The Trump administration’s long-threatened plan to punish Democrat-led states with broad cuts to federal funding could next affect K-12 schools—though the extent and legality of the cuts under consideration remain unclear and in flux.
Top federal officials have recently discussed halting “formula funds” that flow from the U.S. Department of Education to California’s schools and education agencies, an unnamed administration official told Politico on June 10. The White House has deputized staffers for the Department of Government Efficiency to coordinate a wide range of grant cuts across agencies, the Washington Post reported on June 7.
And Education Secretary Linda McMahon, speaking to reporters at a Bloomberg News event this week, didn’t refute that her department might halt federal formula funds from flowing to the California state education department.
“That is one of the tools, and the opportunities that we have, with California,” she said. “I think it’s right that we make them aware that that’s a risk that they run.”
The administration hasn’t yet specified an infraction that would warrant the sweeping funding cuts it’s reportedly preparing. But McMahon said Tuesday that the state is “blatantly refusing to be in compliance with the Title IX regulations.”
Formula funding programs for K-12 schools include Title I for students from low-income households, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act for special education, the Rural Education Achievement Program (REAP) for schools in sparsely populated areas, and Title III for English-learner services.
States and school districts nationwide expect, per the typical schedule, to start receiving their 2025-26 school year allocations of funding from those programs as soon as July 1.
More than 63 percent of California’s 5.8 million K-12 students are socioeconomically disadvantaged, and more than 14 percent are students with disabilities, according to state data.
Sweeping statewide cuts to federal funding would pile on yet another layer of complexity to what has been an especially challenging budget season for school districts nationwide.
Schools are already feeling the effects of the Trump administration’s efforts to slash contracts, claw back already-awarded grant funding, and implement wide-ranging cuts without notice—as well as downturns in state revenue that could force cuts to school funding.
The Multicultural Learning Academy, a K-8 charter school in Los Angeles, earlier this year lost a federal mental health grant that was paying for six therapists and dozens of interns providing support services to students.
Now, school leaders are bracing for the possibility of more federal cuts—just months after wildfires ravaged the city, killing at least 30 people and destroying hundreds of homes and businesses.
“Schools have burned down. We’re still dealing with a lot of rebuilding here, in southern California in particular,” said Gayle Nadler, the school’s executive director. “There’s a lot at stake right now.”
Even before President Donald Trump won last year’s election, schools nationwide were expecting to have tighter margins in the upcoming school year as federal pandemic relief aid expired, said John Campbell, founder and CEO of FundEd Strategies, a consulting firm that helps schools with budget planning and grant management.
But many district leaders have struggled with the previously unanticipated federal funding cuts that have already played out and the deeper future cuts the administration has proposed.
“If it was just a dire situation, but we knew what was happening, schools can at least plan for that,” said Campbell, whose clients include the Multicultural Learning Center and other California school districts. “Right now there is not only very little information, it’s vague, it’s not clear. I think that makes it incredibly hard” for districts to plan.
Under Trump, states and schools feel pressure to comply with administration priorities
In Trump’s second term, the administration has immediately followed through on campaign promises to begin cutting off or threatening to cut off funding streams to punish universities and states that don’t comply with the president’s policy positions on transgender athletes; vaccine mandates; and diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives.
It’s an escalation from his first stint in the White House, when the president’s threats over funding cuts rarely translated into action.
This administration, by contrast, has sought to move aggressively. McMahon said at the Bloomberg event that federal agencies coordinate their enforcement, putting pressure on states and universities from all sides.
In February, after the Democratic governor of Maine verbally sparred with Trump over his order banning transgender athletes from girls’ sports, the state faced three investigations from various federal agencies and threats to federal funding. The U.S. Department of Justice sued the state for refusing to comply; that case is still pending. A separate administrative process to withhold federal education funding from the state for what the Education Department determined was a Title IX violation hasn’t yet begun, a Maine education department spokesperson said.
The office for civil rights in Trump’s Education Department is also moving orders of magnitude faster than it has under previous administrations on investigations that align with the president’s political priorities.
Enforcing civil rights has historically taken years before getting to the point of cutting off federal funding. It’s been more than three decades since the Education Department escalated a K-12 civil rights investigation by withholding funds from a school district (DeKalb County in Georgia); it later restored those funds once the district complied.
But under McMahon, the department has cut off grant funds for universities—Harvard and Columbia, for instance—within weeks of launching investigations, as a way to quickly deliver pain as it pursues longer processes, or to get its way faster.
In those cases, “there was an action that needed to be taken,” McMahon said.
“We’re certainly trying to move much more expeditiously,” she said Tuesday. “… It was kind of a hard hammer at first. So we’ve now seen a lot of other universities who are starting to look at their practices and their programs and getting ahead of the curve.”
The department is announcing investigations and finding violations within weeks—a break from precedent, where investigations could take years before reaching such a stage. It issued violation notices to Maine and New York rapidly, giving both 10 days to meet the Trump administration’s terms, or face further enforcement that could lead to terminated funds.
It also, in April, gave every state just 10 days to sign—and convince school districts to sign—a letter certifying they won’t use “illegal” diversity, equity, and inclusion practices before extending the timeframe to three weeks. Some states balked, and multiple judicial rulings resulted in the administration backing off that request altogether.
In California, McMahon said, the office for civil rights “did our investigation.”
“We found that they were in violation of Title IX, and so that is the process that we do follow,” she said.
But her department hasn’t announced elsewhere that it’s even launched a Title IX investigation into California’s education department, much less that it’s found the state agency in violation of the federal law barring sex discrimination at federally funded schools. (The administration has been quick to announce dozens of other investigations and their results, including with the Maine and New York state education departments.)
The only Title IX investigations the U.S. Department of Education has announced for California this year, according to an Education Week tracker, are of the state’s athletic association, the California Interscholastic Federation, and San Jose State University. A spokesperson for the Education Department didn’t answer a request for clarification in time for publication.
These moves mark a significant departure from the typical procedure of following up on a narrow finding of wrongdoing and then withholding administrative funds in an attempt to pressure a state to fix its violation, said Julia Martin, director of policy and government affairs for the Bruman group, a K-12 education law firm.
“Congress has outlined how it wants formula funds allocated, and the administration is bound to follow that unless there’s a reason the state is deemed ineligible for funds,” she said.
Cutting off federal funding to punish a state is unheard of
So far, in cases where the Trump administration has terminated funds for particular states or institutions, formula funds have rarely been among the victims. In one instance, a judge swiftly blocked the administration’s attempt to cut off formula funds for administration of school lunch programs in Maine.
When the Education Department follows the proper process, Congress could intervene to stop formula funds from being cut, and the affected state or school district could appeal.
But California has faced increased ire, and the administration has moved in ways that courts have found repeatedly overstepped the law.
Disruptions to formula funding would mark an escalation of the administration’s effort to cut federal investment in K-12 schools. California annually receives more than $2.2 billion in Title I funds for low-income students, $3 billion in IDEA funds for students with disabilities; $2.7 billion for school meals; $161 million for English learners through Title III, and $13 million for rural schools through REAP.
The legal path to the unprecedented broad cancellation of federal funding for a particular state is rife with obstacles.
The Constitution gives Congress the power of the purse. Federal law explicitly forbids the executive branch from withholding already-appropriated federal funding without prior approval from Congress—though Trump and other administration officials have said they believe this law is unconstitutional and want the Supreme Court to endorse their interpretation.
California Attorney General Rob Bonta, a Democrat, has already filed a lawsuit aiming to preemptively block the administration from fiscally punishing the state for declining to comply with the administration’s pressure to reverse its policy allowing transgender girls to participate in women’s sports.
Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, has also floated the possibility of withholding California’s annual share of roughly $83 billion in federal taxes to retaliate if Trump proceeds with punitive cuts—though there doesn’t appear to be a mechanism for the state to follow through on that threat. U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has threatened Newsom with criminal prosecution if the governor doesn’t pay his own federal taxes.
Meanwhile, in response to the Trump administration’s hastily announced—and just as hastily revoked—government-wide spending freeze in January, a federal court issued an injunction requiring the Trump administration to “halt all efforts to pause, freeze, impede, block, cancel, or terminate” federal funding to states “except on the basis of the applicable authorizing statutes, regulations, and terms.” That order is still in effect.
Even if California doesn’t face the halting of its federal funds, though, it has hardly been spared from the Trump administration’s crackdown on federal funding so far.
As part of broader moves to cut spending nationwide not targeting California specifically, the Education Department terminated in-progress teacher-preparation grants for more than a dozen California higher education institutions; canceled millions of dollars for mental health support in at least four California school districts; and effectively halted more than $200 billion in pandemic relief funding for K-12 education in California a year before the previously determined deadline to spend them.
The federal government also shuttered two technical assistance centers that served K-12 schools in California, and closed regional offices in San Francisco that provided civil rights enforcement in K-12 schools and support for Head Start providers of early childhood education.
At the Multicultural Learning Center, administrators worry that the Trump administration, because of its animus toward California, will reject the state’s next attempt to secure federal grants that support charter school growth.
They’re contemplating dipping into reserves and pushing to maintain state aid, all while trying to keep abreast of the federal changes.
“We cannot take away things our families and students have come to rely on,” Nadler said. “We have to push forward.”
2025-06-12 21:56:56
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