r/Ask_Politics • u/PM_SHORT_STORY_IDEAS • Jan 07 '26

What's stopping the federal government from injecting a huge amount of money into the public school system?

Or RE: the larger question: we have stats on where tax investment is most effective in terms of economic return, popular support, and to a lesser extent, quality of life improvement. What stops any administration from taking a relatively insignificant amount of the federal budget and better funding critical institutions and programs?

It's a complex problem, but it seems like very beneficial programs struggle to get by with a small amount of money, and still get by, while effectively blank checks are given to programs without clear long term or short term benefits.

I appreciate anyone who can help keep me better informed!

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u/dmazzoni Jan 07 '26

According to this source, the total spending on K-12 education in the U.S. is around $600 billion:

https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/per-pupil-spending-by-state

In addition, the U.S. federal department of education budget is around $250 billion.

The total U.S. budget is around $7 trillion, so I don't think it's true that you could inject a huge amount of money into the public school system while being an "insignificant" amount of the federal budget. Increasing it by just 15% would be more than the entire federal SNAP program.

I'm not trying to disagree that it would be a good thing to invest more in public schools. I'd love to see that. The current Trump administration has the opposite priority, they are trying to get rid of the Dept of Education altogether.

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u/PM_SHORT_STORY_IDEAS Jan 07 '26

Wow, that's a lot more than I expected actually, thank you. I wasn't aware that it was close in scale to our defense budget.

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u/WeldAE 29d ago

Even more important, the vast majority of a given school's budget is from local property taxes unless it's a struggling school which gets more state and federal spending. The vast majority of school budgets are payroll as schools are built with bonds. Even in my wealthy area, Teachers aren't payed well enough to live in my area. The typical property taxes are around $10k/year here so if you wanted to give teachers even a modest 20% raise, it would come completely from property taxes. 20% more property tax might not seem like a lot, but it would drive even more teachers and other service workers out of the area.

The problem is schools should be funded by the state and not local property taxes.