McMahon Testifies at the Senate Appropriations FY26 Budget Hearing, Jun. 3, 2025
June 3, 2025 · The Hill · 1:36:31
Embedded from the source channel — never re-uploaded. Watch on YouTube
What happened
Education Secretary Linda McMahon testified on the Department of Education’s fiscal year 2026 budget request before the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education on June 3, 2025, in The Hill’s carry of the hearing. McMahon opened with the goal, as she stated it, that she shares with President Trump: to responsibly eliminate the federal bureaucracy, cut waste, and give education back to states, parents, and educators — a budget she said would shrink federal bureaucracy, save taxpayer money, and empower the states that best know their local needs, including the funding reduction of more than 15 percent she had also presented to the House.
The sharpest exchanges were about money already appropriated and about programs the budget would end. Ranking Member Tammy Baldwin charged that the department’s operating plan had characterized $13 billion in fiscal year 2025 funding as unallocated, which she called flatly unprecedented and unacceptable, as she stated it. From the majority side, full committee Chair Susan Collins told McMahon she strongly disagreed with the President’s proposal to eliminate the TRIO programs, citing the first-generation and low-income students in Maine whose lives she said the programs had changed — bipartisan pushback, delivered by the committee’s own chair, as Collins stated her position.
Why it matters
The Senate hearing shows the two fronts on which McMahon’s budget had to fight at once: the opposition’s charge that the department was withholding money Congress had already provided, and a senior Republican’s defense of a long-running access program the budget proposed to eliminate. The wind-down’s fate in the Senate runs through exactly these members — the appropriators who write the bill, whatever the department requests.
Scoreboard watch
Scoreboard watch: the fiscal year 2026 budget’s proposal to eliminate the TRIO programs, as defended by Secretary McMahon and opposed on the record by Appropriations Chair Susan Collins on June 3, 2025. Flagged for the scoreboard editor; no entry is published from this page.
Sources: The Hill, “Happening Now: McMahon testifies before Senate on Education budget request” (carry of the Jun. 3, 2025 hearing, embedded above; testimony as delivered by Secretary McMahon and members of the subcommittee).
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