Account fully for CARES Act education expenditures

Partially done

Printed page 359 11. Department of Education

“The next President should issue a series of executive orders requiring: … A full accounting of CARES Act education expenditures”

What has happened

Apr 10, 2026 Partially done
The retrospective half is being done piecemeal by the Inspector General rather than as a single accounting: audits and investigations published through the President's Task Force to Eliminate Fraud found $3.9 million misused by the Puerto Rico Department of Education, a $3.4 million fraud in Boone County, West Virginia, and over $20 million improperly approved by Wisconsin. Findings by grantee, not a full accounting of CARES Act education expenditures.
- Victories for American Taxpayers: Exposing COVID-Era Fraud, Waste, and Abuse in Federal Education Programs
  Primary Executive branch Apr 10, 2026
Feb 19, 2025 Partially done
No executive order requires a full accounting, but the Department built the accounting mechanism itself in the first month. From 2025-02-19 "all future payments under the CARES Act, CRRSA Act, and ARP Act spent on allowable expenditures must be paid by the states in advance and then submitted to the U.S. Department of Education for reimbursement", replacing drawdown "without proof that the funds were used for authorized purposes" and covering the remaining $4.4 billion. That is a piece of the ask delivered by a different instrument: it accounts for what is left to spend, not for what the CARES Act education money already bought.
- U.S. Department of Education Updates Guidance on COVID-19 Funding (reimbursement requirement for CARES, CRRSA and ARP funds)
  Primary Executive branch Feb 19, 2025

Research log

What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence

Research notes

Searched presidential documents in the Federal Register and White House presidential actions for “CARES Act”, “ESSER” and “pandemic relief”: nothing requiring an accounting. The ed.gov sitemap carries no CARES Act expenditure report.
Boundary: a reviewer could hold this at not started on the ground that the Quote asks for an executive order and a full accounting, and neither exists.

Re-checked 2026-09-06. The Status stays partial; no published accounting exists. Re-checked with the Department’s full-text site search, which does discriminate (a nonsense term returns “There are no results matching your search terms”). The site’s other search box returns identical text for every query, which is why the earlier negative rested on the sitemap alone. “CARES Act accounting” and “HEERF accounting expenditures” return the standing HEERF program page, the 2020 equitable-services letter to chief state school officers, and a run of unrelated accountability-system pages. The ESSER awards page is in the sitemap as a data page, not as an accounting of what the money bought. Nothing published since 2025-01-20 is or purports to be a full accounting of CARES Act education expenditures.

The boundary above stands. The partial rests on the reimbursement requirement of 2025-02-19 being a real piece of the accounting delivered by a different instrument, and on the Inspector General’s grantee-level findings being real but not a full accounting.

Action: issue
Object: CARES Act education expenditures accounting
ID: 915