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Dive Brief:
The Trump administration will now release the federal funding for after-school and summer programs that districts and states expected to begin accessing July 1 but had been frozen by the Office of Management and Budget, OMB confirmed on Friday.
The $1.3 billion for 21st Century Community Learning Centers was under review by OMB to ensure the funding aligned with Trump administration priorities. The weekslong delay had already caused cancellations and other disruptions to summer and school-year student services, according to educators, families, education organizations and lawmakers.
Still under OMB review is about $5.6 billion in other K-12 funds, including programs for English learners, professional development, student academic supports, migrant services and adult education. OMB did not provide a time frame for the review or release of those funds.
Dive Insight:
In an emailed statement Friday to K-12 Dive, an OMB senior administration official verified the release of the after-school and summer program money and said, “Guardrails have been put in place to ensure these funds are not used in violation of Executive Orders.” The official did not say when the funds would be released to states.
Earlier this week, OMB said its preliminary findings found the grant programs “have been grossly abused to promote a radical leftwing DEI agenda” — referring to diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives — and directly violate Trump’s executive orders.
The 21st Century grant money for after-school and summer programming, and the other withheld funds, come from the federal fiscal year 2025 budget, which was approved by Congress and then signed into law by President Donald Trump in March. States and districts typically expect to access the funding in question on July 1 for the upcoming school year.
Federal Title I funds for low-income schools and districts and money for the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act was released on July 1 as expected.
The funding hold caused widespread concern among governors, Republican and Democratic senators, parents, education organizations and others calling for the federal government to release the money. Some 24 states filed a lawsuit against Trump, the U.S. Education Department and OMB, calling the funding freeze “contrary to law, arbitrary and capricious, and unconstitutional.”
Jodi Grant, executive director of the Afterschool Alliance, said in a Friday statement that “working parents in particular are breathing an enormous sigh of relief” with the news of the release of the summer and after-school funds.
But, she added, the funding delay “caused massive chaos and harm with summer learning programs abruptly shutting down and a large number of afterschool programs canceling plans to open in the fall.”
The uncertainty caused those programs to fall behind in hiring, outreach, contracting and other work, Grant said.
Relief at the funding release also came from David Schuler, executive director of AASA, the School Superintendents Association.
However, Schuler added, “Districts should not be in this impossible position where the Administration is denying funds that had already been appropriated to our public schools, by Congress. The remaining funds must be released immediately — America’s children are counting on it.”
In a move that has sparked legal action from nearly half the country, the Trump administration has frozen more than $6 billion in education funds to 23 states and the District of Columbia. The decision, issued by the U.S. Department of Education in late June 2025, follows a broader pattern of halted federal support for state and local programs, many of which were previously protected by court rulings.
The funding pause is linked to the Trump administration’s January 2025 memorandum from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB Memo M-25-13), which directed federal agencies to withhold disbursements from thousands of grant and aid programs. The stated purpose was to align spending with the administration’s priorities, though the policy has been challenged as lacking legal authority. The memo was later rescinded, but its effects have continued through new administrative directives.
In this latest instance, the Department of Education cited a need to review Title II and Title IV programs under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), including programs for teacher development, after-school enrichment, and English language learners.
The decision disproportionately affected Democratic-led states, with California alone facing the loss of $939 million.
States impacted include Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington, Wisconsin, and the District of Columbia.
On June 30, attorneys general from those jurisdictions filed suit in Rhode Island, arguing that the Education Department lacks the authority to unilaterally withhold funds that Congress has already appropriated. They assert that the freeze violates both statutory obligations and constitutional principles, including the separation of powers. The lawsuit follows earlier court rulings from January and February in which judges issued temporary restraining orders and preliminary injunctions to stop the administration from freezing other categories of grants. Those cases were largely brought by Democracy Forward, a legal advocacy organization that has played a leading role in contesting the OMB memo.
Although the administration has defended the funding freeze as a necessary review of federal spending, courts have questioned the legality of such actions. In March, a federal court criticized the lack of statutory basis for the freezes, and Democracy Forward issued a detailed brief outlining the harm to nonprofit programs, environmental projects, and public services. That brief emphasized the breadth of affected programs and the legal overreach involved.
The broader legal battle continues. While some funding has been restored through court action, the Education Department’s freeze represents a new front in ongoing disputes between the Trump administration and state governments. Plaintiffs argue that withholding these funds sets a precedent that undermines established appropriations and legislative intent. More lawsuits are expected.
The Trump administration’s freeze on education funding to 23 states opens several legal and political paths, each with different implications depending on how courts and federal agencies proceed. Below are the most likely possibilities based on current legal precedent, federal authority, and political conditions:
Courts Overturn the Freeze, Funding Restored
The most immediate and probable outcome is that courts will order the Education Department to restore the frozen funds, as they did earlier this year with other parts of the federal grant freeze. Courts have already found that the administration lacked statutory authority to suspend programs that Congress explicitly funded. If this logic holds, the education freeze will likely be ruled unlawful and states will receive the funds—possibly with retroactive reimbursement for missed payments.
Partial Restoration, Continued Legal Conflict
The administration may attempt to restore only some of the funding—especially those programs that have garnered the most public or bipartisan support—while continuing to block others. In this scenario, the courts could issue narrow rulings or temporary injunctions that apply to specific funding streams. This would prolong litigation and administrative uncertainty, potentially pushing the issue into 2026 or the next presidential term.
Supreme Court Intervention
If the lower courts issue conflicting rulings or the Trump administration loses significant cases, the Justice Department may seek Supreme Court review. The Court could use this as an opportunity to clarify executive authority over grant disbursement. Depending on the composition of the Court and its interpretation of separation of powers, this could either curtail future executive control over federal spending—or affirm broader authority to “review” or condition funding.
Legislative Response
Congress, particularly if Democrats control at least one chamber in 2025-2026, could pass legislation to prohibit similar funding freezes in the future or require automatic disbursement of appropriated funds. However, any such legislation would likely face veto threats or require a veto-proof majority, making this a longer-term fix rather than a short-term remedy.
Further Administrative Retaliation or Expansion
If courts delay action or issue narrow rulings, the Trump administration could expand the use of funding freezes to other agencies or sectors, testing the limits of executive control. The precedent set by OMB Memo M-25-13 could be repurposed in other contexts—such as public health, housing, or infrastructure—creating broader instability in federal-state relations.
Political Mobilization and Fallout
States may respond by increasing pressure on Congress and federal courts while using the issue as a rallying point in the 2026 midterm elections. Public schools, educators, and parents may amplify the issue if it leads to job losses, school closures, or reduced services. The freeze could become a political liability for the Trump administration, especially in battleground states that rely heavily on federal education support.
In sum, the most likely near-term result is court-mandated restoration of the withheld funds. But depending on how aggressively the administration continues to test the boundaries of federal authority, the dispute could escalate into a broader constitutional and political conflict over the power to allocate and control federal funds.
Sources
Democracy Forward, “Initial Policy Memo on Federal Grant Freezes,” March 12, 2025.
CBS News, “Democratic states sue Trump administration over halted education funds,” July 1, 2025.
Reuters, “Trump asks US court to end judicial overreach, allow funding freezes,” February 11, 2025.
Wikipedia, “2025 United States federal government grant pause.”
The Daily Beast, “GOP Lawmakers Blast Trump Chief Russell Vought for Freezing Education Money,” July 2025.
The Guardian, “Nothing like this in American history: the crisis of Trump’s assault on the rule of law,” March 9, 2025.
U.S. Senator Patty Murray U.S. Senator Patty Murray (D-WA) has blocked the fast-track consideration of Mary Christina Riley, President Trump’s nominee to serve as Assistant Secretary for Legislation and Congressional Affairs at the Department of Education, as the administration continues to withhold nearly $7 billion in funding for K-12 schools and adult education programs nationwide.
The move by Murray, Vice Chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, forces Riley’s nomination to undergo full committee review rather than skipping directly to Senate floor consideration. The action comes just weeks before the new school year begins, with school districts across the country scrambling to address massive budget shortfalls created by the Trump administration’s funding freeze.
“As schools nationwide scramble to figure out how many teachers they need to lay off and afterschool programs warn parents to make back up plans—all because President Trump is blocking over $6 billion in education funding he himself signed into law—there is no reason for any Department of Education nominee to skip committee consideration and get fast-tracked for confirmation,” Murray said in a statement.
The senator’s parliamentary maneuver reflects growing Democratic frustration with the Trump administration’s decision to withhold funding that was previously approved by Congress. The administration notified states on July 1—the traditional deadline for fund distribution—that it was placing the money under review “given the change in Administrations.”
The funding freeze affects six critical federal education programs that support teacher professional development, English language learning, after-school programs, and services for migrant children. The largest portion consists of $2.2 billion for Supporting Effective Instruction State Grants, which fund professional development and activities to improve teacher effectiveness.
Twenty-four states and the District of Columbia have already filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration over the frozen funds, with California Attorney General Rob Bonta calling the move one with “no rhyme or reason” that came “abruptly” just weeks before the school year begins.
The consequences are being felt immediately across the education landscape. The Afterschool Alliance warned that without the funds, “we will quickly see more children and youth unsupervised and at risk, more academic failures, more hungry kids, more chronic absenteeism, higher dropout rates, more parents forced out of their jobs, and a less STEM-ready and successful workforce.”
The Trump administration’s Office of Management and Budget, led by Russell Vought, has suggested the funding freeze is part of an investigation into whether money has been used for what it calls a “radical leftwing agenda,” including scholarships for undocumented students or teachings on LGBTQ topics.
Murray rejected these justifications, arguing that the administration has provided no clear explanation for the delay and no timeline for when funding might be released. Even some Republican senators have criticized the move, with Senator Susan Collins (R-Maine) telling Education Week she “strongly oppose[s] the administration’s decision to pause the delivery of education formula grant funding.”
The funding freeze represents part of a broader Trump administration effort to reshape federal education policy. The administration’s proposed fiscal year 2026 budget would eliminate all six of the grant programs currently under review, as part of a 23 percent cut to domestic spending.
Murray, a former teacher and longtime education advocate, has been a vocal critic of the administration’s education policies. She has previously blasted Trump’s plans to dismantle the Department of Education, calling the idea “terrible” and arguing that “Trump and Musk don’t know what it’s like to count on their local public school having the resources to get their kids the education they deserve.”
The affected programs serve some of the nation’s most vulnerable student populations, including:
Supporting Effective Instruction State Grants (Title II-A) for teacher professional development
21st Century Community Learning Centers (Title IV-B) for after-school programs
Student Support and Academic Enrichment Grants (Title IV-A) for STEM education and school mental health
English Language Acquisition (Title III-A) for English language learners
Migrant Education (Title I-C) for children of migrant workers
Adult Basic and Literacy Education State Grants for adult education programs.
President Donald Trump’s return to office introduced myriad new fiscal ordeals for colleges, along with legal and political tribulations.
Already the administration has terminated or slowed countless research grants both universally and in targeted attacks on disfavored institutions. With the passage and signing of Republicans’ massive budget bill, taxes will rise for some of the larger college endowments while the student aid system will undergo a revamp that includes an end to Grad PLUS loans and introduction of various borrowing limits, all of which could weigh on revenues.
Moreover, Trump’s aggressive stance on immigration and international students could hamper college demand and revenue, as Moody’s analysts recently noted.
As colleges try to adapt, reimagine their operations or just survive, many are shrinking their budgets, including by laying off faculty and staff. In effect, Trump has introduced a new era of austerity for higher ed, while the pain of inflation and enrollment pressure never went away.
Here’s a look at how some are girding for an uncertain fiscal future in Trump’s second term:
The first Nobel Prize–winning scientist to join a White House cabinet, Steven Chu made history when he became Barack Obama’s energy secretary in 2009. But his move to Washington cost him an incredible $300 million.
“I joined the Nvidia board in 2004, before the company took off, but I had to sell my shares in 2009 when I joined government,” Chu said about his early involvement in the microchip firm that recently became the world’s most valuable company with a $4 trillion capitalization.
“At the time Nvidia was a small graphics company, but there were rules about conflict of interest so I had to sell,” he told Times Higher Education. With Nvidia’s stock rising 22,000 percent in the past decade alone, Chu’s stake would be worth $300 million, he said.
Nvidia’s astonishing rise has amazed the stock market in recent years, but Chu, who won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1997, felt the company had huge promise when he joined.
“When Jenson Huang [Nvidia’s founder] told me about developing this high-level chip, I said, ‘If you do that, this computer will be at the heart of every supercomputer in the world.’ And he did it,” recalled Chu.
Sanguine about his lost wealth, Chu’s main takeaway from Nvidia is not his own misfortune. Instead, he worries that this American success story—co-created by a Taiwanese-born Stanford graduate, employing foreign-born engineering talent—might not have been able to happen today given the double whammy faced by U.S. academia: massive cuts to federal science budgets and an immigration crackdown deterring many students, particularly from China, from applying to U.S. institutions.
“Trump wants to cut science budgets by half or more and reduce the number of foreign postdocs—particularly from China,” explained Chu, speaking earlier this month at the annual Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting in southern Germany.
“That’s a problem because if you go to any major research university, you’ll find about a third of researchers are East Asian.”
Chu’s own parents—born and educated in China before moving to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the 1940s—are a good example of how this brain gain has worked in America’s favor. “When the Communists took over, they couldn’t go back, but this is how America got many of its best scientists and engineers—as refugees from Germany, Italy and China.”
“That’s true for business, too—many of America’s captains of industry, from Jenson Huang to [ex-Intel boss] Andy Grove and Alexander Graham Bell, were immigrants,” he said.
Reflecting on how America “didn’t become a scientific superpower until World War II,” Chu said he believes the 1930s are instructive in other ways. “In this era America took what was innovative and applied it to industry. That allowed places like Ford to take what Volkswagen and Peugeot was doing but do it cheaper, but good enough to work,” he said.
“That is what China is doing to America now—for instance, taking the electric car and making it cheaper and now better. What we did to Europe, China and now Korea are doing to us,” he said.
Traditionally, the U.S. has been able to stay ahead thanks to its education system, in particular its generously funded world-leading research universities. With that system under attack, however, that advantage is weaker, he said. “Something magical happens at Ph.D. level in U.S. universities—we teach creativity. China is trying to learn this … and then apply it to their industrial sector. When they do, they will blow us away.”
Without America’s outstanding universities and with its foreign talent pool diminished, China’s path to global dominance will be immeasurably easier, predicted Chu. “Trump is perfectly willing to destroy institutions that any country in the world would give its eyeteeth for,” he said.
Unusually for a Nobel laureate, Chu’s prize did not mark the peak of his scientific achievements. He led a committee that recommended the creation of ARPA-E, a science agency that has funded more than $4 billion in battery, nanotech and other types of energy research since 2009, generating spin-out companies worth more than $22 billion.
Meanwhile, his time as energy secretary saw further investment, including the funding of an experimental $1 billion carbon-capture plant in Louisiana—a stark contrast to the “drill, baby, drill” priorities of the current administration. Obama also credited his expertise as a major reason why the cleanup after the Deepwater Horizon disaster in 2010—the biggest oil spill in history—was successful.
And there are his brushes with some of the 21st century’s biggest tech companies, even if Nvidia wasn’t the only big fish he missed out on. “I knew [financier] Richard Blum, who said he could get me on the board of Apple— I didn’t say yes because I had a lot of nonprofit activities, but that was 2006, the year before the iPhone was launched,” he reflected.
Not that he thinks the money would have made much difference. “If I was worth a couple of hundred million dollars, would I have stopped doing science and just bought sports cars and houses? I hope not.”
Despite a strong desire from the public to get to the bottom of the Jeffrey Epstein case, which saw the trafficking and sexual exploitation of thousands of young girls, the cabal associated with Epstein continues its conspiracy to suppress the ugly truth of the ruling class.
A conservative think tank called on President Trump Tuesday to “draft a new contract” that universities must follow or face “revocation of all public benefit.” Among other things, institutions would have to end “their direct participation in social and political activism,” abolish “DEI bureaucracies,” and publish “complete data on race, admissions, and class rank,” according to the statement put out by the Manhattan Institute.
“The Manhattan Statement on Higher Education” also says universities must deliver “swift and significant penalties, including suspension and expulsion, for anyone who would disrupt speakers, vandalize property, occupy buildings, call for violence, or interrupt the operations of the university.”
“Beginning with the George Floyd riots and culminating in the celebration of the Hamas terror campaign, the institutions of higher education finally ripped off the mask and revealed their animating spirit: racialism, ideology, chaos,” the statement says.
“The universities have contributed to a new kind of tyranny, with publicly funded initiatives designed to advance the cause of digital censorship, public health lockdowns, child sex-trait modification, race-based redistribution, and other infringements on America’s long-standing rights,” it says.
Among the 44 signatories are:
Christopher Rufo, an anti-DEI activist, member of the New College of Florida Board of Trustees and Manhattan Institute senior fellow;
Virginia Foxx, a Republican U.S. representative from North Carolina who chaired the House Education and the Workforce Committee;
Jordan Peterson, a University of Toronto professor emeritus and Daily Wire contributor;
Ben Shapiro, a podcaster and Daily Wire co-founder;
Scott Yenor, a Claremont Institute fellow and Boise State University professor who resigned from the University of West Florida Board of Trustees after implying only straight white men should be in political leadership;
Peter Wood, president of the National Association of Scholars; and
Mark Bauerlein, an Emory University professor emeritus and member of the New College of Florida Board of Trustees.
In an email to Inside Higher Ed, Rufo wrote, “The American people have reached a decision point: to continue subsidizing the corruption of the universities, or to demand sensible, popular, and targeted reforms.”
In a post on X Tuesday, Education Secretary Linda McMahon congratulated Rufo and the Manhattan Institute for “envisioning a compelling roadmap to restore integrity and rigor to the American academy!” But Education Department spokespeople didn’t specifically say whether the federal government would take action on the proposed contract.
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The Trump administration is tapping agencies other than the U.S. Department of Education to implement its agenda in colleges and K-12 schools, sometimes circumventing typical rulemaking procedures that would allow districts months to give feedback on and prepare for policy changes before they roll out.
The use of other agencies to set or enforce education policy marks a significant shift from typical K-12 policymaking, some education policy experts say.
“This is a paradigm shift on the part of how the federal government articulates and connects some of these tools to their education priorities,” said Kenneth Wong, a professor of education policy at Brown University. “So I think going forward, we might be seeing broader use of this wider range of policy tools in the area of education policy changes.”
This month, for example, a policy change from the U.S. Department of Energy could take effect that would undo some students’ protections related to sex discrimination under Title IX, disability discrimination under Section 504 and racial discrimination under Title VI.
The changes would only apply to colleges receiving Energy Department funds, as opposed to public institutions nationwide — which would have been the case had the rules come from the Education Department. The Energy Department provides over $2.5 billion in research funding to more than 300 colleges annually. The agency also distributed just over $160 million to 28 schools in fiscal year 2025, according to department spokesperson Ben Dietderich.
As a result of the quietly proposed policy changes, colleges receiving Energy Department grants would no longer, among other things:
Be required to facilitate noncontact sports team tryouts for women if there is no equivalent women’s team. For example, if a college had a men’s baseball team but no women’s softball team, women would no longer be guaranteed the opportunity to try out for a spot on the men’s baseball team.
Be permitted to proactively “overcome the effects of conditions that resulted in limited participation therein by persons of a particular sex.” This would remove protections that allow schools to have gender-conscious after-school or college programs to provide women and girls opportunities they have historically been denied, such as in STEM fields and technical training, according to Shiwali Patel, senior director of Safe and Inclusive Schools at National Women’s Law Center and a Title IX attorney.
Be required to prevent systemic racial discrimination that may result from seemingly neutral policies, as a result of the department rescinding guardrails protecting against policies that cause a “disparate impact” on underserved students. Disparate impact investigations have previously addressed issues such as Black students being disciplined at higher rates than students of other races.
The agency issued the policy changes through a process called direct final rulemaking, which allows it to issue a rule without going through the rulemaking process twice to incorporate changes based on public feedback and publish a final version. The expedited process is usually used for noncontroversial changes and when an agency does not expect significant pushback.
The rules are to take effect July 15 as long as no “significant adverse comments” were received by June 16. Dietderich did not respond as to whether the agency received significant adverse comments.
However, a review of some publicly available comments show that the direct final rules — posted May 16 — have been controversial, with multiple civil rights organizations explicitly telling the Energy Department they are submitting “significant, adverse” comments for its review.
Other agencies launch civil rights investigations and enforcement
The Energy Department situation isn’t the first time the Trump administration has deployed agencies other than the Education Department to set or enforce education policy. In fact, the administration has used the departments of Justice, Agriculture, and Health and Human Services over the past few months to investigate sex and race discrimination at schools and enforce compliance.
The administration notably used these agencies in an unprecedented investigation into the Maine Department of Education, spurred by a public disagreement between President Donald Trump and Maine Gov. Janet Mills, a Democrat, over the state’s athletic policy allowing transgender athletes on women’s and girls’ sports teams.
That dispute kicked off a string of Title IX investigations by several federal agencies that provide funds to Maine.
They included a four-day probe launched by HHS. And because HHS rather than the Education Department conducted the probe, it didn’t have to follow the standards spelled out in the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights case processing manual. That manual ensures the Education Department conducts investigations according to certain timelines, for example, allowing up to 90 calendar days for negotiations to take place and 10 days for schools or states to sign onto a resolution agreement.
In addition, the U.S. Department of Agriculture froze funds to some of the state’s schools over the Maine Department of Education’s alleged Title IX violations.
“USDA, alongside other federal agencies, will continue to pause and, where appropriate, terminate categories of education programming in Maine if these Title IX violations are not resolved to the satisfaction of the Federal Government,” said an April 2 letter from Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins to Mills.
A court order eventually overturned the USDA funding freeze as part of an agreement struck in May between Maine and the USDA.
These Title IX enforcement actions through HHS, USDA and the Education Department culminated in the Trump administration referring the cases to the Department of Justice, which announced a civil lawsuit against Maine over Title IX compliance in April.
Since then, the administration has used these agencies to initiate and enforce other investigations into schools and states — including over antisemitism under Title VI — in states like California and Minnesota.
Sonja Trainor, executive director of the National School Attorneys Association, acknowledged that federal agencies have been setting and enforcing education policy outside of formal legal channels for many years.
But “what’s different now is the speed with which policy priorities are materializing into funding terminations and direct enforcement,” Trainor said in an email. “Of particular concern, of course, is funding and the prospect of being sued from many possible angles when policy shifts quickly.”
Wong said the Energy Department policy changes potentially taking effect could serve as a test case, as the Maine case did for civil rights investigations.
That means if the Energy Department’s changes went uncontested by districts concerning significant adverse effects, and thus go through in about 60 days as is usual for direct final rules, other agencies will also try setting education policy this way, Wong said.
“Basically every single school, in practically every single school district, has some grants from one of the many agencies in the federal government,” said Wong.
So while the immediate impact of the Energy Department changes would be limited to those that receive its funding, ultimately many more schools could be affected.
Policies related to diversity, equity and inclusion and Title IX are particularly susceptible here, said Wong. “I think there’s a whole bunch of standards that the current secretary of education is redefining, and so these other agencies are likely to provide a vehicle to kind of challenge the practice in the local school systems.”
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The Trump administration is tapping agencies other than the U.S. Department of Education to implement its agenda in schools, sometimes circumventing typical rulemaking procedures that would allow districts months to give feedback on and prepare for policy changes before they roll out.
The use of other agencies to set or enforce education policy marks a significant shift from typical K-12 policymaking, some education policy experts say.
“This is a paradigm shift on the part of how the federal government articulates and connects some of these tools to their education priorities,” said Kenneth Wong, a professor of education policy at Brown University. “So I think going forward, we might be seeing broader use of this wider range of policy tools in the area of education policy changes.”
This month, for example, a policy change from the U.S. Department of Energy could take effect that would undo some students’ protections related to sex discrimination under Title IX, disability discrimination under Section 504 and racial discrimination under Title VI.
The changes would only apply to schools receiving Energy Department funds, as opposed to public schools nationwide — which would have been the case had the rules come from the Education Department. The Energy Department distributed just over $160 million to 28 schools in fiscal year 2025, according to department spokesperson Ben Dietderich. The agency also provides over $2.5 billion annually to more than 300 colleges and universities to fund research.
As a result of the quietly proposed policy changes schools receiving Energy Department grants would no longer, among other things:
Be required to facilitate noncontact sports team tryouts for girls if there is no equivalent girls’ team. For example, if a school had a boys’ baseball team but no girls’ softball team, girls would no longer be guaranteed the opportunity to try out for a spot on the boys’ baseball team.
Be permitted to proactively “overcome the effects of conditions that resulted in limited participation therein by persons of a particular sex.” This would remove protections that allow schools to have gender-conscious after-school or college programs to provide women and girls opportunities they have historically been denied, such as in STEM fields and technical training, according to Shiwali Patel, senior director of Safe and Inclusive Schools at National Women’s Law Center and a Title IX attorney.
Be required to prevent systemic racial discrimination that may result from seemingly neutral policies, as a result of the department rescinding guardrails protecting against policies that cause a “disparate impact” on underserved students. Disparate impact investigations have previously addressed issues such as Black students being disciplined at higher rates than students of other races.
The policy changes were issued through a process called direct final rulemaking, which allows an agency to issue a rule without going through the rulemaking process twice to incorporate changes based on public feedback and publish a final version. The expedited process is usually used for noncontroversial changes and when an agency does not expect significant pushback.
The rules are to take effect July 15 as long as no “significant adverse comments” were received by June 16. Dietderich did not respond as to whether the agency received significant adverse comments.
However, a review of some publicly available comments show that the direct final rules — posted May 16 — have been controversial, with multiple civil rights organizations explicitly telling the Energy Department they are submitting “significant, adverse” comments for its review.
Other agencies launch civil rights investigations and enforcement
The Energy Department situation isn’t the first time the Trump administration has deployed agencies beyond the Education Department to set or enforce education policy. In fact, the administration has used the departments of Justice, Agriculture, and Health and Human Services over the past few months to investigate sex and race discrimination at schools and enforce compliance.
The administration notably used these agencies in an unprecedented investigation into the Maine Department of Education, spurred by a public disagreement between President Donald Trump and Maine Gov. Janet Mills, a Democrat, over the state’s athletic policy allowing transgender athletes on girls’ and women’s sports teams.
That dispute kicked off a string of Title IX investigations by several federal agencies that provide funds to Maine.
They included a four-day probe launched by HHS. And because HHS rather than the Education Department conducted the probe, it didn’t have to follow the standards spelled out in the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights case processing manual. That manual ensures the Education Department conducts investigations according to certain timelines, for example, allowing up to 90 calendar days for negotiations to take place and 10 days for schools or states to sign onto a resolution agreement.
In addition, the U.S. Department of Agriculture froze funds to some of the state’s schools over the Maine Department of Education’s alleged Title IX violations.
“USDA, alongside other federal agencies, will continue to pause and, where appropriate, terminate categories of education programming in Maine if these Title IX violations are not resolved to the satisfaction of the Federal Government,” said an April 2 letter from Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins to Mills.
A court order eventually overturned the USDA funding freeze as part of an agreement struck in May between Maine and the USDA.
These Title IX enforcement actions through HHS, USDA and the Education Department culminated in the Trump administration referring the cases to the Department of Justice, which announced a civil lawsuit against Maine over Title IX compliance in April.
Since then, the administration has used these agencies to initiate and enforce other investigations into schools and states — including over antisemitism under Title VI, — in states like California and Minnesota.
Sonja Trainor, executive director of the National School Attorneys Association, acknowledged that federal agencies have been setting and enforcing education policy outside of formal legal channels for many years.
But “what’s different now is the speed with which policy priorities are materializing into funding terminations and direct enforcement,” Trainor said in an email. “Of particular concern, of course, is funding and the prospect of being sued from many possible angles when policy shifts quickly.”
Wong said the Energy Department policy changes potentially taking effect next week could serve as a test case, as the Maine case did for civil rights investigations.
That means if the Energy Department’s changes went uncontested by districts concerning significant adverse effects, and thus go through in about 60 days as is usual for direct final rules, other agencies will also try setting education policy this way, Wong said.
“Basically every single school, in practically every single school district, has some grants from one of the many agencies in the federal government,” said Wong.
So while the immediate impact of the Energy Department changes would be limited to those that receive its funding, ultimately many more schools could be affected.
Policies related to diversity, equity and inclusion and Title IX are particularly susceptible here, said Wong. “I think there’s a whole bunch of standards that the current secretary of education is redefining, and so these other agencies are likely to provide a vehicle to kind of challenge the practice in the local school systems.”‘
When a white teacher at Decatur High School used the n-word in class in 2022, students walked out and marched in protest. But Reyes Le wanted to do more.
Until he graduated from the Atlanta-area school this year, he co-led its equity team. He organized walking tours devoted to Decatur’s history as a thriving community of freed slaves after the Civil War. Stops included a statue of civil rights leader John Lewis, which replaced a Confederate monument, and a historical marker recognizing the site where Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. was jailed for driving with an out-of-state license.
Reyes Le, a Decatur High graduate, sits at the base of Celebration, a sculpture in the town’s central square that honors the city’s first Black commissioner and mayor. (Linda Jacobson/The 74)
But Le feared his efforts would collapse in the face of the Trump administration’s crackdown on diversity, equity and inclusion. An existing state law against “divisive concepts” meant students already had to get parent permission to go on the tour. Then the district threw out two non-discrimination policies April 15.
“I felt that the work we were doing wouldn’t be approved going into the future,” Le said.
Decatur got snared by the U.S. Department of Education’s threat to pull millions of dollars in federal funding from states and districts that employed DEI policies. In response, several organizations sued the department, calling its guidance vague and in violation of constitutional provisions that favor local control. Within weeks, three federal judges, including one Trump appointee, blocked Education Secretary Linda McMahon from enforcing the directives, and Decatur promptly reinstated its policies.
The reversal offers a glimpse into the courts’ role in thwarting — or at least slowing down — the Trump education juggernaut. States, districts, unions, civil rights groups and parents sued McMahon, and multiple courts agreed the department skirted the law in slashing funding and staff. But some observers say the administration is playing a long game and may view such losses as temporary setbacks.
“The administration’s plan is to push on multiple fronts to test the boundaries of what they can get away with,” said Jeffrey Henig, a professor emeritus of political science and education at Teachers College, Columbia University. “Cut personnel, but if needed, add them back later. What’s gained? Possible intimidation of ‘deep state’ employees and a chance to hire people that will be ‘a better fit.’ ”
A recent example of boundary testing: The administration withheld nearly $7 billion for education the president already approved in March.
But the move is practically lifted from the pages of Project 2025, the right-wing blueprint for Trump’s second term. In that document, Russ Vought, now Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, argues that presidents must “handcuff the bureaucracy” and that the Constitution never intended for the White House to spend everything Congress appropriated.
The administration blames Democrats for playing the courts. White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller accused “radical rogue judges” of getting in the president’s way.
The end result is often administrative chaos, leaving many districts unable to make routine purchases and displaced staff unsure whether to move on with their lives.
While the outcome in the lower courts has been mixed, the Supreme Court — which has looked favorably on much of Trump’s agenda — is expected any day to weigh in on the president’s biggest prize: whether McMahon can permanently cut half the department’s staff.
In that case, 21 Democratic attorneys general and a Massachusetts school district sued to prevent the administration from taking a giant step toward eliminating the department.
“Everything about defunding and dismantling by the administration is in judicial limbo,” said Neal McCluskey, director of the libertarian Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Freedom. As a supporter of eliminating the department, he lamented the slow pace of change. “If the Supreme Court allows mass layoffs, though, I would expect more energy to return to shrinking the department.”
The odds of that increased last week when the court ruled that mass firings at other agencies could remain in effect as the parties argue the case in the lower courts.
While the lawsuits over the Education Department are separate, Johnathan Smith, chief of staff and general counsel at the National Center for Youth Law, said the ruling is “clearly not a good sign.” His case, filed in May, focuses on cuts specifically to the department’s Office for Civil Rights, but the argument is essentially the same: The administration overstepped its authority when it gutted the department without congressional approval.
Solicitor General John Sauer, in his brief to the Supreme Court, said the states had no grounds to sue and called any fears the department couldn’t make do with a smaller staff merely “speculative.”
Education Secretary Linda McMahon defended her cuts to programs and staff before a House education committee June 4. (Sha Hanting/China News Service/VCG via Getty Images)
Even if the Supreme Court rules in McMahon’s favor, its opinion won’t affect previous rulings and other lawsuits in progress against the department.
Here’s where some of those key legal battles stand:
COVID relief funds
McMahon stunned states in late March when she said they would no longer receive more than $2 billion in reimbursements for COVID-related expenses. States would have to make a fresh case for how their costs related to the pandemic, even though the department had already approved extensions for construction projects, summer learning and tutoring.
On June 3, a federal judge in Maryland blocked McMahon from pulling the funds.
Despite the judicial order, not all states have been paid.
The Maryland Department of Education still had more than $400 million to spend. Cherie Duvall-Jones, a spokeswoman, said the agency hasn’t received any reimbursements even though it provided the “necessary documentation and information” federal officials requested.
The cancellation forced Baltimore City schools to dip into a reserve account to avoid disrupting tutoring and summer school programs.
Madison Biedermann, a spokeswoman for the department, declined to comment on why it had yet to pay Maryland or how much the department has distributed to other states since June.
Mass firings
In the administration’s push to wind down the department, McMahon admits she still needs staff to complete what she calls her “final mission.” On May 21, she told a House appropriations subcommittee that she had rehired 74 people. Biedermann wouldn’t say whether that figure has grown, and referred a reporter to the hearing video.
“You hope that you’re just cutting fat,” McMahon testified. “Sometimes you cut a little in the muscle.”
The next day, a federal district court ordered her to also reinstate the more than 1,300 employees she fired in March, about half of the department’s workforce. Updating the court on progress, Chief of Staff Rachel Oglesby said in a July 8 filing that she’s still reviewing survey responses from laid off staffers and figuring out where they would work if they return.
Student protestors participate in the “Hands Off Our Schools” rally in front of the U.S. Department of Education on April 4 in Washington, D.C. (Getty Images)
But some call the department’s efforts to bring back employees lackluster, perhaps because it’s pinning its hopes on a victory before the Supreme Court.
“This is a court that’s been fairly aggressive in overturning lower court decisions,” said Smith, with the National Center for Youth Law.
His group’s lawsuit is one of two challenging cuts to the Office for Civil Rights, which lost nearly 250 staffers and seven regional offices. They argue the cuts have left the department unable to thoroughly investigate complaints. Of the 5,164 civil rights complaints since March, OCR has dismissed 3,625, Oglesby reported.
In a case brought by the Victim Rights Law Center, a Massachusetts-based advocacy organization, a federal district court judge ordered McMahon to reinstate OCR employees.
Even if the case is not reversed on appeal, there’s another potential problem: Not all former staffers are eager to return.
“I have applied for other jobs, but I’d prefer to have certainty about my employment with OCR before making a transition,” said Andy Artz, who was a supervising attorney in OCR’s New York City office until the layoffs. “I feel committed to the mission of the agency and I’d like to be part of maintaining it if reinstated.”
DEI
An aspect of that mission, nurtured under the Biden administration, was to discourage discipline policies that result in higher suspension and expulsion rates for minority students. A 2023 memo warned that discrimination in discipline could have “devastating long-term consequences on students and their future opportunities.”
But according to the department’s Feb. 14 guidance, efforts to reduce those gaps or raise achievement among Black and Hispanic students could fall under its definition of “impermissible” DEI practices. Officials demanded that states sign a form certifying compliance with their interpretation of the law. On April 24, three federal courts ruled that for now, the department can’t pull funding from states that didn’t sign. The department also had to temporarily shut down a website designed to gather public complaints about DEI practices.
The cases, which McMahon has asked the courts to dismiss, will continue through the summer. In court records, the administration’s lawyers say the groups’ arguments are weak and that districts like Decatur simply overreacted. In an example cited in a complaint brought by the NAACP, the Waterloo Community School District in Iowa responded to the federal guidance by pulling out of a statewide “read-In” for Black History Month. About 3,500 first graders were expected to participate in the virtual event featuring Black authors and illustrators.
The department said the move reflected a misunderstanding of the guidance. “Withdrawing all its students from the read-In event appears to have been a drastic overreaction by the school district and disconnected from a plain reading of the … documents,” the department said.
Desegregation
The administration’s DEI crackdown has left many schools confused about how to teach seminal issues of American history such as the Civil Rights era.
It was the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that established “desegregation centers” across the country to help districts implement court-ordered integration.
In 2022, the Biden administration awarded $33 million in grants to what are now called equity assistance centers. But Trump’s department views such work as inseparable from DEI. When it cancelled funding to the centers, it described them as “woke” and “divisive.”
Judge Paul Friedman of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, a Clinton appointee, disagreed. He blocked McMahon from pulling roughly $4 million from the Southern Education Foundation, which houses Equity Assistance Center-South and helped finance Brown v. Board of Education over 70 years ago. His order referenced President Dwight Eisenhower and southern judges who took the ruling seriously.
“They could hardly have imagined that some future presidential administration would hinder efforts by organizations like SEF — based on some misguided understanding of ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ — to fulfill Brown’s constitutional promise to students across the country to eradicate the practice of racial segregation.”
He said the center is likely to win its argument that canceling the grant was “arbitrary and capricious.”
Raymond Pierce, Southern Education Foundation president and CEO, said when he applied for the grant to run one of the centers, he emphasized its historical significance.
“My family is from Mississippi, so I remember seeing a ‘colored’ entrance sign on the back of the building as we pulled into my mother’s hometown for the holidays,” Pierce said.
Trump’s Justice Department aims to dismiss many of the remaining 130 desegregation orders across the South. Harmeet Dhillon, assistant attorney general for civil rights, has said the orders force districts to spend money on monitoring and data collection and that it’s time to “let people off the hook” for past discrimination.
But Eshé Collins, director of Equity Assistance Center-South, said the centers are vital because their services are free to districts.
“Some of these cases haven’t had any movement,” she said. “Districts are like ‘Well, we can’t afford to do this work.’ That’s why the equity assistance center is so key.”
Eshé Collins, director of Equity Assistance Center-South and a member of the Atlanta City Council, read to students during a visit to a local school. (Courtesy of Eshé Collins)
Her center, for example, works with the Fayette County schools in Tennessee to recruit more Black teachers and ensure minority students get an equal chance to enroll in advanced classes. The system is still under a desegregation order from 1965, but is on track to meet the terms set by the court next year, Collins said. A week after Friedman issued the injunction in the foundation’s case, Ruth Ryder, the department’s deputy assistant secretary for policy and programs, told Collins she could once again access funds and her work resumed.
Research
As they entered the Department of Education in early February, one of the first moves made by staffers of the Department of Government Efficiency was to terminate nearly $900 million in research contracts awarded through the Institute for Education Sciences. Three lawsuits say the cuts seriously hinder efforts to conduct high-quality research on schools and students.
Kevin Gee from the University of California, Davis, was among those hit. He was in the middle of producing a practice guide for the nation on chronic absenteeism, which continues to exceed pre-pandemic levels in all states. In a recent report, the American Enterprise Institute’s Nat Malkus said the pandemic “took this crisis to unprecedented levels” that “warrant urgent and sustained attention.” Last year’s rate stood at nearly 24% nationally — still well above the 15% before the pandemic.
Gee was eager to fully grasp the impact of the pandemic on K-3 students. Even though young children didn’t experience school closures, many missed out on preschool and have shown delays in social and academic skills.
Westat, the contractor for the project, employed 350 staffers to collect data from more than 860 schools and conduct interviews with children about their experiences. But DOGE halted the data collection midstream — after the department had already invested about $44 million of a $100 million contract.
Kevin Gee, an education researcher at the University of California, Davis, had to stop his research work when the Trump administration cancelled grants. (Courtesy of Kevin Gee)
“The data would’ve helped us understand, for the first time, the educational well-being of our nation’s earliest learners on a nationwide scale in the aftermath of the pandemic,” he said.
The department has no plans to resurrect the project, according to a June court filing. But there are other signs it is walking back some of DOGE’s original cuts. For example, it intends to reissue contracts for regional education labs, which work with districts and states on school improvement.
“It feels like the legal pressure has succeeded, in the sense that the Department of Education is starting up some of this stuff again,” said Cara Jackson, a past president of the Association for Education Finance and Policy, which filed one of the lawsuits. “I think … there’s somebody at the department who is going through the legislation and saying, ‘Oh, we actually do need to do this.’ ”
Mental health grants
Amid the legal machinations, even some Republicans are losing patience with McMahon’s moves to freeze spending Congress already appropriated.
In April, she terminated $1 billion in mental health grants approved as part of a 2022 law that followed the mass school shooting in Uvalde, Texas. The department told grantees, without elaboration, that the funding no longer aligns with the administration’s policy of “prioritizing merit, fairness and excellence in education” and undermines “the students these programs are intended to help.”
The secretary told Oregon Democratic Sen. Jeff Merkley in June that she would “rebid” the grants, but some schools don’t want to wait. Silver Consolidated Schools in New Mexico, which lost $6 million when the grant was discontinued, sued her on June 20th. Sixteen Democrat-led states filed a second suit later that month.
The funds, according to Silver Consolidated’s complaint, allowed it to hire seven mental health professionals and contract with two outside counseling organizations. With the extra resources, the district saw bullying reports decline by 30% and suspensions drop by a third, according to the district’s complaint. Almost 500 students used a mental health app funded by the grant.
A judge has yet to rule in either case, but Republican Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania and other members of a bipartisan task force are holding McMahon to her word that she’ll open a new competition for the funds.
“These funds were never intended to be a theoretical exercise — they were designed to confront an urgent crisis affecting millions of children,” Fitzpatrick said in a statement. “With youth mental health challenges at an all-time high, any disruption or diversion of resources threatens to reverse hard-won progress and leave communities without critical supports.”
