The Department of Education Isn’t Just Bureaucracy—It’s a Lifeline
The gutting and eventual closing of the Department of Education will have a devastating impact on student mental health. Society will pay the price.
Readers —
This is Bipolar and Bipartisan, a publication meant to help make sense of a complicated disorder and the world of public policy surrounding it. I am grateful for all the new subscribers who joined after I wrote this past weekend about my macro take on the mental health challenge we face.
Today, I cover the devastating impact gutting the Department of Education will have on student mental health. President Trump and DOGE’s fearless leader Elon Musk announced last week they would attempt to close the Department of Education. Since then, almost half the workforce has been terminated.
I still remember the names of my middle and high school counselors. My mom was a school counselor for three decades. I know the critical role that social workers, counselors, and psychologists play in America’s school. This week’s announcement is personal for me. And, it will be personal to the more than 15 million American schoolchildren with a mental health diagnosis.
Thanks for reading. Happy weekends, all.
Tyler
When the Lifeguards Get Laid Off
The cuts made this week to the Education Department will have a devastating impact on student mental health.
The numbers
🧠 1 in 5 children in the U.S. experience a mental health disorder each year.
🧒 That equates to 15,000,000 - 17,000,000 children and adolescents,
🏫 80% of children who receive any mental health support do so at school.
📊 Half of all lifetime mental illnesses begin by age 14.
🚨6,000+ estimated suicides per year among American children aged 15-18
🆘500+ estimated suicides per year among American children aged 10-14
What’s happening?
The U.S. Surgeon General has declared a youth mental health crisis. Rates of suicide, anxiety, and depression among children are skyrocketing. School shootings are common — often attributable (but not always) to a mental health diagnosis that could have been better treated by in-school and out of school providers.
While the care provided by school mental health providers is not the cause of the problem, it can address the problem. Schools have guidance counselors, school psychologists, social workers, and police resource officers. These individuals receive training and benefit from resources provided by the Department of Education (DOE). The DOE also provides block grants to hire more school-based mental health experts.
The American School Counselor Association recommends one counselor per 250 students. The national average? 1:444. Only two states, Vermont and New Hampshire, meet this standard. Arizona performs the worst, with only one counselor per 716 students.
And still—the counselors we do have are catching kids as best they can. They are succeeding.
A 2024 publication in The Journal of Human Resources examined 19 years worth of data and found that School Based Mental Health services, “increases average outpatient mental health service use and reduces self-reported suicide attempts.” The program evaluated averted approximately 260 suicide attempts. This data is exciting.
A 2018 literature review published in the Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry that examined 43 randomized control trials that collectively studied 49,431 elementary aged students found:
“Overall, school-based services demonstrated a small-to-medium effect (Hedges g ¼ 0.39) in decreasing mental health problems, with the largest effects found for targeted intervention (Hedges g ¼ 0.76), followed by selective prevention (Hedges g ¼ 0.67), compared with universal prevention (Hedges g ¼ 0.29). Mental health services integrated into students’ academic instruction (Hedges g ¼ 0.59), those targeting externalizing problems (Hedges g ¼ 0.50), those incorporating contingency management (Hedges g ¼ 0.57), and those implemented multiple times per week (Hedges g ¼ 0.50) showed particularly strong effects.”
School counselors are best positioned to stem the tide of our student mental health crisis. They are not the only assets, but they are the most important ones. We need more of them, not fewer.
It is in that context that President Trump signed an Executive Order last week to take steps to close the Department of Education. The Executive Order says
“The Secretary of Education shall, to the maximum extent appropriate and permitted by law, take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education.”
Less than a week later, nearly half the DOE’s staff are on administrative leave. That includes 243 staff who investigate civil rights claims by parents that their students with special needs — including those with mental health disorders — have faced discrimination in schools. This has advocates in my state concerned. Disability Law Colorado Co-Legal Director Emily Harvey said this week
"Without an administrative agency to take those concerns to, parents are left with alternatives like going to a state agency that enforces similar laws or going to court. And that is time consuming and costly."
This is not hypothetical. We’re already seeing the impact. The Free Application for Student Financial Aid system crashed this week, a result of IT layoffs, amid peak application period. The Comprehensive Care Network (CCN) website is down “due to a lack of federal funding to support this work.” The CCN provides teachers and counselors with resources on best practices and technical assistance to improve their care for students. Secretary Kennedy’s Department of Human Services will now oversee programs for special needs children – including those with mental health diagnoses. Parents of children with intellectual and physical disabilities are worried.
On youth mental health, our country is drowning. This week, President Trump and Elon Musk fired some of the life guards and decommissioned some of the life boats.
What Does the Education Department Do on Mental Health?
There are at least three major ways the Department of Education advances student mental health:
Grant programs to school districts to increase the number and skillsets of providers in schools;
Resources, expertise, and coaching for states, districts, schools, and teachers;
Data to evaluate impact and research to identify new innovations.
Part I: Short-Staffed and Sinking
In 2024, the budget approved by Congress included $174M for Department of Education initiatives focused on student mental health. That is not just an abstract budget line; this is what it funds:
The Mental Health Service Professional Demonstration Grant Program (MHSP) which provides competitive grants to train school-based mental health service providers.
The School-Based Mental Health Services Grant Program (SBMH) provides competitive grants intended to increase the number of school-based mental health providers in areas where there are few.
Student Support and Academic Enrichment Grants under Title IV, Part A which allow school districts to use money for hiring school psychologists, training teachers in trauma, and expanding social-emotional learning (SEL) programs.
Programs authorized by the Individuals with Disabilities Education (IDEA) Act which include training existing special needs instructors and expanding the number of them in high need areas.
Project AWARE — a collaboration between the Department of Education and Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) — which identifies students with mental health needs; provides services or referrals; and promotes mental health literacy.
And, critically, the Department of Education collects data to evaluate the effectiveness of these programs.
All this work was accelerated by the passage of the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act (BSCA), a response to increased alarm about student mental health and gun violence. With support from leadership in both political parties, the BSCA authorized $1B in spending over five years by the Department of Education to “hire more school-based mental health professionals and build a strong pipeline into the profession for the upcoming school year.” Since then, the law has allowed more than 2,300 schools to form crisis intervention teams and another 3,500 without any existing crisis teams to form them. The funding from the law is not up yet — meaning more money has been authorized for the Education Department to spend.
Now it is unclear how or when the DOE will keep making these investments. The webpage that had information on the program has a 404 error. Government efficiency, eh? Government transparency, eh?
The gutting and eventual closure of the Department of Education will directly impact the quality and number of professionals providing students mental healthcare in their schools. In turn, schools’ capacity to prevent suicides and gun violence will diminish.
Part II: Reduced Resources
Beyond grant funding, The Department of Education (DOE) provides states, districts, and schools with tools, expertise, and coaching to boost student mental health outcomes. For example:
The DOE publishes resources on Social Emotional Learning. For example, in 2021 the Department published this 101 page report on “Supporting Child and Student Social, Emotional, Behavioral, and Mental Health needs” that does not just include substantive recommendations but examples of how schools across the country have implemented them.
These types of resources benefit from economies of scale. When the federal Department of Education takes on projects like these, they save states and districts money because not everyone has to figure it out on their own.
The DOE funds the Comprehensive Center Network (CCN), which has 19 regional centers that provide technical assistance and capacity building expertise to school districts working to expand their mental health offerings to students. The CCN also helps develop resources to improve teachers’ mental health.
If you do not believe cuts will disrupt services, you are wrong. The CCN’s website is shut down, and all the resources CCN built cannot be accessed by districts. That seems like government inefficiency, not efficiency to me.
The DOE funds the Center of Excellence on Infant and Early Childhood Mental Health Consultation (CoE for IECMHC) provides resources and consulting services to providers of early childhood mental health. The Center publishes best practices, provides technical assistance to state education departments, and provides coaching to providers.
The DOE funds the National Technical Assistance Center for the Education of Neglected or Delinquent Children and Youth (NDTAC). The NDTAC focuses on a population of students that is most prone to develop mood disorders — including by fostering coordination and collaboration among programs focused on the education of children who have been neglected, are in the juvenile justice system, or are otherwise at high risk.
Does cutting a program that promotes coordination make the government more or less efficient?
The DOE funds the National Center for Safe Supportive Learning Environments (NCSSLE): which provides webinars, case studies, and self-assessment tools for districts working on mental health infrastructure.
The closure of the Department of Education would limit access to best practices, coaching, and toolkits our teachers and school based mental health providers rely on. At the same time, the list above is long. I am not an expert in DOE policy or structure, but there are likely some redundancies and inefficiencies. However, we need a fine-toothed comb, not a sledgehammer.
Part III: No Data, No Direction
Absent resources on best practices, schools will be on their own. The programs and initiatives they take will be hard to measure. We will not know what’s working. We also won’t know if they are following the law. The DOE plays a key role in aggregating data and conducting research on student mental health — while holding districts accountable for civil rights violations.
Through the Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC) Office, the DOE gathers data on: school counselor ratios; use of disciplinary actions; and access to school-based mental health staff. This data includes any disparities by race, disability, and gender. This data helps researchers, advocates, and policymakers identify gaps and target interventions.
You can’t fix what you don’t measure. The DOE ensures transparency and accountability, especially for vulnerable student populations.
The DOE also ensures compliance with IDEA, Section 504, and Title II of the ADA—all of which guarantee protections and accommodations for students with emotional or mental health disabilities. The DOE investigates complaints and provides enforcement through the Office for Civil Rights.
For example, a district that suspends students with emotional disabilities without proper intervention can be held accountable under DOE oversight.
The DOE conducts and funds research to identify what works:
Via the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) , the DOE funds rigorous academic studies, including randomized trials and longitudinal studies on student wellness, resilience, and support services. The IES had a projected 2025 budget of $815M.
The IES commissions researchers at universities through competitive processes that evaluate for the rigor of the research design and the impact the research could have. Last year, the IES estimated there would be 60-105 research awards this year, ranging from $100,000 - $800,000 per year.
Via the What Works Clearinghouse research is published for teachers to access. The top resource on their website right now is a “New Practice Guide on Teacher-Delivered Behavioral Interventions in Grades K-5.” These are the types of resources educators and counselors will lose as the DOE closes.
Without data, we will fly blind. Without accountability, we will leave vulnerable children behind.
Musk Mythbusting
President Trump and Elon Musk say the slashing of the Education Department is to cut down on government waste, primarily by eliminating administrative roles while promising that Education Department functions will continue in a different department (perhaps the Commerce Department). This is hogwash.
The Office of Personnel Management handles nearly all Human Resource needs for federal employees. The OPM sets federal workforce policy, recruitment and hiring systems, benefits administration, personnel data systems, security clearances, and more. The cuts proposed to the Education Department will not just root out what waste there is (there is some, undoubtedly), but have a devastating impact on student mental health.
President Trump and Musk have also said states and localities would provide DOE programs and services better. I have three major critiques here:
First, there are economies of scale and redundancies to be eliminated by the DOE acting on student mental health. Why should every state need to research best practices, surface good ideas from across the country, and build research and data measurement teams? Would the government not be more efficient if we had one institution working on these things, not thousands?
Second, there are now unfunded federal mandates. Congress and the President should not require states and localities to do things that they cannot reasonably pay for on their own. The Individuals With Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) is still on the books, and states must still comply.
In my hometown, the impact is being felt. 30% of Colorado’s resources to implement IDEA comes from the federal government, according to Pam Bisceglia, executive director of Advocacy Denver.
Third, school districts and states will need to increase taxes to provide the same level of support the DOE does. That might be fine if there were plans to cut federal taxes and would put money back in low and middle income Americans. But, that is not the plan: Trump hopes to extend the tax cuts he signed in 2017 and FactCheck.Org finds that 83% of the tax cut benefits will be for the top 1% of income earners.
So, even if school districts and states pick up the tab, it will be low and middle income Americans who pay more.
And, the whole premise of equality of opportunity will be further threatened. Poor areas already see poorer student achievement outcomes because their school resources are driven, in part, by local tax revenue. Under Musk’s plan, students in states with poorer populations will get even fewer resources, compared to states with richer populations. Republicans always say America is “a land of equal opportunity, but not a land equality of outcomes.” The proposed shifts make opportunities more unequal.
These are all policy-specific critiques. However, there is a much more important point. Congress is the first branch of government. Article I of the Constitution makes clear the legislators most directly representing constituents get to write the laws and approve the budgets. Governance by Executive Order is not democratic. When a President actively undermines Congress, we engage in democratic backsliding. Authoritarianism is not simply marked by a lack of elections. Around the world, authoritarianism is marked by actions that concentrate power in the hands of a few. And, when those few fail to follow constitutions.
This isn’t left or right. It’s life or death.
Mental illness does not care how your parents vote. And I guarantee you—bipolar disorder is not checking party affiliation before it shows up in a teenager’s brain.
There is bipartisan consensus that children’s mental health needs urgent attention. So why are we defunding one of the only federal departments that is accountable for improving student mental health?
You cannot claim to care about school safety, student achievement, or family well-being—and then take a sledgehammer to the department responsible for all three.
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. The cuts made this week to the Education Department budget may save taxpayers money now, but the financial return on investment over the long run will be negative: health insurance premiums will go up, governments will need to pay for more emergency room stays because our psychiatric hospitals are overwhelmed, and the pocketbooks of families who have children with mental health disorders would take a hit.
But in the grand scheme, those financial costs pale in comparison to the human toll. How many parents, brothers, sisters, grandparents, aunts, uncles, friends and colleagues will lose someone to suicide because of this action? How many will lose someone to a school shooting that could have been prevented by more and better resourced school mental health workers?
Will this administration’s efforts be worth it in the end? I do not think so. We will see.