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New education cuts will hit Idaho’s most vulnerable students hard • Idaho Capital Sun [1]

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Date: 2025-09-11

Sometimes sitting in Idaho, it is hard to understand the machinations going on in Washington, D.C., especially when it is happening in an obscure congressional subcommittee. But last week the U.S. House Appropriations Committee’s Subcommittee for Labor, Health, Human Services, Education and Related Agencies made headlines.

On Sept. 2, it voted to slash billions in funding for public education.

The budget bill, which now goes to the full House Appropriations Committee, is another punch in the gut for Idaho’s public school students.

The bill cuts Title I funds by 27 percent. These are the all-important funds that help low-income students improve their academic outcomes. These funds provide tutoring, after-school learning opportunities and enhance parental engagement, among many other things.

In short, these funds are on the front lines of working to narrow the achievement gap between Idaho’s affluent students and the 44 percent of Idaho students who come from low-income families.

Looking at this year’s ISAT assessment scores on reading and math puts in perspective how important these Title I funds are for Idaho’s low-income students.

Idaho Education News reported last week that 64 percent of economically advantaged students were proficient in reading compared to 40 percent of economically disadvantaged students. On math, economically advantaged students were 52.4 percent proficient compared to 30 percent of economically disadvantaged students.

The House subcommittee bill also eliminates all funding for other public-school programs, including funds to support teacher training and development, community schools, and English-language learning programs.

Idaho’s public schools received $65 million in Title I funds during the 2021-22 school year, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Based on that, Idaho’s schools could lose about $20 million in Title I funds if the cuts are equitably distributed across the states.

Idaho’s 2nd District Congressman Mike Simpson is one of eleven Republicans on the subcommittee who voted for these cuts to public education, according to his office. I had to check because Simpson didn’t put out a press release announcing his vote.

Yet on Sept. 3, Simpson put out a press release proudly announcing that the Interior and Environment Subcommittee that he chairs passed a bill that provides $13 million in water projects for Idaho’s cities.

Perhaps Simpson, who supported public education when he was in the Idaho Legislature 26 years ago, has become one of those politicians who only explains his vote when it is good news, and avoids explaining his vote to constituents when it is bad news. And the budget cuts Simpson voted for on last week are certainly unwelcome news for the Idaho students in his district.

This subcommittee action is on top of the passage of the “Big, Beautiful Bill” (BBB) which Simpson and all members of Idaho’s congressional delegation voted for in July. That bill slashed nearly $1 billion from the country’s Medicaid budget and $300 million from a supplemental nutrition program that feeds hungry students.

Idaho’s public schools depend on Medicaid funding to ensure that students receive physical and mental health services, among other things. It is especially important funding when you consider that Idaho has one of the highest youth suicide rates in the country.

Meanwhile, President Donald Trump recently admitted that calling it a “Big Beautiful Bill” was not a good marketing move, according to Politico. “I’m not going to use the term,” Trump said. “That was good for getting it approved, but it’s not good for explaining to people what it’s all about.”

U.S. Sen. Mike Crapo, R-Idaho, a chief architect of the Big Beautiful Bill, spent the August recess in Idaho hosting invitation-only meetings to help sell the bill. Politico reported last week that Crapo is telling GOP colleagues that they need to counter attacks on the bill by making it “very clear that the so-called cuts in Medicaid were not what they are being described in the media, and in fact that they were true waste, fraud and abuse.”

But don’t be fooled. An independent study by the Georgetown University McCourt School of Public Policy earlier this year said that questionable Medicaid expenses amount to 5 percent of the program’s budget. And most of those were caused by missing or insufficient paperwork.

Most of the abuse came from Medicaid providers, not from the 83 million Americans who receive benefits, the Georgetown study said. In fact, the beneficiaries are the real victims of both unscrupulous providers and politicians who are cutting Medicaid funding.

In short, Georgetown wrote the “narrative” that there is massive waste, fraud, and abuse in Medicaid “is simply false.” If the politicians are serious about eliminating abuse, Georgetown said, they only need to “follow the money” to those providers who abuse the system. A real indication that Medicaid abuse is not a significant problem is the Trump Administration’s decision to scale back departmental inspector generals who investigate waste, fraud, and abuse.

Crapo’s charge of Medicaid abuse is really a smokescreen to disguise the real reason President Trump, and the GOP Congress passed the bill – to provide a massive $4.5 billion tax cut to mainly wealthy Americans and corporations. They also don’t want the public to focus on the $4.2 billion increase to the federal deficit caused by the “Big, Beautiful Bill.” (The independent Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget pegged the increase to the federal debt by more than $4 billion, including increased interest on the debt.)

It should also be noted that while cutting funding for public education and hungry students by $501 billion, the “Big Beautiful Bill” provides a federal voucher tax credit to provide billions of dollars to fund private and religious schools. This subsidy to private and religious school families will also be added to the federal debt.

Gov. Brad Little and the Idaho Legislature will decide next winter whether Idaho will participate in the federal tax credit program. But Idaho Superintendent of Public Instruction Debbie Critchfield already told the Idaho Association of School Administrators in August that she supports adopting the federal tax credit so more money can flow to non-public school programs.

All of this is unbelievably bad news for Idaho’s public schools which are heavily dependent on federal funding, especially since the state ranks last in the nation on how much it spends on public education. According to the Center for Education Statistics, Idaho public schools receive nearly 20 percent of their funding from the federal government.

Between the Big, Beautiful Bill and last week’s House subcommittee decision to slash Title I funding by 27 percent and zero out other programs, it’s becoming clear the Trump administration and the GOP Congress are waging a war against public schools.

This is an ideological war that hits the more than 300,000 Idaho children who attend public schools hard. And like any innocent citizens caught up in a war zone, Idaho’s students will become collateral damage and pay the price.

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[1] Url: https://idahocapitalsun.com/2025/09/11/new-education-cuts-will-hit-idahos-most-vulnerable-students-hard/

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