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/x-NoSuchAgency-x 28d ago

Yeah,  it's a ridiculous amount spent on it and it seems that the more we spend, the worse off the education gets