Ranking Member DeLauro Remarks at Fiscal Year 2026 U.S. Department of Education Budget Hearing
WASHINGTON — Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro (D-CT-03), Ranking Member of the House Appropriations Committee and the Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies Subcommittee, delivered the following remarks at the subcommittee’s fiscal year 2026 budget hearing for the U.S. Department of Education:
Thank you, Chairman Aderholt, for holding this critically important hearing on the Trump Administration’s budget request for the Department of Education.
Secretary McMahon, good morning. I welcome you to the House Appropriations Committee for your first budget hearing as Secretary of Education.
Public education is deeply important to me. When I was a kid, my mother took me to work with her to the sweatshops in New Haven. The conditions there were horrific, dangerously hot, unsanitary. Mostly immigrant women, bent over sewing machines, trying to pump out the dresses as fast as they could. If you know anything about the needle trades, you get your finger caught in those high-powered machines, you just pull back, you wrap your hand up, because if you get a drop of blood on the garment, you don’t get paid for it. I recognized her madness, the method to her madness, when she asked me to be there every day after school.
What she said to me is, “Get an education so you don’t have to do this.” My dad came as an immigrant from Italy in 1913. He was put in the 7th grade; he couldn’t read or write the language. They laughed at him, his teachers and his classmates. He left school in the 7th grade and never went back to formal education. He served in the United States military, served on the City Council in New Haven, and always was invested in his community. And again, he said to me, “Get an education.” And he said, “If you get an education, you can make $10,000 a year.” So, the whole issue of public education is critical to me and to my parents, as they sacrificed to get me the finest education and to allow me to realize my dreams and my aspirations. And that’s true of the nine out of ten students in our country who attend public schools. And it’s true, the stories of pretty much the entire population. Understanding what public education means to their lives and how it is the key to success.
And I might just say that this budget, in my view, should be described as leaving every child behind. And that is why I strongly oppose your proposal to cut investments in the education of our nation’s children by $12 billion, or 15 percent.
It is clear that your mission is to dismantle our federal investments in our nation’s public education. You and President Trump explicitly seek to eliminate the Department of Education, which Republicans have proposed for decades. But let me be clear with you: You will not have the partnership of Congress in your efforts to destroy the Department of Education and eliminate public education in this nation. Not on our watch.
We will go over your plans to suffocate your own Department and slash our investments in the education of our children and in students hoping to obtain a college degree. But before we discuss next year, I want to talk about what you are doing right now.
The American people demand help with the cost of living. But President Trump is not laser-focused on the cost-of-living—he is actually making it worse. He promised to fight for the middle class and working families, but instead put Elon Musk and wealthy billionaires like yourself in charge of the government that is meant to be of, by, and for the American people.
Madam Secretary, this Administration is recklessly and unlawfully freezing and stealing Congressionally-appropriated funds from agencies, programs, and services across the government that serve the American people. You, President Trump, and Elon Musk are attacking public education to pay for tax cuts you stand to directly benefit from.
Congress alone holds the power of the purse. It is right there in the Constitution. Article I, Section 9, Clause 7. Congress, not the President, determines how the taxpayers’ dollars are spent. The law of the land is the 2024 budget. We are living in 2025 under a continuing resolution that carries forward the 2024 budget. And that is the law you are bound to follow.
Furthermore, the Department of Education was created by the Congress, and it can only be undone by the Congress.
Under your leadership of the Department, hundreds of millions of dollars have been frozen, and entire programs have been terminated.
Funding for vital research, protection of students’ civil rights, and programs that support the recruitment and professional development of effective educators have been terminated.
Madam Secretary, if Congress agreed with your determinations that these programs do not deserve funding, we would have decreased the funding for these accounts accordingly. We did not.
Nor did we remove funding for the Department’s staff, but you took it upon yourself to eliminate half of the Department of Education's workforce.
By recklessly incapacitating the Department you lead, you are usurping Congress’s authority and infringing on Congress’s power of the purse. And you will continue to lose these battles in the courts.
You have been blocked from letting DOGE access student loan borrowers’ private information, from interfering with local school curricula, from punishing school districts for curricula you disagree with, and from stealing COVID relief aid from states and school districts. And there are many more.
For as long as you continue to deliberately and flagrantly defy the law, you will continue to lose in court—but let us be clear about who is losing most of all: the children and families of this country.
The consequences will be felt by students losing access to school psychologists, counselors, and social workers, due to your shameful decision to cancel hundreds of grants for mental health services in public schools. These grants were created and funded on a bipartisan basis by this subcommittee and in the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, including a mental health program I created after hearing how desperately it was needed in schools across Connecticut.
We are not talking about hypotheticals or what-ifs or worst-case scenarios. This lawless and cruel destruction has happened, and is happening, under your watch, today.
Turning to your budget request for 2026, I want to note that the Administration has provided sparse detail about your proposal to cut the Department of Education by $12 billion. We have no idea where that $12 billion is coming from.
A central component of your plan for elementary and secondary education is to eliminate 18 unspecified competitive and formula grant programs, and replace them with a $2 billion block grant to states, yet at the same time, you propose we provide $4.5 billion less to educate our nation’s children overall. A block grant is a cut. All of my colleagues here know that the States cannot afford to pick up the slack.
Your vision for students aspiring to access and pay for college is particularly grim: you take away need-based financial aid for 1.7 million students, and you eliminate Federal Work Study opportunities for more than 500,000 students who need it to help finance their education. They are from working families, middle-class families, vulnerable families, and they work in order to be able to pay for their education. These are students from working-class families, they are working their way through college. Some families do not need financial assistance to go to college. But that’s not true for the rest.
Madam Secretary, in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis, you are pulling up the ladder for everyone who has not yet found their way to extraordinary wealth—or even enough to simply make ends meet.
What will happen if you get your way? What will happen if your Department is dismantled, and our investments in education vanish?
Madam Secretary, your grandchildren, my grandchildren, Elon Musk’s grandchildren, and President Trump’s grandchildren will be just fine. But the children and grandchildren of hardworking Americans will suffer, and they will fall further behind those whose families enjoy enormous wealth and privilege.
I do not believe the American people want larger classes and fewer teachers, but that is exactly what you are aiming to deliver. I do not believe students and families want you to turn a blind eye to predatory for-profit charter schools and colleges, but you appear prepared to continue to let scammers steal the money and the educational dreams of hard-working families and aspiring graduates. I understand the Administration is eager to find a way to give yourselves a tax cut, but doing so by dismantling public education is indefensible.
Your actions are lawless, they reek of disdain for public education, and they are hurting the most vulnerable in our nation.
Education is not a handout. Education is not waste, fraud, or abuse.
As the leading Democrat on the Appropriations Committee, I assure you, we will never stop fighting against this dangerous dismantling of public education, which is undermining and jeopardizing the futures of millions of children in this country.
I look forward to your testimony. I yield back.
###