By Juliana Vasquez | Staff Writer
President Trump’s first year of his second term has included natural disasters, an assassination attempt, economic shifts and policy reforms — here are the things economists and educators noted about Trump’s first year at a glance.
Last fall, the Trump administration campaigned on a number of issues ranging from the elimination of the Department of Education to the U.S.’s withdrawal from the Paris Agreement.
Dr. Van Pham, chair of the economics department, said a lot of these policy goals have had a positive and negative impact on America’s economy. Pham said we see this impact in the America First policy, specifically the Liberation Day tariffs.
“It’s raising cost because of tax, which actually increases input cost for firms and also causes disruption to the supply, which has negative effects on output and in hiring,” Pham said.
These fluctuations in the economy place a lot of strain on the Federal Reserve, Pham said, leading to a phenomenon known as stagflation. Stagflation is when the economy has slow growth, high unemployment and rising price rates, according to Investopedia.
Additionally, Pham said with the crackdown on immigration, the service industry has been uniquely affected, particularly in cities like Los Angeles and Chicago.
“That’s contributing to price pressures, and you’re seeing it through increased prices, and I think indirectly it’s going to affect jobs as well,” Pham said.
The administration’s policies hit the food industry with new tariffs and immigration policies introduced, Pham said. The automobile industry has also been impacted.
Overall, Pham said affordability is a huge issue that the Trump administration will need to tackle in the coming year since it was a larger talking point in the 2025 election cycle.
“That’s one of the things last election that brought President Trump into the White House,” Pham said. “During the Biden administration, inflation got a little bit out of control. Affordability really hit the last administration, and interestingly, that’s hitting this administration, too, but for different reasons.”
The Trump administration has also taken strides in terms of its education policy, most notably with its plans to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education.
Dr. Craig De Voto, a research assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, plans on studying this dismantlement and views the DOE as a valuable tool to aid underserved students.
“The Department of Education to some degree [is] a compliance mechanism and accountability mechanism for supporting underserved, marginalized, vulnerable students,” De Voto said. “And when you start to get rid of it … that means it’s basically on states to pick up the slack.”
States, however, vary in the support and resources they are able and willing to give schools, De Voto said. This alternative method has been in discussions since the Reagan administration. When asked whether the Department of Education would ever be dissolved, he said he was unsure.
“I would’ve said there’s no way [that] could happen,” De Voto said. “I don’t know anymore.”
The power of dismantling a federal agency is in the hands of Congress; however, the Trump administration already made various moves to dismantle the DOE. The first move was Trump’s signing of an executive order titled “Improving Education Outcomes by Empowering Parents, States and Communities,” which stated his intent to dismantle the DOE. The second move was the agencies’ recent announcement of plans to “break up the federal education bureaucracy” and partner with various other federal agencies to tackle the DOE’s load.
Dr. Angela Urick, an associate professor in the school of education, has seen some of the effects of the DOE’s instability within her own day-to-day work, particularly in regard to her research.
“The one [thing] that most influenced me as an education researcher was the data collection and the data sets,” Urick said. “All of that was halted with the new administration. There was a pause in a lot of the research funding.”
Another one of the Trump administration’s education policy goals was to “get colleges to shutter diversity programs,” according to the Associated Press, which Urick said caught universities by surprise.
“I don’t think that the education community was completely prepared for the amount of halting of programs,” Urick said. “It’s been a learning experience.”
Ultimately, when looking toward the next few years of the presidency, Urick said to pay attention to state and local politics, especially when it concerns education policy.
“The trends at the state level … definitely foreshadow the current political climate at the national level, so I think that currently a lot of the work and the power resides within state policy,” Urick said. “The larger work is more local at the state levels.”
