Aligned with his political agenda.

Trump’s next plan for the US education system: Lots and lots of rules

He bombarded schools with a flurry of investigations and demands that they adopt policies aligned with his political agenda. His second year will focus on making them last.

By Bianca Quilantan

President Donald Trump disrupted universities and school districts in 2025 through sheer executive muscle. Now comes the harder part: making sure his policies outlast his presidency.

Trump signed a dizzying number of education-related executive orders — spanning from diversity initiatives to college oversight — launched a barrage of civil rights investigations into schools, froze billions in federal research cash and started his long-promised dismantling of the Education Department.

His actions were designed to pressure schools into adopting policies that align with his political agenda, bolster parental rights and give states more control over their schools. In many ways, the moves worked: Some schools responded by eliminating diversity programs, barring transgender students from women’s sports and striking unprecedented deals with the White House hoping to get their federal research cash flowing again.

Trump’s actions have left school leaders feeling shaky about their relationships with Washington in a way conservatives have wanted for decades. But many educators are fighting back in court, and Trump’s focus on using executive actions leaves a lot of his education legacy at the whims of the next president. To make lasting changes, Trump’s next move will be to make his policies harder to unravel.

“This has been a year of enforcement through investigation,” said Bob Eitel, who served as former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’ senior counsel and is now president of the Defense of Freedom Institute, a conservative think tank. “Next year will be the year of rulemaking.”

Even though Trump has three more years in his second term, he is actually short on time to make that happen because writing regulations is often long, detailed and painstaking work. It’s the type of labor that would have been done by the career employees he spent months pushing out of their jobs.

That has left some former Education Department officials skeptical that the administration will be able to deliver on its robust rulemaking agenda to enshrine Trump’s trans student restrictions and its efforts to investigate campus antisemitism, root out diversity programs and overhaul the college oversight system.

Education Secretary Linda McMahon has halved the agency’s workforce. And the GOP’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act directed officials to finalize rules on a number of student loan policies on tight deadlines next year.

The Trump administration is also facing a midterm election that could change the make-up of Congress, which is being led by Republicans generally supportive of the president’s education agenda — even if wary of specific elements of it.

“The regulatory calendar can get so burdened up that it nearly stops working,” said Ted Mitchell, who served as Education undersecretary under the Obama administration and is now president of the American Council on Education.

“That’s probably doubly true in a depleted Education Department, where there are fewer people to just do the work,” he added. “I think that we’re going to face a regulatory logjam that will take us well into the midterms, and then midterms will define the course for the next two years.”

White House spokesperson Liz Huston said in a statement that the Education Department “has failed American students, parents, and teachers for decades, and President Trump is making lasting changes to improve educational outcomes.”

Turning Trump’s probes into policy

Trump’s torrent of investigations has been impossible to ignore, with administration officials bringing the full weight of the federal government to bear in probing schools nationwide.

The Education Department, which did not respond to requests for comment for this story, this year announced more than 120 investigations into higher education institutions and dozens of probes into K-12 schools.

The scale of the pressure campaign has also vastly expanded. In addition to scrutiny from the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights, the General Services Administration and the departments of Health and Human Services, Agriculture, Homeland Security, State and Justice have found ways to advance the president’s education agenda.

“The Trump two administration has used civil rights tools with a confidence and vigor that is unprecedented in Republican administrations,” said Kenneth Marcus, who led the Education Department’s civil rights office under the first Trump and George W. Bush administrations.

The joint agency actions “have been very real and have brought to bear a much greater power than we’ve seen previously,” added Marcus, who now leads the Brandeis Center, a Jewish civil rights advocacy group.

In a stunning show of force, the Trump administration froze more than $5 billion in federal grants and contracts with universities this year, bringing some of the nation’s oldest and most prestigious institutions to their knees.

The Trump administration froze more than $400 million in federal research grants and contracts to Columbia University, $175 million to the University of Pennsylvania, $510 million to Brown University, $1 billion to Cornell University, $760 million to Northwestern University, more than $2 billion to Harvard University and $584 million to UCLA.

At the K-12 level, the administration withheld roughly $7 billion in previously approved federal education grants to schools until Republican lawmakers challenged the move, arguing it ran counter to Trump’s promise to empower states to make decisions about their schools.

It also placed five Virginia school districts on high-risk status and tried to yank school lunch funding from Maine schools over their trans-inclusive policies.

K-12 schools and their states have fought back. All but two universities — Harvard and UCLA — caved.

In exchange for their federal cash, several universities agreed to pay millions to the federal government and change their policies on diversity programs, admissions, hiring, trans students and addressing antisemitism.

Trump’s deals with these universities are primed to be codified and expanded.

The department has already vowed to engage in rulemaking on the two federal laws underpinning the investigations that led to those changes: Title IX, the federal education law that bars sex discrimination, and Title VI, the federal law that bars discrimination based on race and national origin.

Regulations revising how the Education Department interprets these laws would strengthen the administration’s authority to demand these changes on campuses.

The agency, for example, has already announced it is enforcing Title IX on the basis of biological sex, which includes defining sex as male and female and barring trans students from playing in women’s sports and using their facilities. It is also using the 2020 Title IX rule from the first Trump administration that mandates how schools must address reports of sexual assault and harassment, offers new rights to those accused of misconduct and requires colleges to respond to formal complaints with courtroom-like hearings.

But none of this is enshrined in regulation yet.

Eitel said the Trump administration needs to formally withdraw a Biden-era regulation that attempted to codify safeguards for trans students and overhaul the 2020 Trump rule, which has already been vacated by two courts.

“It’s one thing to launch investigations, whether by a single agency or generally by a number of agencies,” Eitel said. “That’s important, but in the long run, what’s going to matter is what regulations exist on the books and which can be enforceable down the road.”

Trump’s education actions face roadblocks

Two federal judges sided with Harvard and UCLA — which is represented by its faculty union — ordering the White House to reinstate their federal funding.

A federal judge in Boston ruled the freeze on Harvard’s funding was illegal and said research grant terminations and antisemitism are not connected. In California, a federal judge accused the Trump administration of waging a “pressure campaign” and restricted it from using research funding cuts to coerce the University of California system into changing its policies.

The Trump administration’s approach to investigations this past year “was much more picking targets that were politically useful to the administration and bludgeoning them one by one — you can’t do that 4,000 times,” Mitchell said.

Other higher education institutions are expected to be emboldened by these wins, making them less likely to make deals with the White House. The rulings hamper the administration’s strategy of using its financial prowess against schools.

It has also been two years since antiwar protests engulfed campuses, Mitchell said, which could weaken the administration’s ability to launch similar antisemitism probes in 2026.

“It’s hard to go back and say, ‘Well, three years ago, you didn’t do this, so I’m going to fine you a billion dollars,’” Mitchell said. “The funding freezes didn’t help a single Jewish student. … It was just an excuse to whack the institutions. And unless there’s another set of excuses, I think we’re done with that.”

The White House is already pivoting from trying to strong-arm schools to get on board with Trump’s policies. In October, the White House started negotiating with institutions to sign a compact including Trump’s policy priorities in exchange for a possible leg up on federal grants and relationships in the administration.

But even that effort has been largely rejected by university leaders.

“I think that they have figured out that they can’t do a grand deal with institutions,” Mitchell said. “So they’re going to have to revert to good old-fashioned policymaking.”

Trump’s wins could get in his way

The Trump administration has eliminated half the Education Department’s workforce and outsourced responsibility for critical functions to other agencies. Trump also signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which enacted significant changes to the tax code and the federal student loan program.

The law for the first time expanded the Pell grant to short-term workforce training programs and established a federally funded program to bolster school choice by allowing individuals to receive a tax credit for donating to certain organizations that provide K-12 scholarships for education programs, including private schools.

It also changed the endowment tax for some schools, how borrowers repay their student loans and established caps on graduate student loan borrowing.

These policies now require the Education Department to adopt rules and start working on implementation by July.

The Treasury Department must also start rulemaking on the school choice tax credit established in the law before it takes effect Jan. 1, 2027.

But Trump officials still want to implement more regulatory changes on issues like college foreign gifts reporting requirements and revamp accreditation to address what the administration considers to be ideological overreach.

“For any regulation, the earlier you start, the better it is,” Eitel said. “They have the time to do it, but they just need to be thoughtful and strategic in their approach.”

The Education Department has been moving quickly on regulations to meet the law’s July deadlines. But the department’s other rules could run up against the master calendar rule, a statutory deadline established by the Higher Education Act that dictates institutions must be given time to implement and prepare for significant new regulations.

Generally, rules must be finalized by Nov. 1 to take effect by July. If not, a rule’s implementation could be delayed a year.

The law’s deadlines and the department’s regulatory calendar rule, combined with the agency’s reduced workforce, could pose significant hurdles.

“I think it’s going to be a very, very slow walk through a very, very complicated regulatory agenda,” Mitchell said.

If the Education Department is unable to handle its regulatory duties, it could undermine Trump’s arguments that the agency is no longer needed. The agency already decided in December to reinstate more than 260 employees to the Office of Civil Rights, which has been critical to the administration’s enforcement actions.

But Eitel and Marcus say they’re confident in the agency’s ability to be effective with a reduced staff because of its successful early launch of the FAFSA — the federal college financial aid form — and track record on civil rights enforcement.

“It’s hard to remember that it’s still very early in the Trump administration,” Marcus said, adding that it “really is just getting started.”