Jess Gartner
@jessgartner.bsky.social
570 followers 210 following 130 posts
Education • Finance • Technology 📷🧘🏻‍♀️🚴🏻‍♀️🏋🏻‍♀️✈️📚🎶 📍Seattle
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jessgartner.bsky.social
I once had to buy an extra bag in Portland to take home all the books I *needed*
Reposted by Jess Gartner
hankgreen.bsky.social
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.
jessgartner.bsky.social
Bagels with cream cheese and lox would like a word.
jessgartner.bsky.social
100% this. But I’m sure they’re going to ask me for $10 somewhere today.
mollyjongfast.bsky.social
Why aren’t Dems on everything talking about the Joni Ernst “you can die” bill?
jessgartner.bsky.social
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).
jessgartner.bsky.social
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.
jessgartner.bsky.social
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...
Federal Education Budget Proposal [as of 5.31.25]
docs.google.com
jessgartner.bsky.social
Programmatically, they propose eliminating or consolidating about 57% of prior appropriations.
jessgartner.bsky.social
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.
jessgartner.bsky.social
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.
jessgartner.bsky.social
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...)
jessgartner.bsky.social
🚨 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…
jessgartner.bsky.social
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?
Reposted by Jess Gartner
propublica.org
The Trump administration laid off nearly half of the Department of Education division that handles civil rights investigations and halted work on thousands of pending discrimination cases.

If you were affected, we want to hear from you. Get in touch:
Help Us Report on How the Department of Education Is Handling Civil Rights Cases
Have you recently filed a civil rights complaint or do you have a pending case? We need your help to get a full picture of how the dismantling of the Office for Civil Rights is affecting students,…
www.propublica.org
jessgartner.bsky.social
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.
jessgartner.bsky.social
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.
jessgartner.bsky.social
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
jessgartner.bsky.social
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…
jessgartner.bsky.social
I do! 🙋🏻‍♀️🙋🏻‍♀️🙋🏻‍♀️
jessgartner.bsky.social
My interpretation of the budget proposal for K-12 education
Reposted by Jess Gartner
schoolfinance101.bsky.social
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.
jessgartner.bsky.social
A 10% conversion rate to (still) Married is crazy.
Reposted by Jess Gartner
kwcollins.bsky.social
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
jessgartner.bsky.social
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.

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