The Ohio Valley Educational Cooperative was one of more than 200 federal grant recipients that received surprise notices from the Trump administration last April telling them that funding for their five-year initiatives to expand in-school mental health services would end years early.
Today, 138 grantees that received those notices still have their funding, at least for now, and there’s a chance they’ll keep it longer. But the Ohio Valley Educational Cooperative, which used the federal money to hire school counselors for nine rural and suburban school districts in north-central Kentucky, isn’t among them.
The reason? Kentucky didn’t sign onto a 16-state legal challenge launched in late June that has so far been successful in preserving funds for grantees in the states that sued.
“Some grantees are getting an opportunity to continue their services, and others are not getting that opportunity,” said Jason Adkins, the cooperative’s CEO. “And the only difference that I can surmise is geographic location.”
Since President Donald Trump took office a year ago, lawsuits have contested his moves to lay off U.S. Department of Education employees, cancel previously awarded education grants and contracts, freeze congressionally approved funding for schools, and more.
Many of the most prominent have been joint legal challenges filed by coalitions of states with Democratic attorneys general. And often, the relief granted by judges—more time to spend federal money, a reversal of grant cancellations, a pause on new policies—only benefits affected schools and organizations in the states that sue. States with Republican attorneys general haven’t signed onto any of these lawsuits.
That leaves organizations such as the Ohio Valley Educational Cooperative without the same legal recourse as grant recipients in states with Democratic attorneys general to recoup grant funding terminated by the Education Department.
“It doesn’t seem to cohere with the department’s emphasis on fairness,” Adkins said.
But it’s straightforward, said Jim Tierney, a former Maine attorney general who directs Harvard Law School’s attorney general clinic: “If you’re not gonna sue, you’re not gonna get any money.”
Justice Department lawyers have repeatedly defended administration policies against these legal challenges in court. An Education Department spokesperson, Savannah Newhouse, said the agency “is carrying out a clear mandate from parents: get politics and DEI out of classrooms, cut federal administrative bloat, and ensure education dollars are spent directly on student achievement.
“Challengers who are rushing to the courts claim to act in students’ interests, but their efforts would only lock students into a broken status quo that has already failed them,” Newhouse said. “This politically motivated pushback only reinforces our commitment to do everything within the law to deliver real results for families.”
Multistate lawsuits against Trump have so far largely succeeded
The Trump administration’s education actions in its first year have been met by 75 lawsuits, according to tracking by Education Week. A fifth of them—15—were filed by coalitions of Democratic state attorneys general.
One of the first challenges to grant terminations, in early March 2025, came from a California-led coalition of eight states. The legal challenge that temporarily halted the Trump administration’s layoffs of hundreds of Education Department employees came from 20 states, led by New York. Multistate coalitions also managed through lawsuits to secure more time for schools and states to spend pandemic relief money, a pause on a new policy barring undocumented immigrants from Head Start and other federally funded programs, and the reprieve for the school mental health grantees.
In the 10 multistate education-related cases in which judges have issued at least preliminary rulings, the states prevailed at least initially all 10 times. In three of those cases, higher courts later blocked lower-court rulings that favored the states, according to an Education Week review, leaving rulings for the states in place in 70% of those cases.
Multistate legal actions have their roots in the 1980s, and they haven’t only targeted federal policies. Many deal with consumer protection issues, and the Master Tobacco Settlement reached in the 1990s that directs billions of dollars to states each year from major tobacco companies was the result of bipartisan legal action among attorneys general.
“When I was AG, I barely knew the party affiliation of my colleagues, and we would bring cases together all the time,” said Tierney, a Democrat who served in the 1980s.
But as multistate lawsuits against the federal government have grown more common, they’ve also grown more partisan, with attorneys general from one party reliably suing presidents from the other.
One of the lawsuits challenging the Affordable Care Act during the Obama administration, for example, came from a coalition of Republican attorneys general. Democratic attorneys general launched 155 lawsuits against the first Trump administration while their Republican counterparts sued the Biden administration 122 times, according to a database maintained by Marquette University political science professor Paul Nolette. During President Joe Biden’s term, Republican attorneys general successfully challenged the Democratic president’s efforts to forgive student loan debt and rewrite rules that expanded Title IX protections to LGBTQ+ students.
With Trump back in office, Democratic attorneys general have grown more coordinated, pooling their resources to launch legal challenges.
They’d likely welcome a Republican attorney general’s participation in one of their cases, Tierney said.
“I assume they’d all say, ‘terrific, great, the more the better,’” he said. “A bipartisan collective of states is better for optics as well as likelihood of success. But that hasn’t happened yet.”
Short of legal action, grantees whose funds have been terminated have appealed directly to the Education Department, generally with limited success. They’ve also sought help from Republican elected officials, who have contacted federal officials on their behalf. In Idaho, for example, the Republican state superintendent’s intervention with Education Department officials on behalf of a Full Service Community Schools grantee that received a discontinuation notice resulted in the agency restoring funding. But that hasn’t been the outcome for all such efforts.
Multistate coalitions shift from case to case
While Democratic attorneys general have filed all the multistate lawsuits against the Trump administration, the specific states that sign on vary from case to case.
When the Trump administration froze $6.8 billion in federal formula funds for schools last summer, all 23 Democratic attorneys general at the time signed onto the subsequent legal challenge, along with the Democratic governors of Kentucky and Pennsylvania, states with Republican attorneys general.
But more recently, in a challenge of the Full Service Community Schools grant cancellations, the coalition of states was much smaller: Maryland, North Carolina, and the District of Columbia.
The circumstances determining which states sign on vary from case to case, including whether states themselves have lost funding and whether states can sue in particular situations under their own laws. Oftentimes, larger Democrat-led states such as New York or California whose attorneys general have offices with hundreds of lawyers take the lead, and smaller states decide whether to join them.
Illinois, Maryland, and New York have been most likely to participate in education-related multistate lawsuits challenging Trump administration policies, joining 14 legal challenges each. North Carolina—where Republican lawmakers have sought to rein in the Democratic attorney general’s ability to challenge federal actions—has signed on least often, joining four of those cases.
Attorney General Jeff Jackson “looks at whether a federal agency has broken the law, whether it has harmed North Carolinians, and whether he believes he’ll be able to prove that illegality and alleged harm in court,” spokesperson Nazneen Ahmed said in an email.
After last weekend, one additional state has a Democratic attorney general, following the inauguration of Jay Jones in Virginia after his November defeat of Republican incumbent Jason Miyares. Jones has signaled he intends to join many of the multistate lawsuits pending against the Trump administration.
Uncertainty continues for mental health grantees
The Education Department in the coming weeks is expected to decide whether the 138 recipients of school mental health grants covered by the 16-state lawsuit will receive another year of funding.
A federal judge on Dec. 23 told the agency to make those decisions within a week, but the Trump administration missed the deadline, saying it wasn’t possible to meet it during the holiday season. Instead, it extended funding for those grant recipients—a mix of school districts, universities, and state education departments—until it makes those decisions. Funding is now slated to continue until Feb. 6, according to court filings.
The additional time hasn’t removed the uncertainty for those grantees over whether they’ll be able to continue their work long term. But it’s more time and funding than grantees in states with Republican attorneys general, such as the Ohio Valley Educational Cooperative in Kentucky, have received.
Adkins, the cooperative’s CEO, would have appreciated even that limited chance. A spokesperson for Kentucky Attorney General Russell Coleman didn’t respond to questions about why he didn’t join the 16-state legal challenge.
“I just don’t understand why all grantees couldn’t be given that opportunity,” Adkins said.
2026-01-22 21:01:37
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