McMahon Testifies at the Senate Appropriations FY27 Budget Hearing, Apr. 28, 2026
April 28, 2026 · PBS NewsHour · 2:02:31
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 2027 budget request before the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education on April 28, 2026, in PBS NewsHour’s live carry of the hearing — her second budget season before the subcommittee. McMahon opened, as she stated it, with the mandate she said Americans had given President Trump: to sunset a 46-year-old, $3 trillion failed education bureaucracy in Washington and return authority to parents, teachers, and local leaders, and she reported that she had traveled to more than 30 states in the past year seeing the system’s successes and challenges firsthand.
She put the request’s figures on the record as she stated them: full funding maintained for Title I-A grants at over $18 billion; $33 billion for the Pell Grant program, an increase of over $10 billion; $2 billion in new Make Education Great Again grants for literacy and numeracy; and $16 billion for IDEA programs for students with disabilities, an increase of more than half a billion dollars. She also claimed the year’s operating record, as she stated it: the simplified FAFSA launched on the earliest timeline in program history with a record 11 million submissions to date, over $1 billion in federal student aid fraud prevented, and seven agreements secured with universities over civil-rights violations. Ranking Member Tammy Baldwin answered with the opposition’s ledger, as she stated it: $2 billion in grants terminated mid-year, more than $7 billion in formula funds withheld until states sued, and program transfers to the Department of Labor that she argued create more bureaucracy rather than less.
Why it matters
Year two of the wind-down was argued on results rather than intentions: the Secretary defended a request that holds the big formula programs harmless — Title I, Pell, IDEA all maintained or increased, on her figures — while the bureaucracy around them keeps shrinking, and her critics answered with the disruption ledger of the first year. The two accounts, stated back to back in this hearing, are the cleanest single record of the fight over what the department has become.
Scoreboard watch
Scoreboard watch: the fiscal year 2027 figures as stated by Secretary McMahon on April 28, 2026 — Title I-A over $18 billion maintained, Pell at $33 billion, $2 billion in Make Education Great Again grants, IDEA at $16 billion, and a record 11 million FAFSA submissions. Flagged for the scoreboard editor; no entry is published from this page.
Sources: PBS NewsHour, “WATCH LIVE: Linda McMahon testifies on Education Department’s 2027 budget before Senate subcommittee” (live carry, embedded above; testimony as delivered by Secretary McMahon and members of the subcommittee).
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