Jess Gartner

mRNA tech is some of the coolest, most powerful, most promising scifi shit humans are currently doing. They are being investigated to help with cancers, autoimmune diseases, M.S., stroke recovery, heart disease, diabetes, arthritis, and high cholesterol.

Bagels with cream cheese and lox would like a word.

100% this. But I’m sure they’re going to ask me for $10 somewhere today.

Green = explicitly in WH proposal. If the line item is blank for FY26, it's proposed to be cut or consolidated. You can see the top-line year-over-year changes relative to FY25 in columns F.

***Note: because of prior year obligations, line-items don't add up perfectly (much to my chagrin).

Please let me know if anything looks off (I started getting a little loopy around 2am 😵‍💫) or if you have any questions! You can roll-up by budget authority categories or drill down to individual appropriations.

Federal Education Budget Proposal [as of 5.31.25]

I'm sharing my analysis because this stuff is highly complex and it can only help to get more eyes on this and work together to figure out the details of this proposal so we can advocate to protect the programs that are most impactful for students and communities.

docs.google.com/spreadsheets...

Programmatically, they propose eliminating or consolidating about 57% of prior appropriations.

I spent Friday night reconciling the new line-item proposal with the chart I already had (at least I got to listen to Reputation!) Now with the whole budget, there are more cuts (I get $13.5B relative to FY25 estimated), but the denominator is larger, so it's still about 15% proposed cut overall.

The other big 🤔 for me was WHICH grants were being consolidated to $2B. Here again, the math wasn't mathing for me. Any combination that I looked at, it seemed like the cuts would have to be much higher to achieve that outcome. Lastly, the line-item cuts didn't add up to the reported $12B cut.

The biggest 🤔 for me was that the original proposal said the current education budget was $78B, but I was coming up with numbers much higher than that in prior bills (more like $90B). Would that mean that the actual proposed cuts would be higher? (Spoiler alert: yes...)

🚨 Friday night White House budget drop 💰My analysis is linked in 🧵

The math wasn't quite adding up for me on the original White House budget proposal for Education, and the hearing with Linda McMahon last week didn't shed any light on the gaps…

a man in a blue shirt and tie is pointing at a bulletin board with a lot of papers on it . ALT: a man in a blue shirt and tie is pointing at a bulletin board with a lot of papers on it .

Me trying to align the detailed FY24 and FY25 proposed appropriations bills with the “consolidated” appropriations law with the White House proposal.

I spent 7 hours tonight combing through hundreds of pages of appropriation legislation documenting every program and appropriation, compared it to the White House budget proposal and still have several-billion-dollar gaps in every direction. Any other ed finance super geeks want to compare notes?

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It will also be telling how they handle this block grant proposal from a legislative stand-point. Lots of options with varying implications for equity and accountability— especially with IDEA.

Ok that was exactly my read, too. That’s why I think the “preserving Title” language is misleading because it’s going into a whole bucket that is getting a big cut… that’s a functional cut to Title if not an explicit one.

Based on adding up all the line item cuts I think it has to be additional… but I’m trying to figure out what else is in that bucket 🤔 and it still doesn’t add up to $12b

Have you seen clarity on what else is in the ($4.5B) consolidation cut? It seems to be inconsistent in terms of what they pulled out for line-item cuts. The other K-12 programs called out for cuts “only” add up to $2.7b by my count… I can’t figure out of that’s includes in the $4.5b or in addition…

I do! 🙋🏻‍♀️🙋🏻‍♀️🙋🏻‍♀️

My interpretation of the budget proposal for K-12 education

One more time - with pictures. So, first, there's this junk (intentionally deceitful) graph from Edunomics (so bad as to disqualify any future engagement in this space)
I infer intentional deceit from choice of 2013 as baseline.

A 10% conversion rate to (still) Married is crazy.

My daughter's daycare just sent out an email about potentially needing to layoff staff because new babies about to start withdrew because of parental job losses. So if you're wondering how government layoffs and mass contract cancellations will affect the economy, here's an example

If you’re not interested in humanitarian aid for the sake of HUMANITY at least connect the dots between USAID providing food in areas like DNC, which reduces the possibility that children will eat a wild bat, which limits the likelihood for a deadly virus to turn into a pandemic.

WE SHARE A PLANET

Oh-- and you'll also be footing the bill on federal taxes to pay for cuts for the 1%

TL;DR: you'll be getting a lot less and paying a lot more-- for your schools, and your eggs, apparently. 3/3

Translation: cut federal education funding and make state legislatures and local taxing authorities pick up the bill on critical school funding.

Further translation: pass the buck to taxpayers by increasing property taxes and/or sales taxes and/or PTA dues. 2/3

In case you missed it...

The Trump administration's plan for K-12 budgets is start rolling back Title I funding to "restore revenue responsibility to the states." 1/3

And I call this out because I see a lot of “this may work in tech but…” takes and I want to remind everyone that IT DOESN’T WORK IN TECH EITHER in the vast majority of cases; it’s a ruthless tactic in a “winner takes all” scenario. It has *nothing* to do with efficiency or sustainability.

Remember that “move fast and break things” is the motto of a sector of businesses with a 90% failure rate. The US Government cannot afford a 90% failure rate.

Some federal workers are ‘getting wealthy at taxpayer expense,’ says Elon Musk, whose companies have received at least $20 billion from the government

See here's how to do a headline.

fortune.com/2025/02/13/e...