A federal law helps homeless students get an education. Trump’s budget could weaken it

Megan Mainzer works with children and families experiencing homelessness at Middletown Public Schools in Rhode Island.

Last year, the federal government sent $65,000 to her district to help support those students – funding that was made possible by the decades-old McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act, a federal law that includes legal protections and a grant program to help schools cover the costs of educating students experiencing homelessness.

In Middletown, Mainzer says those federal dollars helped staff a high school food pantry, and helped pay for transportation, after-school care, internet hotspots, gas and groceries for families.

But she may not be able to rely on that funding going forward.

That’s because the Trump administration’s budget proposal for fiscal year 2026 aims to consolidate the McKinney-Vento federal grant program with 17 other programs, and dramatically cut funding.

Mainzer says, if the proposal is approved by Congress, her work will continue “but I won’t have the same resources … that I do right now, and that makes this program feel like the future is very scary and uncertain.”

In fiscal year 2024, the U.S. Education Department sent roughly $6.5 billion to school districts to administer those 18 federal programs, including $129 million specifically designated to support students experiencing homelessness.

Trump’s budget proposal recommends reducing that overall funding to about $2 billion and combining these programs into a single block grant, which the administration says would give districts “flexibility” to spend the money “without the unnecessary administrative burdens imposed under current law.”

Under the proposal, schools would not be required to spend this money on resources for students experiencing homelessness. They could instead choose to spend it on, among other things, literacy instruction or rural students or arts education or school safety.

“I think the proposal is devastating. It is anti-child. It is anti-education,” says Maura McInerney, legal director at the Education Law Center, a nonprofit advocacy organization in Pennsylvania.

“The reality is that states and school districts typically do not direct resources towards homeless students unless dedicated funding is set aside for that purpose,” McInerney says.

She worries schools will have so many competing needs that it’s “highly likely this will lead to a lack of any support for students experiencing homelessness.”

It’s up to Congress to approve the 2026 budget. Government funding is currently set to expire at the end of September and fiscal year 2026 begins on Oct. 1.

So far, it’s unclear whether Trump’s proposal has the necessary backing, though a group of House and Senate Democrats, as well as two House and two Senate Republicans, signed letters urging their colleagues in Congress to support the McKinney-Vento grant program.

Madi Biedermann, the Education Department’s deputy assistant secretary for communications, told NPR in a statement, “We trust that states will use the flexibility provided to them under the K-12 simplified funding program to better meet the needs of all students, including homeless children and youth.”

How this proposal would weaken McKinney-Vento

Roughly 1.4 million U.S. pre-K-12 students experienced homelessness in the 2022-’23 school year, according to the latest federal data.

Barbara Duffield, executive director of SchoolHouse Connection, a national nonprofit that advocates for homeless youth, says without the dedicated federal funding, McKinney-Vento loses its power.

She lays out a complicated domino effect: Schools won’t have the resources they need to identify students experiencing homelessness. As a result, fewer students will be identified and fewer students will receive the protections of McKinney-Vento, like the right to stay in their school of origin if they move to a shelter, a motel or a relative’s home.

To Duffield, that’s essentially a death blow to McKinney-Vento.

“The program is gone, the services are gone, the protections are gone,” Duffield says.

Another thing that disappears: supports to help students finish high school, which can only be provided after students are identified as housing insecure.

Students experiencing homelessness have higher rates of chronic absenteeism and are more likely to drop out, which can lead to a vicious cycle of homelessness, Duffield says.

“We know that lack of a high school degree is the single greatest risk factor for experiencing homelessness. So any prevention strategy, any early intervention strategy, starts with identification.”

Finally, Duffield says states and the federal government will no longer know how many U.S. students are experiencing homelessness if they aren’t able to identify them.

For one homeless liaison, the future feels uncertain

Megan Mainzer, the McKinney-Vento liaison in Rhode Island, says the administration’s proposal is “really scary.”

She says there’s an affordable housing crisis in her community, and she fears more students will experience homelessness in the coming years.

“If you don’t mandate protections, then you leave it up to individual districts and states to decide and almost have a hierarchy of who is the most in need or who is the most deserving,” Mainzer says.

Right now, she says the future feels uncertain.

“It feels like we’re letting [families and students] down and not able to carry through all of the things that we promised that we would do, and the ways in which we would be able to support them.”