Tag: Grants

  • Canceling AmeriCorps grants threatens the future of education and workforce pipelines that power our nation’s progress

    Canceling AmeriCorps grants threatens the future of education and workforce pipelines that power our nation’s progress

    The recent decision to cancel $400 million in AmeriCorps grants is nothing short of a crisis. With over 1,000 programs affected and 32,000 AmeriCorps and Senior Corps members pulled from their posts, this move will leave communities across the country without critical services.

    The cuts will dismantle disaster recovery efforts, disrupt educational support for vulnerable students and undermine a powerful workforce development strategy that provides AmeriCorps members with in-demand skills across sectors including education.

    AmeriCorps provides a service-to-workforce pipeline that gives young Americans and returning veterans hands-on training in high-demand industries, such as education, public safety, disaster response and health care. Its nominal front-end investment in human capital fosters economic mobility, enabling those who engage in a national service experience to successfully transition to gainful employment.

    As leaders of Teach For America and City Year, two organizations that are part of the AmeriCorps national service network and whose members receive education stipends that go toward certification costs, student loans or future education pursuits, we are alarmed by how this crisis threatens the future of the education and workforce pipelines that power our nation’s progress, and it is deeply personal. We both started our careers as corps members in the programs we now lead.

    Related: A lot goes on in classrooms from kindergarten to high school. Keep up with our free weekly newsletter on K-12 education.

    Aneesh began his journey as a Teach For America corps member teaching high school English in Minnesota. Jim’s path began with City Year, serving at a Head Start program in Boston. We know firsthand that AmeriCorps programs are transformative and empower young people to drive meaningful change — for themselves and their communities.

    At Teach For America, AmeriCorps grants are essential to recruiting thousands of new teachers every year to effectively lead high-need classrooms across the country. These teachers, who have a consistent and significant positive impact on students’ learning, rely on the AmeriCorps education awards they earn through their two years of service to pay for their own education and professional development, including new teacher certification fees, costs that in some communities exceed $20,000.

    Termination of these grants threatens the pipeline of an estimated 2,500 new teachers preparing to enter classrooms over the summer. At a time when rural and urban communities alike are facing critical teacher shortages, cutting AmeriCorps support risks leaving students without the educators they need and deserve.

    City Year, similarly, relies on AmeriCorps to recruit more than 2,200 young adults annually to serve as student success coaches in K-12 schools across 21 states, 29 cities and 60 school districts.

    These AmeriCorps members serving as City Year student success coaches provide tutoring and mentoring that support students’ academic progress and interpersonal skill development and growth; they partner closely with teachers to boost student achievement, improve attendance and help keep kids on track to graduate. Research shows that schools partnering with City Year are two times more likely to improve their scores on English assessments, and two to three times more likely to improve their scores on math assessments.

    Corps members gain critical workforce skills such as leadership, problem-solving and creative thinking, which align directly with the top skills employers seek; the value of their experience has been reaffirmed through third-party research conducted with our alumni. The City Year experience prepares corps members for success in varied careers, with many going into education.

    AmeriCorps-funded programs like Breakthrough Collaborative and Jumpstart further strengthen this national service-to-workforce pathway, expanding the number of trained tutors and teacher trainees while also preparing corps members for careers that make a difference in all of our lives.

    Those programs’ trained educators ensure all students gain access to excellent educational opportunities that put them on the path to learn, lead and thrive in communities across the country. And the leaders of both organizations, like us, are AmeriCorps alumni, proof of the lasting effect of national service.

    Collectively, our four organizations have hundreds of thousands of alumni whose work as AmeriCorps members has impacted millions of children while shaping their own lives’ work, just as it did ours. Our alumni continue to lead classrooms, schools, districts, communities and organizations in neighborhoods across the country.

    Related: Tracking Trump: His actions to dismantle the Education Department, and more

    The termination of AmeriCorps grants is a direct blow to educators, schools and students. And, at a time when Gen Z is seeking work that aligns with their values and desire for impact, AmeriCorps is an essential on-ramp to public service and civic leadership that benefits not just individuals but entire communities and our country at large.

    For every dollar invested in AmeriCorps, $17 in economic value is generated, proving that national service is not only efficient but also a powerhouse for economic growth. Rather than draining resources, AmeriCorps drives real, measurable results that benefit individual communities and the national economy.

    Moreover, two-thirds of AmeriCorps funding is distributed by governor-appointed state service commissions to community- and faith-based organizations that leverage that funding to meet local needs. By working directly with state and local partners, AmeriCorps provides a more effective solution than top-down government intervention.

    On behalf of the more than 6,500 current AmeriCorps members serving with Teach For America and City Year, and the tens of thousands of alumni who have gone on to become educators, civic leaders and changemakers, we call on Congress to protect AmeriCorps and vital national service opportunities.

    Investing in AmeriCorps is an investment in America’s future, empowering communities, strengthening families and revitalizing economies. Let’s preserve the fabric of our national service infrastructure and ensure that the next generation of leaders, educators and community advocates who want to serve our nation have the ability to do so.

    Aneesh Sohoni is Teach For America’s new CEO. Previously, he was CEO of One Million Degrees and executive director of Teach For America Greater Chicago-Northwest Indiana. He is a proud alum of Teach For America.

    Jim Balfanz, a recognized leader and innovator in the field of education and national service, is CEO and a proud alum of City Year.

    Contact the opinion editor at opinion@hechingerreport.org.

    This story about AmeriCorps, Teach For America and City Year was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s weekly newsletter.

    The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.

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  • Education Department retracts CTE grants for Native American and Hawaiian students

    Education Department retracts CTE grants for Native American and Hawaiian students

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    The U.S. Department of Education canceled two grant competitions for fiscal year 2025 meant to improve career opportunities for Native American and Native Hawaiian students, according to notices published in the Federal Register earlier this month. 

    The competitions were canceled because they do not “align with the objectives established by the Trump Administration while fostering consistency across all grant programs.” The department also said in its notices that canceling the competition for the fiscal year is part of “enhancing the economic effectiveness of Federal education funding.” 

    Instead of continuing the competitions, the department will dedicate available funds to support current recipients of the grants. 

    In total, the grants provided nearly $21.6 million for the Native American Career and Technical Education Program and the Native Hawaiian Career and Technical Education Program, according to the Education Department’s Office of Career, Technical and Adult Education. It provided nearly $18 million in Native American opportunities and $3.6 million for Native Hawaiians on an annual basis, according to the department. 

    The competitions were originally announced in the Federal Register on Jan. 7, prior to the inauguration of President Donald Trump, who has proposed a much slimmer Education Department budget that would cut its total funding by 15%. The administration has also already slashed a handful of other education grant programs. 

    In previous years, the Native American and Native Hawaiian grants have supported colleges, schools and tribes in establishing postsecondary career pathways.  

    For example, in fiscal year 2021, the department awarded 39 grants under the NACTEP program and nine grants under the NHCTEP program. 

    A NACTEP grant awarded to Chief Leschi Schools, a Native American tribal school located in Washington, allowed for work-based learning related to fisheries, medical facilities, schools and other careers.

    “The tribal connections of pathways embrace and honor the culture and identity of students and families and provide students a connection to their heritage along with a path to a successful future,” the program description states.

    In Castle High School in Hawaii, the NHCTEP program prepared students for a medical career pathway.

    “The project will provide culture-based education to Native Hawaiian students and foster a community where relationships are formed, and learning is connected to the context of students’ lives applied to the real world,” the description states. 

    In 2021-22, there were more than 8.1 million high school CTE participants out of 11.5 million participants nationwide, according to the Association for Career and Technical Education. Nationally, about 109,000 were American Indian or Alaska Native and 43,000 were Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander.

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  • Fulbright-Hays Grants Canceled for the Year

    Fulbright-Hays Grants Canceled for the Year

    The Department of Education canceled this year’s competition for three Fulbright-Hays fellowship programs, adding to the growing list of higher education grants that have been eliminated since President Donald Trump took office in January.

    The decision, announced Thursday on the Federal Register, will affect doctoral students and faculty who applied for the Group Projects Abroad, Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad and Faculty Research Abroad programs—all of which focus on expanding American expertise in critical languages and are congressionally mandated.

    About 110 individuals and 22 groups from over 55 institutions benefited from these three programs, according to department data, in fiscal year 2022, the most recent year for which data is available. This year, prior to the cancellation, more than 400 applications had been submitted.

    Department officials wrote in Thursday’s announcement that the cancellation is just for fiscal year 2025 and was part of a “comprehensive review” to ensure that all competition criteria and priorities “align with the objectives established by the Trump Administration.”

    But outside critics say these cuts signify larger problems that stem from cutting nearly half of the department’s staff in March.

    The massive reduction in force was sweeping and impacted nearly every sector of the agency, including the International and Foreign Language Education Office, which oversees Fulbright-Hayes. After the cuts, not one IFLE employee remained.

    “When [the department] conducted the reductions in force, it claimed it would continue to deliver on all of its statutory requirements,” said Antoinette Flores, director of higher education accountability and quality at New America, a left-leaning think tank. “But this is evidence that it’s not, and it can’t.”

    The Department of Education did not respond to Inside Higher Ed’s request for further comment on why the cuts were made and whether the program will resume in fiscal year 2026.

    ‘A Loss to Education’

    All three of the canceled programs were signed into law by President John F. Kennedy during the Cold War in response to national security concerns. The goal was to ensure Americans had the international exposure and comprehensive language training necessary to maintain the nation’s diplomatic, economic, military and technological prowess.

    In total, the 12 Fulbright-Hays programs have allocated more than $2 trillion to nearly 58,000 participants since 2000. But now higher education advocates worry that impact will be squandered.

    “This is just a cancellation for these grants for this year, but the entire office that ran these programs was let go. It’s a team that had very specific expertise and knowledge that is not easily transferable or replaceable,” said Flores, who worked as a political appointee in the department during the Biden administration. “This is just one year, but long term, it’s a loss to education over all.”

    IFLE’s former director of institutional services confirmed Flores’s concerns in a court declaration filed in an ongoing lawsuit from Democratic state attorneys general challenging Trump’s efforts to dismantle the department.

    In addition to selecting grant recipients, the anonymous declarant said, IFLE assisted the awardees with securing visas and housing, ensured their work aligned with the goals articulated in their applications, helped establish research affiliations, and responded to safety and security concerns if they arose. Furthermore, each of the 18 staff members had expertise in curriculum development, and most were multilingual—skills the declarant said were “critical.”

    Without the staff’s expertise, maintaining the program and meeting the department’s statutory obligations would likely be impossible, the former director explained.

    “The complete removal of our team, leaving underqualified and overwhelmed staff left to manage these programs, seems to suggest to me that the decision was not made for budgetary efficiency but rather as part of a broader effort to dismantle international education initiatives within the Department and the America[n] education system,” the declarant explained.

    And the consequences will not only fall on this year’s applicants whose proposals will be dismissed, but also on last year’s awardees, who are currently abroad and left with no experienced contact point in the States.

    “We put in lifesaving mechanisms to ensure that scholars overseas are safe,” the declarant said. “The absence of this expertise puts scholars at extreme risk.”

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  • Florida’s Own DOGE Is Reviewing Faculty Research, Grants

    Florida’s Own DOGE Is Reviewing Faculty Research, Grants

    Elon Musk’s days with DOGE appear numbered—the unelected billionaire bureaucrat said Tuesday that his time spent leading the agency-gutting U.S. Department of Government Efficiency will “drop significantly” next month. As Tesla’s profits plummet, the world’s richest man faces opposition from both Trump administration officials and voters.

    DOGE’s legacy remains unclear. Lawsuits are challenging its attempted cuts, including at the U.S. Education Department. Musk seems to have scaled back his planned overall budget savings from $1 or $2 trillion to $150 billion, and it’s unclear whether DOGE will achieve even that.

    But something may outlive Musk’s DOGE: all the state iterations it has inspired, with legislators and governors borrowing or riffing off the name. Iowa’s Republican governor created the Iowa DOGE Task Force. Missouri’s GOP-controlled Legislature launched Government Efficiency Committees, calling them MODOGE on Musk’s X social media platform. Kansas lost the reference to the original doge meme when it went with COGE, for its Senate Committee on Government Efficiency.

    But, as with the federal version, the jokey names for these state offshoots may belie the serious impact they could have on governments and public employees—including state higher education institutions and faculty.

    To take perhaps the most glaring example, the sweeping requests from the Florida DOGE team, which is led by a former federal Department of Transportation inspector general, have alarmed scholars.

    Earlier this month, the Florida DOGE asked public college and university presidents to provide an account—by the end of last week—of “all research published by staff” over the last six years, including “Papers and drafts made available to the public or in online academic repositories for drafts, preprints, or similar materials.”

    “If not contained therein, author’s name, title, and position at the institution” must be provided, according to the letters the presidents received. The letters didn’t say what this and other requests were for.

    The Florida DOGE also requested information on all grants awarded to institutions over the last six years, asking for each institution’s policy on allocating grants “for purposes of indirect cost recovery, including procedures for calculation.” Further, it requested an account of “all filled and vacant positions held by any employee with a non-instructional role.”

    By the end of April, Florida’s public institutions must also provide the “Length of research associated” with each research publication, funding sources associated with the research and any “publications about the research” from the researcher or institution. In addition, the state DOGE is requesting funding sources for each institution’s noninstructional positions and the names of the nonstudent employees administering the grants.

    And that may not be the end of the DOGE demands. In a March 26 letter, the state DOGE team told college presidents that it will conduct site visits “to ensure full compliance” with the governor’s executive order that created it, “as well as existing Florida law.” It said it may in the future request various other information, including course descriptions, syllabi, “full detail” on campus centers and the required end of diversity, equity and inclusion activities.

    The requests so far from the Florida DOGE are the latest in a string of state actions that faculty say threaten to infringe on, or have already reduced, academic freedom. Dan Saunders, lead negotiator for the United Faculty of Florida union at Florida International University and a tenured associate professor of higher education, expressed concerns about what he called a “continuation of a chilling effect on faculty in terms of what we research and publish.”

    “The lack of any meaningful articulation as to why they’re looking for this data and what they’re going to do with it just adds to the suspicions that I think the state has earned from the faculty,” Saunders said. “It’s clear that this is part of a broader and multidimensional attack” on areas of scholarship such as women’s and gender studies—part of a “comprehensive assault” on the “independence of the university,” he said.

    “If Florida DOGE is following the patterns of the federal DOGE, then I think we can expect some radical oversimplifications of nuanced data and some cherry picking” of texts that an “unsophisticated AI will highlight,” he said. Noting how much research is published over six years, he questioned “how anyone is supposed to engage meaningfully” with that much information.

    David Simmons, president of the University of South Florida’s Faculty Senate and a tenured engineering professor, said many faculty are “reasonably” concerned that this request is part of an effort to target “certain ideas that are disfavored by certain politicians.” Simmons—who stressed that he’s not speaking on behalf of the Senate or his institution—said such targeting would be “fundamentally un-American and inconsistent with the mission of a public university.”

    “We hope that’s not happening. We hope this is just an inefficient effort to collect data,” Simmons said. He noted that much of the research information that the Florida DOGE is requesting is already publicly available on Google Scholar, an online database with profiles on faculty across the country.

    “Universities are being required to reproduce information that’s already freely available in some cases, and to do that they’re using considerable resources and manpower,” Simmons said. The initial two-week data request was “so large as to be nearly impossible” to fulfill, he added.

    A State University System of Florida spokesperson deferred comment to the DOGE team, which didn’t respond to Inside Higher Ed’s requests for an interview or provide answers to written questions Thursday. A spokesperson for the Florida Department of Education, which includes the Florida College System, deferred comment to Republican governor Ron DeSantis’s office, which responded via email but didn’t answer multiple written questions.

    “In alignment with previous announcements and correspondence with all 67 counties, 411 municipalities, and 40 academic institutions the Florida DOGE Task Force aims to eliminate wasteful spending and cut government bloat,” a DeSantis spokesperson wrote. “If waste or abuse is identified during our collaborative efforts with partnering agencies and institutions, each case will be handled accordingly.”

    ‘DOGE Before DOGE Was Cool’

    When Donald Trump returned to the White House in January and announced DOGE’s creation, he suggested it was an effort to cut the alleged waste his Democratic predecessor had allowed to fester. But DeSantis—who lost to Trump in the GOP presidential primary—launched his own DOGE in a state that he’s been leading for six years.

    “Florida was DOGE before DOGE was cool,” DeSantis posted on X Feb. 24. (His actions in higher education have, in many ways, presaged what Trump is now doing nationally.)

    So, perhaps not surprisingly, DeSantis’s executive order creating the Florida DOGE that day began by saying the state already has a “strong record of responsible fiscal management.” A list of rosy financial stats followed before DeSantis finally wrote, “Notwithstanding Florida’s history of prudent fiscal management relative to many states in the country, the State should nevertheless endeavor to explore opportunities for even better stewardship.”

    “The State of Florida should leverage cutting edge technology to identify further spending reductions and reforms in state agencies, university bureaucracies, and local governments,” DeSantis wrote, echoing, at least in language, the tech-focused approach of the federal DOGE.

    He established the DOGE team within the Executive Office of the Governor, tasking it in part to work with the statewide higher education agencies to “identify and eliminate unnecessary spending, programs, courses, staff, and any other inefficiencies,” including “identifying and returning unnecessary federal grant funding.” The executive order says state agencies must set up their own DOGE teams, which will identify grants “that are inconsistent with the policies of this State and should be returned to the American taxpayer in furtherance of the President’s DOGE efforts.”

    This executive order expires about a year from now. In an emailed statement, Teresa M. Hodge, the statewide United Faculty of Florida union president, said the request for faculty publication records “is not about transparency or accountability; it is about control.”

    “Our members should not be forced to defend their scholarship, or their silence, in a political witch hunt,” Hodge said. “We stand united in ensuring that Florida’s faculty are free to teach, conduct research, and to speak without fear of retaliation.”

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  • CCRC Loses $12M in Federal Grants

    CCRC Loses $12M in Federal Grants

    The Community College Research Center has lost access to funding from four federal grants collectively worth more than $12 million, the center’s director, Thomas Brock, said in a letter Tuesday. The cut was part of the Trump administration’s broader freeze on $400 million in federal funding at Columbia University over accusations that the institution didn’t do enough to response to antisemitism.

    But Brock argued in the letter that “the terminations did nothing to address perceived problems at Columbia, nor did they challenge ‘woke’ ideology, as our projects were nonideological to begin with.”

    CCRC is based at Teachers College, an education graduate school that became affiliated with the nearby Columbia University in 1898 but was founded independently in 1887 and remains “legally, administratively, and financially separate” from the Ivy League institution, Brock explained.

    Still, when the federal antisemitism task force announced the funding cut, Teachers College, and therefore the CCRC, were affected. All four grants that were cut came from the Institute of Education Sciences. The now-terminated grants supported: 

    • A study on whether work-study programs improve retention, degree completion and employment postgraduation.
    • An analysis of how effective Virginia’s Get a Skill, Get a Job, Get Ahead program has been in helping low-income students access short-term training programs.
    • An apprenticeship program that helps develop the next generation of state-level higher ed policy researchers.
    • A network of six research groups studying ways to reverse post-pandemic enrollment declines.

    It added to the blow CCRC had already experienced in February when the Department of Education canceled 10 contracts with Regional Educational Laboratories, which are also overseen by the IES, saying they were examples of “woke” government spending. The REL Northwest had signed a contract with CCRC to pilot a professional development program for community college faculty members.

    “It is hard to overstate the importance of IES grants and contracts to a research center like CCRC,” said Brock, who was commissioner of the National Center for Education Research at IES from 2013 to 2018.

    CCRC has appealed the decision to terminate the grants.

    “We do not know how long the process will take,” Brock wrote, “but are hopeful that fair minds will rule in our favor.”

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  • Federal Grants Website Gets DOGE’d

    Federal Grants Website Gets DOGE’d

    The Department of Government Efficiency has taken control of a federal website that universities and other organizations use to find out about—and apply for—federal grant opportunities, The Washington Post reported Friday. 

    Federal officials have historically listed on Grants.gov more than $500 billion in annual federal grant opportunities from numerous agencies, including the Defense, State and Interior Departments, that fund research on a range of topics, such as cancer, cybersecurity and wastewater management. However, an engineer from DOGE—the agency run by billionaire Donald Trump donor Elon Musk—deleted, without notice, many of those officials’ permissions to post those funding opportunities.

    Agency officials have been instructed instead to send their planned grant notices to a Department of Health and Human Services email address that DOGE is monitoring. The HHS, which has long managed Grants.gov, said it’s “taking action to ensure new grant opportunities are aligned” with the Trump administration’s priorities outlined in its Make America Healthy Again agenda, according to the Post. 

    Now DOGE is responsible for posting grant opportunities. And if it delays them or stops posting them altogether, that “could effectively shut down federal-grant making,” an anonymous federal official told the Post.

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  • Supreme Court maintains freeze on teacher training grants

    Supreme Court maintains freeze on teacher training grants

    In a 5-4 split, the U.S. Supreme Court on Friday granted the Trump administration’s emergency request to maintain a freeze on millions of dollars in federal teacher training grants.

    The administration’s emergency application, filed on March 26, asked the justices to vacate a district court judge’s order requiring the U.S. Department of Education to reinstate some of Trump’s $600 million in slashed funding. The justices granted Acting Solicitor General Sarah Harris’ call for an immediate administrative stay, which pauses the March 10 order by Judge Myong Joun of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts while the case continues.

    In an unsigned opinion, the Supreme Court majority wrote that the recipient programs wouldn’t suffer permanent damages if the funds were withheld while the case moves through the lower courts. The “respondents have not refuted the Government’s representation that it is unlikely to recover the grant funds once they are disbursed,” the opinion said.

    The opinion also suggested the lower court may not have had the authority to issue its order. 

    In a dissenting opinion, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, wrote that the notion that some grant recipients may seek to draw down funds that the Trump administration seeks to terminate was the “only hint of urgency that the Government offers to justify its unusual request for our intervention.”

    “If true, that would be unfortunate, but worse things have happened,” Jackson wrote.

    In a separate dissent, Justice Elena Kagan characterized the majority’s decision as a “mistake” that followed a “barebones briefing,” no argument and little time for reflection. Chief Justice John Roberts did not join either dissent but disagreed with the majority.

    The move is the first time the Supreme Court has considered any challenges to President Donald Trump’s efforts to significantly scale back federal education programs — and ultimately dismantle the Education Department. 

    In the administration’s March 26 emergency request, Harris said the case is an example of a broader question the Supreme Court needs to answer: “‘Does a single district-court judge who likely lacks jurisdiction have the unchecked power to compel the Government of the United States to pay out (and probably lose forever)’ millions in taxpayer dollars?”

    “Unless and until this Court addresses that question, federal district courts will continue exceeding their jurisdiction by ordering the Executive Branch to restore lawfully terminated grants across the government, keep paying for programs that the Executive Branch views as inconsistent with the interests of the United States, and send out the door taxpayer money that may never be clawed back,” Harris wrote. 

    The case in question concerns the Education Department’s February cancellation of over $600 million in what it called “divisive” federal teacher training grants funds. The canceled grants had been made under the Teacher Quality Partnership Program and the Supporting Effective Educator Development program. 

    In March, eight Democratic attorneys general sued the Trump administration to restore the awarded funds. In response, Joun granted a temporary restraining order for the department to reinstate those funds to the eight plaintiff states: California, Colorado, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York and Wisconsin.

    If the Supreme Court were to order the Trump administration to reinstate the grants to those eight states, the acting solicitor general said, the department would have to disburse up to $65 million in remaining funds.

    On March 28, the eight states urged in a 44-page filing that the Supreme Court leave Joun’s order in place. The states said the Trump administration’s “real concern” appears to involve other cases “where courts are grappling with a raft of legal disputes arising out of recent actions by the Executive Branch.”

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  • Supreme Court maintains freeze on teacher training grants

    Supreme Court maintains freeze on teacher training grants

    This audio is auto-generated. Please let us know if you have feedback.

    In a 5-4 split, the U.S. Supreme Court on Friday granted the Trump administration’s emergency request to maintain a freeze on millions of dollars in federal teacher training grants.

    The administration’s emergency application, filed on March 26, asked the justices to vacate a district court judge’s order requiring the U.S. Department of Education to reinstate some of Trump’s $600 million in slashed funding. The justices granted Acting Solicitor General Sarah Harris’ call for an immediate administrative stay, which pauses the March 10 order by Judge Myong Joun of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts while the case continues.

    In an unsigned opinion, the Supreme Court majority wrote that the recipient programs wouldn’t suffer permanent damages if the funds were withheld while the case moves through the lower courts. The “respondents have not refuted the Government’s representation that it is unlikely to recover the grant funds once they are disbursed,” the opinion said.

    The opinion also suggested the lower court may not have had the authority to issue its order. 

    In a dissenting opinion, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, wrote that the notion that some grant recipients may seek to draw down funds that the Trump administration seeks to terminate was the “only hint of urgency that the Government offers to justify its unusual request for our intervention.”

    “If true, that would be unfortunate, but worse things have happened,” Jackson wrote.

    In a separate dissent, Justice Elena Kagan characterized the majority’s decision as a “mistake” that followed a “barebones briefing,” no argument and little time for reflection. Chief Justice John Roberts did not join either dissent but disagreed with the majority.

    The move is the first time the Supreme Court has considered any challenges to President Donald Trump’s efforts to significantly scale back federal education programs — and ultimately dismantle the Education Department. 

    In the administration’s March 26 emergency request, Harris said the case is an example of a broader question the Supreme Court needs to answer: “‘Does a single district-court judge who likely lacks jurisdiction have the unchecked power to compel the Government of the United States to pay out (and probably lose forever)’ millions in taxpayer dollars?”

    “Unless and until this Court addresses that question, federal district courts will continue exceeding their jurisdiction by ordering the Executive Branch to restore lawfully terminated grants across the government, keep paying for programs that the Executive Branch views as inconsistent with the interests of the United States, and send out the door taxpayer money that may never be clawed back,” Harris wrote. 

    The case in question concerns the Education Department’s February cancellation of over $600 million in what it called “divisive” federal teacher training grants funds. The canceled grants had been made under the Teacher Quality Partnership Program and the Supporting Effective Educator Development program. 

    In March, eight Democratic attorneys general sued the Trump administration to restore the awarded funds. In response, Joun granted a temporary restraining order for the department to reinstate those funds to the eight plaintiff states: California, Colorado, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York and Wisconsin.

    If the Supreme Court were to order the Trump administration to reinstate the grants to those eight states, the acting solicitor general said, the department would have to disburse up to $65 million in remaining funds.

    On March 28, the eight states urged in a 44-page filing that the Supreme Court leave Joun’s order in place. The states said the Trump administration’s “real concern” appears to involve other cases “where courts are grappling with a raft of legal disputes arising out of recent actions by the Executive Branch.”

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  • Trump Administration to Block Brown’s Federal Grants

    Trump Administration to Block Brown’s Federal Grants

    The Trump administration plans to block $510 million in federal contracts and grants for Brown University in retaliation for the university’s alleged failure to address antisemitism on campus, The New York Times reported.

    That makes Brown the fifth university to face such consequences, after Columbia, Penn, Harvard and Princeton.

    The Daily Caller first reported the news, writing that “an administration official” said Brown’s grants “would be paused” while the government conducts a review of the university’s response to claims of antisemitism.

    Brown provost Frank Doyle sent an email to campus leaders Thursday, acknowledging “troubling rumors emerging about federal action on Brown research grants,” but noting that they had received “no information to substantiate any of these rumors,” the Times reported.

    Brown was among the 60 higher ed institutions to receive a letter last month from the Office for Civil Rights warning of “potential enforcement actions” if they failed to comply with federal antidiscrimination law.

    After Columbia became the first institution to have its grants frozen, Brown president Christina Paxson issued a statement reiterating the university’s commitment to upholding both federal law and academic freedom. She noted that if Brown were prevented from performing “essential academic and operational functions, we would be compelled to vigorously exercise our legal rights to defend these freedoms, and true to our values, we would do so with integrity and respect.”

    On Thursday night, leaders of the Brown Corporation and of Brown’s Jewish community, released a statement praising Brown’s commitment to Jewish students.

    “Brown University is home to a vibrant Jewish community that continues to flourish with the steadfast support of the administration,” it read. “Amidst broader concerns about antisemitism on college campuses, Brown stands out as an inclusive environment where Jewish life is deeply integrated into campus culture.”

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  • Researchers sue NIH over mass cuts to DEI grants

    Researchers sue NIH over mass cuts to DEI grants

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    Dive Brief:

    • Researchers, unions and others sued the National Institutes of Health on Wednesday over the agency’s purge of diversity, equity and inclusion-related research activity that has resulted in lost grant funding and career opportunities. 
    • Plaintiffs, including dozens of academic scientists, alleged that the agency’s leaders, starting in February, “upended NIH’s enviable track record of rigor and excellence, launching a reckless and illegal purge to stamp out NIH-funded research that addresses topics and populations that they disfavor.”
    • They are asking a federal court to block NIH from enforcing its anti-DEI directives both in the short term and permanently and to restore grants to researchers that the agency has cut under the Trump administration. 

    Dive Insight:

    The complaint counts at least 678 research projects that have been terminated by NIH, some of them potentially by the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency rather than NIH staff. 

    The recently cut grants amount to over $2.4 billion, the lawsuit noted. Of that, $1.3 billion was already spent on projects “stopped midstream that is now wasted,” and $1.1 billion has been revoked.

    Plaintiffs argue that grant terminations “cut across diverse topics that NIH is statutorily required to research,” many of which involve life-threatening diseases. Specifically, they argue that NIH’s actions violate the Administrative Procedures Act and constitutional limits on executive branch authority, and are unconstitutionally vague. 

    In the lawsuit, filed in U.S. district court in Massachusetts, plaintiffs detailed how their lives, careers and potentially life-saving research have been thrown into turmoil by the NIH’s attack on DEI under President Donald Trump.

    Among them is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of New Mexico’s medical school who studies alcohol’s impact on Alzheimer’s risk. The researcher, the first in her family to graduate college, sought a grant created to help promising researchers from underrepresented backgrounds transition to tenure-track faculty positions. 

    According to the lawsuit, the researcher “satisfies the eligibility criteria for the program and invested months into assembling her application,” but NIH refused to consider it “solely because the program is designed to help diversify the profession.”

    Another plaintiff, a Ph.D. candidate at a private California university, had received a high score on a research funding application for a dissertation proposal that would have studied suicide prevention among LGBTQ+ youth experiencing homelessness. 

    But the candidate learned that new restrictions on LGBTQ-related research meant the NIH would not likely fund the project. The turn of events will harm the researcher’s “ability to progress through their PhD program,” the complaint said. 

    Others include a University of Michigan social work professor whose research focuses on sexual violence in minority communities. The NIH has cut at least six grants supporting her research because the agency said it “no longer effectuates agency priorities,” according to the complaint. 

    Setting the various cuts in motion was internal NIH guidance, most of it revealed by the news media and cited in the complaint, that directed agency staff to terminate and deny DEI-related grant proposals. One memo instructed NIH officials to “completely excise all DEI activities.”

    Staff guidance included research topics for grant terminations. One document forbade three research activity topics: China, DEI and transgender issues. A later document, the complaint alleges, effectively banned research grants around vaccine hesitancy and COVID-19.

    NIH did not immediately respond to a request for comment Thursday.

    The scale of impact by both DEI cuts and other funding chaos at NIH is broad, cutting across much of the higher ed world. The United Auto Workers, one of the plaintiffs, counts tens of thousands of members who depend on NIH grants for their work and training, according to the lawsuit. It also noted 18,000 full-time graduate students who received their primary federal funding support through NIH in 2022.

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