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President Donald Trump signed an executive order last night calling for the dismantling of the Department of Education. Today, he said that he would transfer key responsibilities of the agency to other departments. It’s unclear whether those changes are possible without Congressional approval.

Trump’s executive order calls upon Education Secretary Linda McMahon “to the maximum extent appropriate and permitted by law, take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education” while still “ensuring the effective and uninterrupted delivery of services, programs, and benefits on which Americans rely.”

“I think of it as an announcement of his policy priorities,” Brookings education and inequality researcher Rachel Perera said of the executive order. “They’re certainly testing the boundaries in terms of how much they can reshape the work of the department.”

Trump and McMahon have repeatedly stated that critical funding streams that schools rely on will continue to flow to states. But experts say that promises to move these programs out of the Education Department and into other departments, as well as the 50% staffing cuts seen last week, threaten the security of those dollars.

What could be the potential impact on Pennsylvania and New Jersey?

Pennsylvania’s public schools receive about $4.67 billion in federal funding. New Jersey receives about $1.2 billion. That includes funding under Title I, which supports schools in low-income communities, as well as the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, also known as IDEA, which distributes funding for special education and related services for children with disabilities.

Thousands of jobs are reliant on these funding streams. According to Philadelphia Federation of Teachers President Arthur Steinberg, 1,449 jobs in Philadelphia alone are funded by Title I and the IDEA. New Jersey’s Education Law Center Executive Director Robert Kim said that 18,000 teaching jobs in New Jersey would be affected if federal education programs stopped operating.

“The idea that they would all still be operational, and that there would not be disruptions, delays or cancellations of a lot of these funding streams, is absolutely a fantasy,” Kim said.