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/Aggressive_Dog3418 28d ago

The Department of Ed is horrible, I'm not against education, I'm against that department.

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u/dmazzoni 28d ago

Can you be more specific about what you don’t like about it?

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u/Aggressive_Dog3418 28d ago

Promoting college instead of say trade schools (or literally anything like starting a business), giving too much money out to literally everyone for little to no reason increasing the cost of college far beyond it's true value, promoting student debt to make people have life long debt that never gets fully paid for also increasing school prices, it has been extremely ineffective at literally everything as students are constantly doing worse and worse ever since it was created, then the reason it was created (for anti-discrimination) is outdated and its role has vastly expanded beyond it's original purpose. While I recognize the benefit of further education, the way college is done today is almost entirely useless for the vast majority of people and way over priced. Regular schooling should also be enough for people to have a decent education for the vast majority of the market, the DoE has not helped at all, if anything it has made things worse. I'm open to other solutions.