Table of Contents
Introduction: The Ghost in the Machine
For the first few years of my career as a school district budget director, I saw myself as a mechanic.
My office was a garage of sorts, lined not with tools but with binders, spreadsheets, and color-coded flowcharts.
I had studied the schematics provided by the U.S. Department of Education with an almost religious fervor (1).
The federal budget process, I believed, was an intricate but ultimately logical machine.
It had four distinct phases—formulation, congressional process, execution, and evaluation—that, if understood correctly, would deliver a predictable output: funding for the children in my district.
My job was to keep the gears oiled and the inputs precise.
I built my budgets with the meticulousness of an engineer.
I tracked the President’s annual budget request, plugging the proposed figures for Title I and IDEA grants into my multi-year projections (3).
I followed the timelines laid out in federal law, expecting funds to be disbursed on schedule, typically by July 1, just in time for the new school year (4).
I believed in the system’s rationality.
That belief was my first and most profound mistake.
The machine I was so carefully tending was haunted.
Every year, the same ghosts would appear.
The impressive funding promises made in the President’s Budget in February would evaporate in the halls of Congress by summer (3).
The neat, predictable timelines would slip, then break, then shatter completely (4).
Most terrifyingly, funds that were not just promised but legally appropriated by Congress and signed into law would suddenly be frozen by the executive branch, often with no warning and no clear explanation (5).
These weren’t abstract problems.
They forced me into a series of impossible choices.
Do I send layoff notices to the 16 literacy tutors we just hired with a now-frozen grant, as happened to my counterparts in Missouri (6)? Do I tell parents that the after-school program their children depend on—the one funded by the 21st Century Community Learning Centers grant—is canceled indefinitely (7)? Do I freeze hiring for a desperately needed special education teacher because the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) allocation is months late, jeopardizing our ability to serve our most vulnerable students (8)?
I was a mechanic trying to fix a machine that was actively working against me, possessed by a ghost of unpredictability I couldn’t name.
The official government documents, with their clean lines and orderly phases, were not just an oversimplification; they were a map to a world that didn’t exist.
My struggle, and the struggle of thousands of school finance officers like me, stemmed from trying to navigate the chaotic reality of federal funding using the blueprint for a rational system.
It took a crisis that pushed my district to the brink for me to finally understand: the problem wasn’t a ghost in the machine.
The problem was the machine itself.
It wasn’t a machine at all.
Part I: The Epiphany – It’s Not a Machine, It’s a River Delta
The epiphany arrived during a particularly brutal budget cycle.
A continuing resolution had passed, which should have guaranteed funding at the previous year’s levels (8).
We had made plans.
We had signed contracts.
Then, in late June, the news broke: the administration was placing a “programmatic review” hold on nearly $7 billion in K-12 education funds, including the Title II grant that paid for our teacher professional development and the Title IV grant that funded our after-school enrichment programs (6).
The money was there, appropriated and legal, but it was being held behind a political dam.
My spreadsheets were useless.
My flowcharts were a fantasy.
Staring at a budget full of red ink, I realized my core metaphor was wrong.
I wasn’t a mechanic.
You can’t “fix” a system that is inherently fluid, political, and subject to the gravitational pull of power.
Federal education funding isn’t a machine; it’s a vast, powerful, and chaotic river delta system.
This new paradigm changed everything.
It reframed the entire problem and my role in it.
Suddenly, the chaos made a different kind of sense.
- The River of Gold: This is the annual flow of federal education dollars, a powerful current that originates far from our schools.
- The Headwaters: The process begins not with a single, clean spring but in the turbulent headwaters of the executive branch, where thousands of competing agency priorities and political agendas mix to form the initial flow (2).
- The Main Channels: The river then splits into two powerful, competing channels—the House and the Senate. They carve separate, often conflicting, paths through the political landscape, creating a braided stream of resolutions and appropriations bills (3).
- Dams, Levees, and Canals: These are the political tools used to control the flow. Budget resolutions act as levees, attempting to guide the water. But powerful actors can build dams (like an impoundment) to stop the flow entirely or dig diversionary canals (ideological riders and politicized grant-making) to redirect the water for their own purposes (5).
- The Floodplains: The river eventually empties into the vast floodplains of the 50 states. Here, the small but vital federal stream mixes with the much larger rivers of state and local funding (11).
- The Soil: The landscape of these floodplains is wildly uneven. Some communities are built on fertile soil (areas with high property values and a robust local tax base), while others are on arid, rocky ground (low-income areas with little local wealth to draw upon) (12).
- The Estuary: This is the final point of impact—the schools, classrooms, and children where the water is supposed to nourish growth. But whether a school flourishes or withers depends entirely on how much water reaches it after this long and treacherous journey.
This reframing was a liberation.
It shifted my goal from trying to “fix the machine” to learning how to “navigate the ecosystem.” It meant accepting the inherent chaos and focusing on building resilience, forecasting the political weather, and understanding the system as it is, not as the official schematics claim it to be.
The ghosts in the machine were just the natural currents of the river.
Part II: The Headwaters – The Myth of a Single Source
In my early days as a budget director, I treated the President’s Budget Request as the river’s single, authoritative source.
Released with great fanfare each February, it was a hefty document filled with tables and projections that I took as gospel (3).
I now understand it as the turbulent confluence of a thousand competing tributaries, a political document designed more for messaging than for management.
The journey of the river begins long before the public ever sees it, in a phase called “budget formulation” that can start up to 18 months before the fiscal year begins (2).
This is not a calm, reflective process of planning.
It is a fierce, internal battle for resources within the executive branch.
Each federal agency, from the Department of Defense to the Department of Education, develops a budget proposal outlining what it believes it needs to operate (3).
These proposals then flow to the White House’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB), which acts as the first and most powerful filter.
The OMB’s job is not just to check the math; its explicit purpose is to shape these disparate requests to align with “presidential priorities” (2).
This is where the river’s course is first altered.
An education program that doesn’t fit the administration’s political agenda can have its funding throttled before a single member of Congress ever sees the proposal.
The most critical and least understood part of this process is the “passback.” In late fall, the OMB “passes back” its initial decisions to the agencies (2).
Agencies are given a very short window, sometimes as little as 72 hours, to review the OMB’s cuts and make a final, desperate appeal (4).
This is not a collaborative discussion; it is a high-stakes, last-ditch negotiation where billions of dollars and entire programs hang in the balance.
What emerges from this secretive, pressure-filled process is the President’s Budget Request.
And here is the fundamental truth that my “machine” metaphor could never account for: this entire document, the product of more than a year of work, is, by law, just a suggestion (3).
It has no legal authority.
Congress is under no obligation to follow it and frequently casts it aside entirely.
This reveals that the formulation phase is a process of “anticipatory negotiation.” The numbers in the President’s Budget are not just reflections of operational need; they are strategic calculations for the political war to come.
An agency might deliberately inflate a request for a popular program, knowing the OMB or Congress will cut it, but the high initial number makes for a good press release.
The President might include a bold, expensive new initiative that has zero chance of passing, simply to signal commitment to a core constituency.
The budget request is the opening salvo in a political battle, a strategic messaging document disguised as a financial plan.
This is why the final budget that emerges from Congress often bears so little resemblance to the President’s initial proposal.
The river was never meant to follow that first proposed channel.
Part III: The Main Channels – Carving a Path Through Congress
Once the President’s proposal arrives at Capitol Hill, the river of gold splits into two powerful and unpredictable channels: the House of Representatives and the Senate.
My old mechanical flowcharts showed a neat, linear progression from one chamber to the next.
The reality is a messy, braided stream, where the two channels carve their own paths, frequently colliding, creating legislative logjams, and threatening to either dry up completely or cause a catastrophic flood.
The first attempt to control these channels comes in the form of a budget resolution.
The House and Senate Budget Committees are each supposed to draft and pass their own resolution, which sets the overall spending limits for the 12 major areas of government, including education (3).
These resolutions are meant to act as a set of levees, defining the riverbanks for the rest of the process.
However, these levees are often structurally unsound.
The House and Senate versions can be wildly different, reflecting the political priorities of the majority party in each chamber.
Reconciling them in a conference committee is a contentious and often futile exercise (3).
Frequently, Congress fails to pass a budget resolution at all, which, as one analyst notes, makes the rest of the process “longer and more difficult” (3).
Without levees, the river can flow anywhere.
The real work of directing the water happens in the appropriations process.
Both the House and Senate have an Appropriations Committee, each with 12 subcommittees responsible for one slice of the federal discretionary budget (3).
The Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education is where the fate of programs like Title I, IDEA, and Pell Grants is decided.
These subcommittees hold hearings, listen to testimony, and draft the 12 appropriations bills that contain the actual, legally-binding funding amounts.
This is where a specific grant program can be quietly starved of funds or have its flow diverted through restrictive language.
At least, that’s how it’s supposed to work.
In recent decades, this deliberative, 12-bill process has almost completely broken down.
Instead of carefully managing 12 smaller streams, Congress now typically waits until the last possible minute—usually the end of the fiscal year on September 30—and combines all government funding into a single, monstrous bill known as an omnibus (3).
This is the legislative equivalent of a dam breaking.
A multi-thousand-page bill is dropped on lawmakers with only hours to read it, forcing a single, up-or-down vote under the threat of a government shutdown.
When even an omnibus is too difficult, Congress resorts to a continuing resolution (CR), a stopgap measure that simply keeps government agencies funded at the previous year’s levels, often for weeks or months at a time (8).
For a school district, a CR creates profound uncertainty.
We can’t plan for new initiatives or hire permanent staff because we have no idea what our final allocation will be.
This systemic shift from a dozen deliberative bills to a single crisis vote represents a fundamental change from legislative budgeting to crisis management.
Power is stripped from the subject-matter experts on the subcommittees and consolidated in the hands of a few party leaders who negotiate the final package behind closed doors.
Oversight becomes impossible.
Thoughtful allocation of resources is replaced by a desperate, high-stakes scramble to avoid catastrophe.
This is why, as a budget director, I felt so out of control.
The process wasn’t designed for control; it was designed for brinkmanship.
| Table 1: The Federal Budget Process – Theory vs. Reality |
| Phase |
| 1. President’s Budget Request |
| 2. Congressional Budget Resolution |
| 3. Appropriations Bills |
| 4. Budget Execution |
Part IV: The Politics of the Levee – How Power Diverts the Flow
My most jarring realization was that the river’s path wasn’t just shaped by the natural erosion of legislative compromise.
It was being actively, and at times illegally, manipulated.
Political actors were building dams to stop the flow and digging canals to divert it, often leaving the most vulnerable communities in a man-made drought.
The levees weren’t just failing; they were being sabotaged.
The most blatant form of this manipulation is impoundment, a term for when an administration simply refuses to spend money that Congress has legally appropriated (5).
This is a direct violation of the 1974 Impoundment Control Act, a law passed specifically to stop presidents from unilaterally defunding programs they dislike.
Yet, it happens.
A chilling example occurred when the Trump administration withheld an estimated $6.2 to $6.8 billion in K-12 funding that was due to be released to states on July 1 (5).
The money wasn’t cut from the budget; it was simply held captive by a “programmatic review” that the Government Accountability Office (GAO) later found to be illegal (5).
For budget directors on the ground, this wasn’t a political abstraction.
It was a five-alarm fire.
The funds being withheld were for programs serving the most at-risk students: Title II for teacher training, Title III for English learners, Title IV for after-school programs, and grants for migrant education (5).
The human cost was immediate and devastating.
Summer programs were canceled.
Tutors were laid off.
School districts across the country, from Los Angeles to Miami-Dade, were left with multi-million dollar holes in their budgets (6).
The very students federal law is designed to protect were the ones who suffered most.
A more subtle, but equally damaging, tactic is the weaponization of grant funding.
Here, the river isn’t dammed, but its flow is redirected through ideological canals.
We’ve seen federal research funding used as a “cudgel and carrot” to coerce universities into compliance on issues ranging from campus speech codes to diversity policies (10).
When Columbia University was accused of failing to adequately address antisemitism, over $400 million in federal funding was pulled (10).
A freeze on $108 million in federal grants at Duke University prompted a wave of layoffs and restructuring (14).
Even the wealthiest universities, like Harvard and Stanford, have been forced to cut staff and halt research projects due to politically motivated funding cuts and new taxes on their endowments (14).
This politicization extends to K-12 as well.
In one of the most glaring examples, the Department of Education canceled $226 million in grants for the Comprehensive Centers Program, which provides technical assistance to states, claiming the centers were pushing “divisive and wasteful” and “radical agendas” (16).
The evidence cited included a training video on resisting the “white gaze” and a paper questioning the number of white students in STEM (16).
Regardless of one’s view on the content, the action sent a clear message: federal partnership is contingent on ideological alignment.
The most insidious long-term effect of this manipulation is the erosion of trust.
The riverbanks are collapsing.
As an education leader, you can no longer assume that a law passed by Congress and signed by the President guarantees a reliable flow of funds (7).
This uncertainty becomes a “distressing norm,” forcing districts to budget defensively.
We become hesitant to launch innovative programs or hire for new positions, even when we have the paper appropriation, because we live in constant fear that the river will be arbitrarily diverted.
This stifles progress and ultimately robs children of opportunities.
This creates a cruel vulnerability paradox.
Federal aid is a relatively small portion of overall school funding, but it is highly targeted to specific, vulnerable populations like low-income students (Title I) and students with disabilities (IDEA) (11).
These funds are a lifeline for the districts that receive them and cannot be easily replaced with local dollars, which are already stretched to the breaking point in these communities (12).
Because these programs are so visible and targeted, they become easy pawns in political games.
The very mechanism designed to promote equity—targeted federal aid—becomes a point of extreme political vulnerability.
The districts the federal government is most intended to help are the ones most easily harmed by these power plays.
| Table 2: Anatomy of Federal Funding Disruptions |
| Incident/Tactic |
| Impoundment / Funding Freeze |
| Politicized Grant Cancellation |
| Ideological Leverage on Higher Ed |
| Budgetary Delays |
Part V: The Floodplains and the Droughtlands – State and Local Realities
For years, I focused my energy on the treacherous journey of the federal river.
My epiphany deepened when I finally zoomed out and looked at the entire watershed.
I realized that even a perfectly managed federal stream was just a trickle flowing into a vast and profoundly uneven landscape of state and local funding.
A perfect federal flow could never, on its own, turn a desert into a floodplain.
The first step to understanding this reality is grasping the scale.
On average, K-12 public education funding in the U.S. is split roughly 8-13% federal, 47% state, and 45% local (11).
While the federal government’s share grew temporarily due to pandemic relief funds, it has historically hovered around 8% (20).
This immediately shows that the vast majority of the water in the system comes from state and local sources.
The federal government’s role is small financially, but its influence through regulation and targeted grants is disproportionately large.
The original sin of American school funding, the root cause of the droughtlands, is its deep and abiding reliance on local property taxes (11).
In most states, local property taxes are the primary source of local school funding, accounting for 82% of it on average (13).
This structure directly ties a school district’s wealth to the value of its real estate.
A district in a wealthy suburb with a booming commercial tax base is a fertile floodplain, awash in resources.
A district in a post-industrial city or a poor rural area with low property values is an arid droughtland.
This inequity is not an accident; it is the logical outcome of the system’s design.
State funding formulas are meant to be the great equalizers.
They are complex mechanisms designed to distribute state aid to offset these local wealth disparities (11).
As detailed by analysts at Bellwether Education Partners, these formulas generally fall into three categories (21):
- Student-Based Funding: States provide a base amount per student, with additional “weights” for students with greater needs (e.g., low-income students, English learners, students with disabilities). This is generally seen as the most transparent and equitable model.
- Resource-Based Funding: The formula is based on the cost of specific inputs, like paying for a certain number of teachers or counselors per 1,000 students.
- Program-Based Funding: Funding is allocated based on the costs of specific educational programs, like special education or transportation.
Despite these attempts at equalization, the state river is rarely powerful enough to irrigate the driest lands.
As The Education Trust consistently reports, the system remains profoundly inequitable.
On a national level, districts with the most students of color receive about 16% less in state and local funding than districts with the fewest, and high-poverty districts receive 5% less than low-poverty districts (22).
The state formulas simply do not, or cannot, fully compensate for the vast disparities in local wealth.
Furthermore, the flow of state money is itself subject to political currents.
Academic studies using regression analysis on state election data have found that political party control significantly impacts spending priorities.
For instance, some research suggests that Democratic-controlled state legislatures may prioritize spending on welfare or higher education over K-12, often operating under the assumption that local property taxes can and will make up the difference in school funding (23).
This leads to a perverse systemic reality that functions like a moral hazard machine.
The federal government, with its small but targeted stream of funding for programs like Title I, steps in to address the most glaring symptoms of inequity.
This federal aid provides just enough water to keep the plants in the droughtlands from dying completely.
But in doing so, it acts as a political release valve.
It allows state and local politicians to claim they are “doing something” about the problem while avoiding the politically treacherous work of fundamental reform—namely, decoupling school funding from local property wealth (13).
By patching the worst holes, the federal government inadvertently helps perpetuate the broken system, treating a systemic disease with just enough painkiller to make it bearable.
| Table 3: K-12 Education Funding Sources (FY 2023) | |
| Funding Source | |
| Federal | |
| State | |
| Local | |
| Note: Percentages are approximate based on data from FY2023 and may not sum to 100% due to rounding. The federal share was elevated in FY23 due to pandemic relief funds and is expected to return to its historical average of ~8%.11 |
Part VI: The Estuary – Where the Water Meets the Children
The long, turbulent journey of the river of gold ends at the estuary—the school, the classroom, the child.
It is here that the abstract chaos of budgets and politics becomes devastatingly concrete.
It is here that the water either nourishes growth or fails to arrive, leaving potential to wither.
The most critical federal streams are the lifeline programs designed to serve our nation’s most vulnerable students.
These are not budgetary line items; they are moral commitments.
- Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA): This is the largest and most important federal grant program, providing over $16 billion annually to school districts with high concentrations of children from low-income families (11). Its purpose is to provide the supplemental resources—extra teachers, tutors, technology, and learning materials—needed to help these students meet the same challenging academic standards as their wealthier peers (17).
- The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA): This is a landmark civil rights law that guarantees a “free and appropriate public education” (FAPE) for every child with a disability. The federal government provides over $13 billion in Part B grants to help states and districts cover the significant additional costs of providing the special education and related services these students need to thrive (11).
- Other Key Programs: The federal government also provides vital, targeted funding through Title II for preparing and training high-quality teachers, Title III for helping English learners acquire language proficiency, Title IV for student support and academic enrichment (including after-school programs), and the Perkins Act for career and technical education (CTE) (9). For millions of students, these programs are the difference between opportunity and failure.
When these federal streams flow as intended and are combined with strong local leadership, they can achieve remarkable success.
The federal School Improvement Grants (SIG) program, which invested $3.5 billion into turning around the nation’s lowest-achieving schools, provides a powerful case study (26).
The program required bold action, such as replacing the principal and a significant portion of the staff, and provided the resources for intensive, job-embedded professional development and new instructional coaching positions.
Case studies of 25 SIG schools found that in many, these federally-funded interventions led to positive changes in school culture and teaching practice (26).
Similarly, decades of litigation in states like New Jersey (
Abbott v.
Burke) have resulted in court-mandated funding reforms that, backed by the force of law, have directed more resources to poor urban districts and narrowed achievement gaps (27).
However, for every targeted success, there is a story of systemic failure.
The most prominent example is the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) of 2001.
NCLB was the federal government’s most ambitious attempt to reform the entire American education system.
It failed, and it failed spectacularly (28).
The law’s core premise was that schools could be forced to improve through a rigid system of standardized testing and punitive sanctions for failure to make “Adequate Yearly Progress.” This approach was doomed from the start because it willfully ignored the single most powerful factor in student achievement: socioeconomic status (28).
As the landmark 1966 Coleman Report demonstrated, a student’s family background is a far greater predictor of academic success than any in-school factor (29).
NCLB tried to command the river to flow uphill, placing the entire burden of overcoming societal inequality on the shoulders of teachers and principals, and then punishing them when they inevitably failed.
It was an exercise in magical thinking, and its failure left a legacy of narrowed curricula, teaching to the test, and demoralized educators.
| Table 4: Major Federal K-12 Grant Programs | |
| Program (and Authorizing Act) | |
| Title I, Part A (ESEA) | |
| IDEA, Part B (IDEA) | |
| Title II, Part A (ESEA) | |
| Title III, Part A (ESEA) | |
| Title IV, Part A (ESEA) | |
| 21st Century Community Learning Centers (Title IV, Part B) (ESEA) | |
| Perkins V (CTE Act) | |
| Funding levels are based on FY24 appropriations and continuing resolutions as reported in sources 11, and.9 |
Conclusion: Towards a More Resilient Ecosystem
My journey as a budget director began with the frustration of a mechanic whose machine was constantly breaking down.
It ends with the hard-won wisdom of an ecosystem manager.
The federal education funding system is not a machine we can perfect.
The chaos is not a flaw; it is a feature of its design as a political, fluid, and contested system.
We cannot turn the river delta into a perfectly engineered aqueduct.
The goal, therefore, must shift from seeking perfection to building resilience.
If we accept the river delta as our guiding metaphor, a new set of solutions emerges—not a single grand plan, but a series of pragmatic interventions designed to manage the ecosystem for equity and stability.
First, we must shore up the riverbanks.
The executive branch cannot be allowed to build illegal dams.
The Impoundment Control Act must be strengthened with swift, automatic consequences for any administration that illegally withholds congressionally appropriated funds (5).
Predictability is the bedrock of planning, and the rule of law must be the bedrock of predictability.
Second, we must build reservoirs, not just rely on the annual flow.
The unpredictable floods and droughts of the yearly appropriations process make long-term planning impossible.
States should be federally incentivized to follow the lead of pioneers like New Mexico and Connecticut by creating permanent education trust funds (31).
These endowments, often funded by surplus revenues or dedicated taxes, act as reservoirs that can store resources during good years and release them during lean ones, insulating schools from both economic recessions and political whims.
Third, and most fundamentally, we must remediate the soil.
We must finally confront the original sin of American education: its reliance on local property taxes.
As long as a child’s opportunity is tied to their zip code’s real estate market, we will be trapped in a cycle of inequity.
This requires a politically courageous, state-led shift toward funding systems that distribute all operational dollars through equitable, student-centered state formulas, as advocated by organizations like Bellwether Education Partners (13).
The federal government can play a role by offering significant grants to states willing to undertake this difficult but essential reform.
Finally, we need better weather forecasting.
We cannot navigate a river we cannot see.
Radical transparency is essential.
We need the ability to track the river of gold in real time, from its headwaters in the OMB to its final destination in the classroom.
This means mandating clear, accessible, school-by-school spending data, building on the work of research groups like Georgetown’s Edunomics Lab (32), so that parents, advocates, and policymakers can see exactly where the water is flowing and where it is not.
My time as a budget director taught me that there is no magic bullet.
There is no perfect schematic.
There is only the difficult, constant work of managing a complex and dynamic system.
The work is not about finding a flawless blueprint, but about learning to read the river, to protect its flow against those who would dam or divert it, and, above all, to ensure that its life-giving water reaches every single child, regardless of the soil in which they are planted.
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