Trump Bypasses Congress and Slashes Hundreds of Education Grants

The Vaughn Next Century Learning Center in San Fernando, Calif., this week is wrapping up the first year of what was supposed to be a seven-year federal education grant totaling $19 million. Thousands of 6th and 7th graders at more than a dozen Los Angeles-area public charter schools have been getting tutoring and mentoring aimed at exposing them to college opportunities they might otherwise see as out of reach.

As rumors swirled this summer about potential federal cuts, program leaders hoped the Trump administration would spare them, given that the Vaughn center is a charter school district, and charter schools are among the few education priorities for which the administration wants to increase federal investment.

But on Sept. 12, the U.S. Department of Education sent Vaughn administrators a notice of “non-continuation” that eliminates their remaining $16 million of funding for the next six years, effective Oct. 1.

“During the review process, department staff identified that Vaughn Next Century Learning Center has proposed project activities that may conflict with the department’s policy of prioritizing merit, fairness, and excellence in education; or violate the letter and purpose of federal civil rights law,” reads the notice.

If the Education Department doesn’t approve the appeal the Vaughn team rushed to submit last week, 11 full-time employees and 16 part-time tutors will likely lose their jobs, and more than 3,300 students from low-income neighborhoods will lose programming that would have followed them for the rest of their K-12 careers.

“In our heart, based on the rhetoric that we’re seeing nationally, as positive as we are here, it feels like they might not even hear our call,” said Fidel Ramirez, CEO of Vaughn. “It’s devastating.”

The Vaughn initiative’s funding came from Gaining Early Awareness and Readiness for Undergraduate Programs, also known as GEAR UP, which Congress established in 1998. GEAR UP is among more than 40 education funding streams that the Trump administration in May proposed to eliminate beginning with the new federal fiscal year that starts next week.

Lawmakers from both parties in Congress have since rejected most of those proposed cuts, and still aren’t close to passing a final budget.

But in the meantime, the Trump administration has begun advancing its budget priorities, making unprecedented use of a legal mechanism for nixing individual grants, while leaving other grants issued under the same programs intact.

For instance, the department has discontinued a total of nine GEAR UP grants—including four in Ohio and one in New Hampshire—while issuing routine continuation awards for dozens of others, and soliciting new applicants this summer.

In the four months since the Trump administration released its budget proposal, the Education Department has discontinued more than 200 separate grants across at least 16 competitive programs the administration has proposed to eliminate altogether, according to an Education Week analysis. Those 16 programs cover a wide range of priorities:

On top of issuing non-continuation notices for some grants in those 16 programs, the Trump administration last week alleged civil rights violations and threatened to revoke tens of millions in grant funds for school desegregation efforts from school districts in Chicago; Fairfax County, Va.; and New York City.

Earlier this year, the administration canceled hundreds of ongoing grants for mental health services and teacher-training programs.

And on Sept. 10, the Trump administration announced a slew of across-the-board cuts for higher education grant programs, including $350 million for minority-serving institutions.

The administration has already announced plans to repurpose some of the funds it’s clawing back—including by launching new grant competitions for existing programs, and expanding investments in charter schools and civics instruction above the funding levels approved by Congress.

Education advocates and former department officials have become increasingly alarmed as the department’s new approach to ongoing grants has taken shape.

“These programs have a long history of bipartisan support in most cases,” said Kayla Patrick, who served as a senior policy adviser in the department’s office of planning, policy development, and evaluation from 2022 to 2024, under President Joe Biden. “Ending them without warning is breaking a longstanding agreement between the federal government and local communities.”

Some lawmakers have taken notice as well. Two Democratic senators and one Democratic congresswoman last week urged the department to halt “plans to unilaterally eliminate and significantly cut several programs through a reprogramming of fiscal year 2025 funding.”

“The department has never used reprogramming authority in this manner, even during previous full-year continuing resolutions, to make wholesale changes to programmatic funding levels simply based on administration priorities,” wrote Sens. Patty Murray, D-Wash., and Tammy Baldwin, D-Wis., and Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., in a Sept. 18 letter to McMahon.

The Trump administration is “no longer allowing taxpayer dollars to go out the door on autopilot,” Ellen Keast, the agency’s deputy press secretary, wrote in a statement to Education Week.

On Monday, McMahon posted a thread on X with seven examples of what she called “programs that don’t put students first,” including a technical assistance center aiming to dismantle systemic racism, and a school for the blind that pledged to “embed the values of diversity, equity and inclusion in all aspects of our work.”

This year’s barrage of grant non-continuations is much bigger than ever before

The department has the legal authority to discontinue ongoing grants that conflict with its priorities.

But past administrations have exercised that authority only in extraordinary cases when a grant recipient is extraordinarily delinquent or otherwise unable to finish the project, said Patrick, who helped implement the mental health grant program the Trump administration nixed earlier this year.

During her tenure at the department, Patrick and her colleagues would take several intermediate steps when a grantee was failing to meet program requirements, including offering technical assistance or issuing a stopgap $1 continuation award until the grantee could demonstrate it had fixed the problems.

“We would never just cancel or issue a non-continuation award,” Patrick said. “That’s just causing financial chaos.”

In most of the non-continuation notices it’s issued this year, the department quotes from grant application materials it claims clash with administration priorities. Objectionable efforts, according to the department’s letters to grantees, include hiring and admissions practices that prioritize racial and gender diversity, training sessions centered on “racial sensitivity” and “DEI,” and other programming that touches on topics like “dismantling white supremacy.”

Virtually none of the non-continuation letters comment on how grantees have spent the federal grant or what they have or haven’t accomplished with it.

Most of the letters—which bear the signature of Murray Bessette, a Trump appointee who serves as principal deputy assistant secretary and acting assistant secretary of planning, evaluation, and policy development—don’t specifically allege the grantee has broken the law or violated a specific policy.

In some cases, the department has called out grantees for language in their applications that’s required by state or federal law, or that was listed among the grant priorities published by the Biden administration or the previous Trump administration when they made the initial awards.

Guy Trainin, a professor of education at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln who serves as program director for a project funded by the federal Assistance in Arts Education program, received a non-continuation notice flagging his program’s commitment to a diverse candidate pool for open positions.

He included that provision in the grant application to follow Nebraska law, he said. Now his project—an effort to infuse art teaching into other subjects and vice versa—won’t have funding for its final year.

“We could not give any preferential treatment to any individual if they do not meet qualifications,” Trainin said. “This was not even a question.”

Grantees aren’t sure their appeals will matter

The department has given grantees a tight window of seven days to appeal their non-continuations. But it’s not clear when or even if the department will reinstate any grants based on the submitted appeals.

Without clarity on the timeline or the prospects for getting funds back, many programs have already begun curtailing operations.

The New York City-based Community Inclusion and Development Alliance, one of roughly two dozen “community parent resource centers” nationwide that supply special education resources and guidance to parents of children with disabilities, has canceled workshops and support group sessions planned for October that would have been attended by several dozen Korean-American parents of children with disabilities.

The nonprofit organization received a non-continuation notice on Sept. 5 for its $120,000 annual award under Part D of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. Young Seh Bae, the alliance’s executive director, filed an appeal the following week.

But despite the need for trustworthy guidance among Korean-American families and the broader community of parents of children with disabilities in New York City, Bae feels pessimistic about the prospects for reinstatement.

In-kind funding is keeping the organization afloat for now, she said, but it’s not clear whether private funders will be willing or able to fill the gaps long term.

The disruption couldn’t come at a worse point on the calendar.

“People always are nervous about how to communicate with new teachers at a new school,” Bae said. “This is a very critical time.”

Grant cuts affect programs that support Trump administration priorities

Some recipients of now-discontinued grants were planning to spend the remaining years of their initiatives on priorities the administration has said it supports.

Among the grants nixed by the administration in recent weeks are tens of millions of dollars for programs that prepare low-income students for college, train teachers to serve students with disabilities, expand school choice opportunities, and supply children’s books for school libraries.

Trump administration officials have stressed support for charter schools, community colleges, and historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs)—but all three have weathered discretionary grant cuts in recent weeks.

“We’re not even sure if they knew that there [were] 13 charter schools in this partnership,” said Cesar Perez, director of the Vaughn Next Century Learning Center’s GEAR UP program.

Dozens of educators appear poised to lose their jobs if the Trump administration doesn’t reverse its grant non-continuations.

The school district in Anchorage, Alaska, is scrambling to find alternative funding sources for six career-technical education teachers and eight academic coaches after the department on Sept. 15 abruptly discontinued its Fostering Diverse Schools grant worth more than $6 million over the next three years.

Even some members of the president’s own party have publicly questioned certain cuts. New Hampshire Gov. Kelly Ayotte, a Republican, said last week that she’ll personally appeal for McMahon to reinstate a $1.2 million TRIO grant that was funding efforts to smooth the path to college for 1,200 low-income K-12 students.

Mass disruptions to federal grant funding haven’t just hurt recipients of newly canceled grants. Hundreds more grantees have either gotten their routine continuation awards weeks or months later than usual, or are still waiting for them to arrive. Some have started a new fiscal year without the funding they typically receive before it starts.

Chaos like this is exactly what the Education Department under previous administrations strenuously tried to avoid, Patrick said.

“You don’t pull the rug from under school districts who are doing the best they can to educate students,” Patrick said. “While we could have done such a thing, it was just unheard of in every administration.”