Trump's Education Department Canceled 104 of 109 Teacher-Training Grants Under a Policy a Judge Ruled Unlawful

Nearly Every Grant Canceled

On February 5, 2025, Acting Education Secretary Denise Carter issued a directive to carry out two of Donald Trump's executive orders against diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI).¹ Within fourteen days, her department canceled 104 of the 109 grants in two programs Congress created to address teacher shortages.¹ California reported disrupted educational services and lost opportunities for more than 500 K-12 students.¹ On September 17, 2026, Judge Angel Kelley ruled the policy unlawful: it made diversity and equitable access grounds for canceling grants even though Congress required the programs to support those objectives.¹

Trump set the policy in motion.¹ His Executive Order 14173, issued January 21, 2025, ordered officials to "excise references to DEI and DEIA principles, under whatever name they may appear" from federal grant procedures.¹ A week later, his Executive Order 14190 required a plan to end federal support for "illegal and discriminatory treatment and indoctrination in K-12 schools."¹

The two programs, Teacher Quality Partnership (TQP) and Supporting Effective Educator Development (SEED), funded teacher preparation, residencies and professional development, particularly for high-need schools.¹ The eight states that sued had more than forty active grants totaling over $250 million.¹ On February 17, 2025, the department announced that it had terminated over $600 million in grants nationwide.¹

Seven staff members reviewed the grants in one week, focusing on material associated with DEI, including cultural responsiveness and antiracism.¹ Grant recipients in the eight plaintiff states were midway through their projects' fiscal year when the termination letters arrived.¹ Among recipients who objected, none had received a response or resolution by June 2, 2025.¹

Lost Placements, Lost Support

Kelley's opinion records what the states reported losing.¹ California reported that termination of the NorCAL GREAT Teacher Pipeline immediately ended training and placements for 60 teacher candidates in rural schools facing severe shortages.¹ Massachusetts described the termination of a UMass Boston and Boston Public Schools residency program leading to a master's degree in special education.¹

Maryland reported ending key parts of professional development and coaching for 70 principals and assistant principals at high-need schools, and dismissing six project employees.¹ Wisconsin described how lost funding forced many school administrators to fill special education vacancies with people not fully certified to support students with disabilities.¹ New York reported continuing shortages affecting multilingual students and students with disabilities.¹

California reported disrupted services for more than 500 schoolchildren, and the court described high-school students in dual enrollment losing money for mentoring, textbooks, laptops and travel.¹ Kelley found no evidence that the department considered, before it acted, how schools and teachers had planned around approved funding, or the effects on thousands of teachers and on graduate programs later put on hold or dissolved.¹

Civil-Rights Enforcement Was the Defense

The department defended the cuts as enforcement of existing civil-rights law to eliminate discrimination and fraud.¹ Its directive promised lawful terminations with required notice and procedures, and the government argued that grant criteria did not need exact definitions.¹

Kelley rejected that defense.¹ At oral argument, the government's lawyers said the directive reached all DEI activities because they considered all DEI discriminatory.¹ Yet the cuts reached family and community in the classroom and social-emotional learning, topics the judge found had no apparent connection to discrimination.¹ Government counsel also acknowledged that the directive reached practices contrary to department policy even when they did not violate the law.¹ Kelley also found that the directive supplied no discernible criteria for DEI, leaving recipients without fair notice of which activities it prohibited.¹

Kelley held that the department had turned Congress's requirements for these teacher-training grants into reasons to cancel them.¹ She found that it offered no new facts, data or studies to justify the reversal and skipped required public notice and comment.¹ It could have told recipients what was wrong and given them a chance to fix it; Kelley found it did not consider that option.¹ She also held that the regulation the department invoked did not authorize terminating grants for failing to meet priorities adopted after the awards.¹

No figure in the ruling shows whether the cuts reduced discrimination or fraud.¹ It documents lost training, lost student support and a policy that penalized the equitable access Congress required.¹

Two later facts favor the department: it had not used the directive to cancel or refuse to continue grants in these two programs since June 5, 2025, and it reported that eight of nine fiscal-year 2026 applicants represented in sworn statements had since obtained funding approvals under other programs.¹ Kelley found that department guidance from June 2025 covered continuation awards and had not withdrawn the February termination policy.¹

Where It Stands on October 10, 2026

Kelley's judgment did not order repayment of the canceled grants.¹² It vacated the February directive in its entirety and declared it unlawful under the Administrative Procedure Act.²¹ That final judgment for the eight states, entered September 17, 2026, is the district-court outcome as of October 10, 2026.²¹ Kelley did not decide whether the policy also violated the Constitution.¹ She declined a separate permanent injunction because vacating the directive and declaring it unlawful already provided sufficient relief.¹

The government won on which court could decide repayment: in April 2025 the Supreme Court stayed an earlier temporary order that had barred the terminations in the plaintiff states, and in November 2025 Kelley dismissed the individual grant claims because they belonged in the Court of Federal Claims.¹ Kelley found that the states' applications for fiscal-year 2026 grants with similar DEI-related programming faced a sufficiently imminent risk of denial or later termination under the directive to support their challenge.¹

Kelley left the grant statutes, regulations and newly adopted priorities in place to govern awards.¹ The Education and Labor departments announced new 2026 competitions, with approximately $90 million planned for SEED and $70 million for TQP.³⁴

This was not the only such cut a court rejected: in September 2025, Judge Allison Burroughs found Harvard's research-funding freeze and terminations violated the First Amendment.⁵

Trump's orders became an unlawful funding policy that treated Congress's requirements as grounds for cutting teacher training.¹ The states reported the cost: training ended for 60 teacher candidates, coaching cut back for 70 school leaders, services disrupted for more than 500 schoolchildren.¹ That is an abuse of federal spending power: the administration reversed the purposes Congress set for these grants, and the court's eventual intervention did not undo the interrupted training and services.¹