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Over $2 trillion of federal government spending could be on the chopping block according to statements from the heads of the proposed Department of Government Efficiency. We’ll leave national news to national news outlets. But what about the local impact, particularly on public education in Sudbury?
President-elect Donald Trump has said he will name Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy as head of a new entity, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which would not be an official government agency but would be tasked with identifying how to reduce spending. It should be noted that only Congress has the actual power to decide how federal funds are allocated, so DOGE’s findings could only result in recommendations. Nonetheless, one of the heads of DOGE this week posted a video of Trump calling for the Department of Education to be shuttered.
Investopedia has a helpful visualization of federal budget here. Social Security is the single largest bucket of the federal budget, at nearly $1.5 trillion. Debt service, the military and defense, and Medicare are also huge and largely untouchable chunks; Trump has declared cuts to Social Security and Medicare off the table.
The Department of Education gets $268 billion. But the incoming administration has floated proposals to eliminate or restructure the Department of Education. The Education Data Initiative reports that the federal government provides 13.6% of funding for public K-12 education. It also reports that states contribute nearly $400 billion to public K-12 education. That’s nearly half of all public expenditures for K-12 education in the country, though there are other sources of funding.
If any of that federal funding for public education or aid to states is subject to a significant cut, it could send a shockwave through the states, even in states like Massachusetts that don’t tend to get as much federal support in the first place. On average, states get about a third of their revenue from the federal government, which amounted to a touch more than $1 trillion in FY2022.
Meanwhile, the Sudbury Public Schools FY25 budget book reports nearly $6 million in estimated state aid, over $800,000 in estimated federal grants, and another $500,000 in estimated state grants. That totals out to about 12% of the estimated total spending in the budget book for FY25. The bulk of the federal aid comes from the Individuals with Disabilities Education (IDEA) Grant program.
Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School estimated about $4.5 million in “State and other revenue” for FY25. That’s roughly 11.8% of their estimated revenue for FY2025, but they don’t break out what portion, if any, is federal.
Educators in California are already sounding the alarm about possible cuts in funding from the Department of Education. And schools in Massachusetts are already struggling with their budgets. California has a lot at stake if federal aid is significantly cut. But what would those hypothetical cuts mean for Sudbury?
In a small town that spends the majority of its budget on education, some of these possible DOGE-proposed cuts could be a recipe for significant disruption in the years ahead. What exactly will be proposed and what might happen in Congress is entirely unpredictable.
Campaign comments and stump speeches aren’t the same as enacted legislation or official actions. But we do know school budgets in Sudbury are overwhelmingly funded by local taxpayers, and the Town is dependent on property taxes for most of its revenue. Any cuts to state or federal aid to education could, at least in the near-term, force cuts in Sudbury’s budgets, delays in new education initiatives, or push added burden on local taxpayers to just to keep the schools level-funded. Those do appear to be surmountable challenges for Sudbury, at least relative to other communities in Massachusetts.
Perhaps ironically, the overwhelming dependence on local taxpayers to fund the public school system in Sudbury provides a bit of a buffer from the worst effects of any major reduction in aid from the state or federal governments. For example: the municipal contribution to Sudbury Public Schools is over 85% of total spending. That gives Sudbury some ability to self-determine regardless of what’s happening at the State House or the White House. As budget season accelerates in the coming weeks, the Town cost centers have the opportunity to make decisions that are at least cognizant of possible sweeping changes in Washington. The real question is how much of the rhetoric actually becomes action, policy or law.
