements that kept a working family within reach of the life they were told they were building. My father’s salary covered tuition, a mortgage, and a week at Wildwood every August. The infrastructure held.
I cannot replicate that for two children on two incomes. The parish schools contracted when the nuns left. The mortgage is seven percent. Childcare runs $2,400 a month. And now the federal system that makes it possible for Eva’s school to serve the children who need the most help is being taken apart by the woman who runs it.
The receipts do not exist. That is the point. Senate Democrats have asked the Government Accountability Office to evaluate what the interagency agreements cost. Congress required briefings on implementation expenses. The department stopped providing them. Senator Patty Murray put the question plainly: “Tell Congress and the public what these interagency agreements actually cost taxpayers. Show us the receipts.”
The human cost is easier to see. More than a hundred special education staffers now report to an HHS building across the street from where they used to work. Dozens of civil-rights employees moved to the Justice Department. Staff managing grants are working under renewable 120-day details — temporary arrangements that nobody can explain the purpose of. When employees asked what happens when the 120 days are up, leadership said they remained Education Department employees with the same responsibilities. One employee asked the obvious question: “So then what? Are we going to move again in 120 days? A year? They have framed it as a permanent solution to our country and it’s not.”
The department spent as much as $38 million between March and December 2025 paying staff not to work after laying them off. At the same time, the civil-rights office resolved more than 7,000 discrimination complaints and dismissed roughly 90 percent without investigation. The money to move people across the street existed. The capacity to investigate a civil-rights complaint against a school did not.
Title I money is not an abstraction. It is the reading specialist at Eva’s school, and the reading specialist at a school in North Philadelphia where the poverty rate is triple what it is in Fishtown, and the reading specialist at a school in rural Pennsylvania where the nearest pediatrician is forty-five minutes away. The Labor Department’s grant system does not know the difference between those schools. The Education Department’s system does.
Taylor Swift wrote a song called “You’re On Your Own, Kid.” I have quoted the title line here before as my shorthand for what American care infrastructure actually delivers to parents: you are on your own. It was a diagnosis. The Trump administration is turning it into a policy. They are not failing to fund education. They are dismantling the mechanism that delivers the funding and telling states, schools, and families to figure it out without it.
That is what the interagency agreements are doing. That is what the building moves are doing. That is what the grant-system swaps are doing. It is not inefficiency. It is not red tape being cut. It is the deliberate demolition of the federal commitment to fund the education of children who cannot afford to wait for Washington to figure out where it put the money.
Bryce McKibben, who works with colleges and states that depend on federal grants at Temple University, told NPR the changes amount to “a very intentional effort to simply … make folks less likely to want federal funds in the first place.” That is the strategy. Make the system so dysfunctional that the case for its existence collapses. But dysfunction does not dissolve the underlying need. It moves it to the school that eats the cost. It moves to the family that cannot afford a private alternative. It moves to the child who does not get the reading specialist in first grade and does not catch up in second or third or fourth.
This is what a country that means it when it says every kid deserves an education actually builds: not a building, not a bureaucracy, but a system that gets money to the children who need it. The Trump administration is not improving that system. They are breaking it and betting that no one will notice until their kid is the one who doesn’t get the reading specialist.
My daughter does not know any of this. She knows she has a backpack with a dinosaur on it and that her teacher’s name is Ms. Rodriguez and that she gets hot lunch at school every day for free because her school is a Title I school. The federal money that pays for that lunch, and for the reading specialist, and for the classroom aide, is supposed to arrive on October 1. The department says it will. The department also said Labor’s system would work, twice, and it did not.
The red tape is being cut. The receipts are missing. And somewhere between McMahon’s office and the school where my daughter eats lunch, the money is supposed to figure out how to get there on its own.