Congress ended 2025 in a holding pattern, with appropriations unresolved, no legislative response to the Department's interagency agreements, and significant open questions about the year ahead—including what Congress will do, if anything, as the administration continues to restructure ED without statutory authority. Education stakeholders heading into 2026 face compounding uncertainty across funding, program administration, and federal oversight.

The House passed the Secure Rural Schools Reauthorization Act, the Senate passed the Ensuring VetSuccess on Campus Act, and the House Education and Workforce Committee advanced four higher education transparency bills—while the Energy and Commerce Subcommittee marked up eighteen bills addressing student and youth interactions with social media, data, and AI, signaling an intensified congressional push on digital safety governance. Separately, the Department convened negotiated rulemaking on Workforce Pell.

The House passed three bills targeting foreign influence—primarily from China and the Chinese Communist Party—in K–12 public schools, including measures requiring parental notice of foreign entity involvement, prohibiting school contracts with the Chinese government, and cutting federal funding for schools that receive Chinese government support. The week's activity came alongside the Department's rollout of a new HEA Section 117 foreign-gift disclosure portal, signaling accelerating federal scrutiny of foreign influence across both K–12 and higher education.

A new deep-dive collaboration between EducationCounsel and Sligo Law Group analyzes the legal authority underlying the Trump Administration's use of interagency agreements (IAAs) to transfer significant Department of Education programs and funds to other federal agencies. The analysis finds that the IAAs appear to conflict with appropriations statutes expressly prohibiting such transfers and likely exceed the statutory authorities cited to support wide-scale program transfers aimed at dismantling ED without congressional authorization.

With the shutdown resolved, Congress returned to a broad legislative agenda spanning K-12 nutrition, student mental health, loan transparency, civil rights protections, and online safety for minors—including substantive hearings on the future of college, CTE pathways, and services for foster youth. The Energy and Commerce Subcommittee simultaneously advanced a package of eighteen bills targeting student and youth interactions with social media, data, and artificial intelligence.

On November 18, 2025, the Department of Education announced a sweeping plan to redistribute core statutory responsibilities—including grant competitions, technical assistance, and program oversight—to other federal agencies through interagency agreements, despite Congress having consolidated these functions under a single Cabinet department specifically to avoid the fragmentation that existed before 1979. The proposal raises substantial legal concerns, as many of the responsibilities ED intends to transfer are specifically assigned to the Department by statute and cannot be reassigned through executive action alone.

After 44 days, the longest federal government shutdown in U.S. history ended when the Senate passed H.R. 5371 by 60–40 and the House approved it 229–209—with provisions restoring back pay to affected employees, reversing RIFs initiated during the shutdown, and pausing further reductions through January 30. The President signed the bill into law that evening.

The federal government has filed appeals of two preliminary injunctions blocking enforcement of the July 2025 PRWORA reinterpretation—one in the First Circuit covering 20 plaintiff states and D.C., and one in the Ninth Circuit covering Head Start programs nationwide. Both injunctions remain in place while the appeals are pending, meaning current enforcement restrictions continue for affected states and Head Start grantees.

A final PSLF regulation published October 31, 2025 adds exclusions from "qualified employer" status for organizations the Secretary determines have a "substantial illegal purpose"—with a definition broad enough to encompass work related to immigration services, gender-affirming care, student protests, and DEI initiatives. The rule gives the Secretary discretionary authority to disqualify employers with narrow appeal rights and a 10-year bar on reapplication, immediately ceasing loan payment credits for employees of disqualified organizations, and is already subject to two separate legal challenges before it takes effect July 1, 2026.

On Day 41 of the shutdown, a bipartisan group of Senators announced a deal to fund the government through January 30—while Head Start preschools began to close after November 1 federal grant payments failed to arrive and 1 in 8 Americans faced disruption from the ongoing SNAP litigation. The funding deal still faced procedural hurdles in both chambers and did not include the ACA premium tax credit extension Democrats had sought.

Thirty-three days into the shutdown, Congress continued to fail on continuing resolution votes while Head Start preschools began to close after November 1 federal grant payments did not arrive—and courts stepped in to force continued SNAP disbursements to recipients in several states. Both chambers introduced bills to address the downstream harms of the shutdown, though none advanced.

The government shutdown continued into its fourth week, with furloughed and excepted employees missing their first complete paychecks and the Senate taking its 11th and 12th failed procedural votes on the GOP-backed continuing resolution. The week also brought the withdrawal of Kevin O'Farrell's nomination to lead the Department's Office of Career, Technical, and Adult Education, following upheaval in that office and a job promotion in Florida.

With the government shutdown entering its third week—at 19 days, the third-longest in U.S. history—the Senate continued to fail on procedural votes to advance a continuing resolution as the federal judiciary announced its funding would be exhausted by October 20. The longest shutdown on record (35 days, 2018–19) remained ahead as negotiations stalled.

The new Continuing Resolution has paused all federal agency RIFs government-wide and requires reinstatement, with back pay, for employees separated during the shutdown period. All RIF actions taken between October 1 and November 12, 2025 are invalid, and no agency may initiate or implement a RIF through January 30, 2026.

As the government shutdown stretched on, the Senate confirmed four key Department of Education nominees—including the new Assistant Secretaries for Elementary and Secondary Education, Civil Rights, Legislation, and Postsecondary Education—all by a party-line vote of 51–47. The nominees will be sworn in once the government reopens, while the Senate's 11th and 12th procedural votes on continuing resolutions again failed to advance.

The government shutdown began after the Senate took six failed votes on two competing continuing resolutions—the Republican H.R. 5371 and the Democratic S. 2882—with negotiations at an apparent standstill through the week. With the shutdown in its sixth day and Representative Jeffries challenging Speaker Johnson to a debate, the path to reopening the government remained entirely unclear.

With Congress largely out of session in the final week of the fiscal year, the shutdown calculus was complicated by the President cancelling a budget negotiation meeting with Democrats and the Supreme Court temporarily allowing the administration to impound $4 billion in previously appropriated foreign aid—weakening Congress's constitutional power of the purse heading into the final days before October 1. Both chambers held only pro forma sessions; no long-term spending action was taken.

During the final full week of the fiscal year, the House passed a short-term continuing resolution but the Senate rejected it 44–48—and separately failed to advance the Democratic alternative—making a government shutdown at the October 1 deadline highly likely. The Senate also spent time on the National Defense Authorization Act and crime legislation related to the District of Columbia, as negotiations on a CR continued without resolution.

With only two and a half weeks remaining in the fiscal year, both chambers turned to appropriations—with House and Senate Appropriations Committees reporting their FY2026 Labor, HHS, and Education spending bills—though a government shutdown at October 1 appeared increasingly likely given the compressed legislative timeline. Education-related provisions in the National Defense Authorization Act also advanced, including limitations on federal research grants to institutions with certain foreign partnerships.

Former U.S. Department of Education attorneys Emily Merolli, Jill Siegelbaum, and Josie Eskow Skinner have launched Sligo Law Group, PLLC, a boutique federal education law firm designed to fill the expertise gap created by sweeping layoffs at the Department's Office of General Counsel. The firm advises K–12 agencies, higher education institutions, nonprofits, and advocacy organizations on federal education law, grants compliance, civil rights, and employment matters.