Education Department dismantling sees study abroad initiatives transferred to State

Name: Buila
Price range: $

Under the new agreement, the programs will be brought under the authority of the State Department’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA), the primary government agency administering educational exchange programs.

Announcing the news on November 18, the government said the State Department was “best positioned to tailor foreign language education programs with the national security and foreign policy priorities of the United States”.

It said integrating the programs within the department’s existing international education framework would streamline management, enhance efficiency and “ensure alignment with US national security and foreign policy priorities”.

Stakeholders welcomed the fact the Title VI and Fulbright-Hays programs are being moved and not cancelled, but said the announcement raised more questions than answers relating to the funding, staffing and authorisation of the exchange initiatives.

The arrangement is part of a wider dismantling of the Education Department which has seen the transfer of some of its largest grant programs to other federal agencies as the government pursues its mission of shutting down the department.

“The Trump administration is taking bold action to break up the federal education bureaucracy and return education to the states,” education secretary Linda McMahon said in a statement.

“Cutting through layers of red tape in Washington is one essential piece of our final mission.”

The government has said there is “no anticipated adverse impact on eligible agencies” and that all programs will “continue to be administered in accordance with the applicable statutory requirements”.

If the funding doesn’t materialise, then there won’t be anything for ECA to administer
Mark Overmann, The Alliance for International Exchange

But commentators noted the announcement’s ambiguous wording, which raises doubts about the programs’ future funding, highlighting that none of the 12 affected initiatives received FY25 funding and that FY26 funding remains up in the air.

“If the funding doesn’t materialise, then there won’t be anything for ECA to administer,” executive director of The Alliance for International Exchange Mark Overmann told The PIE News.

The news comes at an uncertain time for educational exchange programs in the US after the President’s Budget Request called for the elimination of all Education Department international programs and the House allocated zero funding to the initiatives in its FY26 spending proposal.

Overmann said the Senate’s provision of over $80 million for the programs in its budget proposal was a sign of support on Capitol Hill, though delays and disagreements clouding the entire FY26 budget have thrown agencies’ full-year funding plans up in the air.

Earlier this year, nearly two dozen cultural exchange programs run by the State Department saw their FY25 funding slashed, totalling $100m, despite the money having already been appropriated by Congress.

Meanwhile, Overmann questioned who would run the programs at the ECA if they continued, after widespread State Department layoffs reduced the bureau’s workforce by nearly a hundred employees through redundancies and voluntary departures.

He also raised doubts about whether the Interagency Agreement (IAA) framework and the Economy Act – cited by the government as the allowable reason for this transfer – conflict with what the authorising statutes for the programs allow.

Elsewhere in the Education Department spinoff, large swathes of funding for K-12 education, including money for schools serving low-income communities, were transferred to the Department of Labour.

Under the agreement, the following international education programs will now be under the authority of the State Department: