Last week, in a mostly partisan vote, the House Appropriations Committee approved its fiscal year 2027 spending bill for the Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education. Tucked into the bill is $243.6 million for the Department of Education’s Safe Schools and Citizenship Education account, intended to keep students safe under Title IV, Part F of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.
The account’s name no longer describes what it funds. Originally, federal school safety funding was meant to focus largely on physical security, violence prevention, discipline, and emergency preparedness. But policymakers increasingly view school safety through a mental-health lens, treating schools as mental-health clinics though no evidence suggests that the education system can treat mental-health conditions better than clinical settings can. The FY27 bill codifies this transformation: it directs roughly 70 percent of the account to three school-based mental-health grants—and makes those allocations, listed in a committee report table, legally binding.
Finally, a reason to check your email.
Sign up for our free newsletter today.
The legally binding aspect deserves attention. Committee reports typically break down an account’s funding in tables that have no legal force; they simply act as guidance for agencies, which customarily follow them. This bill, however, contains language that the funding allocations “shall be … in the amounts specified” in the report table. That means the Department of Education would be required by law to spend the precise amounts detailed on those exact mental-health activities.
The practice of making table allocations legally binding has become more common in recent budget cycles. It locks in program allocations against an executive branch willing to withhold and redirect funds for programs it wants to eliminate—including these mental-health grants. There’s good reason for the administration’s approach: the spending buys little that’s good and a lot that’s bad. If the bill reaches the House floor for a vote as written, members should not let it pass.
Consider what actually drives school safety problems: unsafe schools are a function of unenforced discipline and unfollowed behavioral codes of conduct, academic disengagement, inadequate physical infrastructure, poor attendance, and family breakdown. When safety issues reflect unmet clinical needs, it’s from very serious cases—like early signs of psychosis—that schools cannot address. Most school-based mental-health programs flag kids with even slight distress for potential intervention and push them toward the mental-health system for diagnosis. These programs have not made students any safer.
The track record of school-based mental health efforts is not impressive. These programs fit the public-health model of mental health—awareness trainings, universal screenings, expanded counseling staff—meant to direct students toward the mental-health system. A 2018 systematic review in Psychological Medicine examined school-based prevention programs, finding their evidence base weak and mostly low-quality; the authors could not conclude that the programs improved outcomes; universal mental-health screening produces up to 90 percent false positives, driving overdiagnosis.
A 2025 review in Child and Adolescent Mental Health went further: universal prevention is less effective than targeted efforts, its benefits are null or short-lived, and it can even cause harm. Direct services fare no better: a gold-standard randomized controlled trial using 19 years of data found that access to school-based mental-health services increased students’ usage of those services—though it’s not clear whether use increased for students who needed them, or those who didn’t and were treated anyway. Regardless, the services improved neither test scores nor attendance. A multiyear Toronto study found that heavy investment in school-based screening and treatment produced more diagnoses and more medicated children—again, without clarity about whether that treatment was appropriate or needed, and with no academic improvement.
The statutory funding authority for two of the grants—the Mental Health Service Professional Demonstration Grants and the School-Based Mental Health Services Grants—has expired, yet the appropriations committee is continuing them at elevated spending levels despite no evidence they’re effective.
The third and fourth programs of the account have drifted, too. Project SERV originally provided emergency assistance following school violence or traumatic events. But the concept of “trauma” meriting federal intervention has broadened substantially, medicalizing ordinary adversity and extending psychological intervention into ever more corners of kids’ lives. National Programs for School Safety have also become a way to stuff in mental-health awareness programming, which turns kids and teachers into pseudo-screeners identifying one another for potential mental-health conditions.
Much of the school-based mental-health enterprise is ideology cloaked in caring or clinical language. Consider “trauma-informed” practice: it sounds unobjectionable, but the label routinely covers political activism. California’s statewide math framework, for instance, cites as its evidentiary support for “trauma-informed pedagogy” a study in which a teacher converted a number-line exercise into a lesson on “food deserts,” showed students a video of a single mother struggling to afford food, and asked the kids how it made them feel. Students cried, expressed anger at the government, and committed to political activism—which the study author counted as “radical healing.” All this in math class! Whether the students ever learned to add and subtract went unexamined; the study reported that all students passed and enjoyed the tasks.
A “Safe Schools” account label is now entirely misleading. Congress is treating school counselors and psychologists, social-emotional learning programs, and woke wellness messages as primary solutions to genuine safety challenges. It’s analogous to having social workers respond to 911 calls for homeless adults with untreated serious mental illness.
Congressional leadership will now decide when (or whether) the bill will be considered by the full House, which will debate the bill and vote on amendments before final passage. House Republicans need to wake up here. Youth mental health matters. But funding mental-health mission creep in the education system is not the way to address it.
City Journal is a publication of the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research (MI), a leading free-market think tank. Are you interested in supporting the magazine? As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, donations in support of MI and City Journal are fully tax-deductible as provided by law (EIN #13-2912529).