See All the Lawsuits Filed Over Trump’s Education Policies

The Trump administration early in its second week ordered a pause on the disbursement of most federal financial assistance and told agencies to review their grant programs to determine whether they conformed with the president's executive orders signed when he took office.

Read about confusion stemming from the funding freeze.

First-day orders from Trump instructed federal agencies to end diversity-, equity-, and inclusion-related contracts and take other measures to end federal DEI programs and initiatives. Anti-DEI orders have been the basis for the cancellation of Education Department contracts and grants funding research, data collection, teacher prep, and technical assistance efforts as well as an earlier federal funding freeze.

Read about one round of contract cancellations.

Employees of Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency were reportedly looking at private information maintained by federal agencies, including the Education Department through its national student loan database. Read more.

In his first days as president, Trump overturned a federal memo that for more than a decade had prevented immigration officials from making arrests on school properties. It was within his executive power to overturn the memo, but educators and advocates feared the effect it would have on school attendance. Later, in September 2025, the president announced a $100,000 fee for employers to use H-1B visas to fill job openings. The H-1B visa, which previously cost $2,000 to $5,000, is one of the primary visas that school districts use to hire candidates for hard-to-fill positions, but districts worry that a $100,000 fee could place that option out of reach.

Trump signed a Feb. 5 executive order to pull federal funding from any school or university that allowed trans athletes to compete alongside cisgender girls. He’s also made it official U.S. policy that there are only two sexes. The Education Department has followed up the executive order with investigations into school districts, athletic associations, state departments of education, and colleges over transgender athletes' participation in sports, all of which come with the threats of withholding federal funds. Other Cabinet agencies have taken actions of their own to enforce the executive order. Read more.

The Education Department issued a letter on Feb. 14 telling school districts and universities they had two weeks to end all race-based programming or risk losing their federal funding—its biggest foray into influencing curriculum. The department later followed up with a "frequently asked questions" document and a portal soliciting reports of DEI activities in schools. On April 3, it sent a form to state education chiefs requesting that they and local districts sign it to certify their schools are not using "illegal DEI practices" as a condition of receiving federal funding. Federal judges later paused these actions. Read more.

The Education Department in February suddenly terminated grants awarded under key teacher-training programs authorized by Congress, saying they no longer fulfilled department priorities. The cancellations came as part of administration efforts to eliminate spending it categorized as DEI. Read more.

The Trump administration dismissed tens of thousands of federal employees on probationary status in February as part of its efforts to shrink the federal workforce. Dozens of these employees worked in the Education Department.

The Bureau of Indian Education runs 55 elementary and secondary schools and funds another 128 operated by federally recognized tribal nations. It also runs two colleges: Haskell Indian Nations University and Southwest Indian Polytechnic Institute. The bureau, part of the U.S. Department of the Interior, runs some of the only schools directly operated by the federal government. A lawsuit filed in early March alleges that the Trump administration's series of efforts to reduce the federal workforce have hurt the school system and led to instructor layoffs and reduced student services at the bureau's two colleges.

The Trump administration has moved aggressively to shrink the U.S. Department of Education through contract and grant terminations that have hit research, data collection, student mental health initiatives, teacher training, and other programs; the dismissal of nearly half the agency's staff through buyout offers and nearly 1,400 layoffs; and through a March 20 executive order calling on the education secretary to "facilitate" the agency's closure.

Virtually all of these initiatives have faced lawsuits that contest the staff dismissals and other cuts.

Read more about the effects of these dismissals.

The Education Department shut down income-driven student loan repayment plans, and made it more difficult for loans to be forgiven under Public Service Loan Forgiveness, which expanded under former President Joe Biden. The department on March 26 said it had reopened income-driven repayment.

The Trump administration has targeted universities with investigations, threats to cut funding, and actual funding cuts related to allegations that they've violated civil rights laws. Elite universities have been subject to some of the most heavy-handed actions. The Trump administration swiftly terminated $400 million in federal contracts and grants with Columbia University in early March over claims of antisemitic harassment on campus. Columbia has since agreed to some changes sought by the administration. The administration launched a review of federal grants and contracts held by Harvard University on similar grounds, demanding that the university end all racial preferences in admissions and hiring, hold student groups accountable for university policy violations, cooperate with federal immigration authorities, close DEI offices and end all DEI programming, take steps to prevent the admission of international students who are "hostile to ... American values and institutions," and more. The university has said it will resist the demands.

Read about what these funding cuts could mean for school districts.

On April 2, U.S. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said she was freezing "Maine's federal funds for certain administrative and technological functions in schools." It was the latest attempt from the Trump administration to use federal funds as leverage to force Maine to change a policy that allows transgender athletes to compete on girls' athletic teams, which runs contrary to the president's February executive order on transgender athletes. During a Feb. 21 White House luncheon, Trump called Maine Gov. Janet Mills out directly for the policy, telling her she’d better comply “because you’re not gonna get any federal funding at all if you don’t.” Mills' responded that the state was following state and federal law and that she would "see you in court." In rapid succession, the Education, Health and Human Services, and Agriculture departments launched investigations into Maine's education department, a school district, and the state body that oversees school athletics. The Education and Health and Human Services departments have since said Maine is violating Title IX.

Read more about Maine's defiance of Trump.

In mid-February, the Education Department terminated the grants funding four Equity Assistance centers created by Title IV of the Civil Rights Act to help school districts desegregate following the Brown v. Board of Education ruling. The grant terminations came amid the cancellation of scores of other department contracts and grants.

On March 28, Education Secretary Linda McMahon announced that, effective immediately, the Department of Education was revoking extensions granting states and districts more time to spend COVID relief aid.

Read more about McMahon's March 28 letter.

The Department of Defense Education Activity runs 161 schools spread across 11 foreign countries, seven U.S. states, and two territories that serve 67,000 students. The department's schools are some of the only directly run by the federal government. The system "is scrubbing references to race and gender from its libraries and lessons with no regard to how canonical, award-winning, or age-appropriate the material might be," according to an April 15 lawsuit. The lawsuit alleges the actions are a response to presidential executive orders that seek to bar "gender ideology extremism" and diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives from schools, the armed forces, and other aspects of public life.

Since Trump took office, more than 1,000 international students have had their student visas revoked, or their legal status has been terminated, according to the Associated Press. A number of affected students have filed lawsuits arguing they were denied due process, and federal judges in several states have temporarily halted revocations. On May 22, in an escalating battle with Harvard, the Trump administration revoked the university's ability to enroll international students, a move that a judge quickly quashed.

President Trump has announced tariffs that apply to virtually all U.S. trading partners, but implementation has been marked by numerous delays, exemptions, and partial reversals. The tariffs have also faced legal challenges, including one by two manufacturers of educational toys that sell to schools. School districts in the spring of 2025 already encountered vendors raising prices on goods including technology and school buses, largely in anticipation of tariffs increasing their costs. Read more.

Head Start programs that serve children who live in poverty have experienced delays in receiving their allocated funding as well as a directive to certify that their programming doesn't promote "diversity, equity, and inclusion," under an executive order from the president to eliminate DEI from the federal government. Mass layoffs at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees Head Start, have also resulted in the closure of half of Head Start's regional offices and the dismissal of staff members who served as Head Start programs' key federal contacts for recertification, fund disbursement, and expense approval. Head Start programs also now have to follow extra steps to receive the federal money they've been allocated. In addition, President Donald Trump reportedly plans to propose eliminating funding for the decades-old program in his budget. Read more.

The president on March 27 signed an executive order ending collective bargaining rights for large numbers of federal employees by claiming their work is related to national security and intelligence. The American Federation of Government Employees, the largest union representing federal employees, said the order affects more than 1 million workers, NPR reported. Because the order applies to the Department of Defense, educators who work for Department of Defense Education Activity schools are among the affected workers.

Job Corps is a federally funded residential, job training program for students ages 16 to 24 from low-income backgrounds. The program is overseen by the U.S. Department of Labor, but contractors run each site. At the start of 2025, there were 99 Job Corps sites across the United States and Congress had appropriated $1.6 billion for the program. The Labor Department on May 29, 2025 announced a "pause" in Job Corps operations that was set to take effect June 30, 2025. The department instructed Job Corps site operators to shut down their programs.

The U.S. Department of Education on April 29, 2025, notified recipients of two, multi-year grants aimed at boosting school-based mental health services and the training of school-based mental health professionals that it was terminating the awards, made during the Biden administration, because they now conflicted with Trump administration priorities. Congress established the Mental Health Service Professional Demonstration Grant Program in 2018 and the School-Based Mental Health Services Grant Program in 2020, and set aside funding for them in the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act passed in 2022 after the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas. Read more.

The U.S. Department of Education on June 30, 2025, informed states that it would not release $6.8 billion of congressionally approved funds as scheduled on July 1. The funds cover functions including professional development for teachers, services for English learners, student support and academic enrichment, before- and after-school programs, adult education, and services for students whose families move throughout the year for jobs in agriculture and fishing. States and schools had already set budgets relying on those funds coming through as they have in previous years, and federal laws and regulations require those funds' release by July 1. Read more.

Multiple federal agencies on July 10, 2025, announced they were interpreting a 1996 law restructuring the nation's welfare programs so they could prohibit undocumented immigrants from accessing a wider range of services. As part of this change—parts of which took effect immediately—the Trump administration reclassified Head Start as a "federal public benefit" similar to welfare under the 1996 law so it could bar undocumented students from the early childhood program. The U.S. Department of Education said it was doing the same for postsecondary career and technical education programs it oversees, as well as adult education. While the department said its change affected postsecondary programs, it said undocumented high school students would be ineligible for early college and dual enrollment programs that allow them to earn college credit. The department argued those were postsecondary programs. Read more.

As the federal government shut down on Oct. 1, 2025, Education Department employees discovered that the out-of-office messages they had prepared for their email accounts had been replaced with a message blaming Democratic senators for the shutdown. On Oct. 10, the Trump administration announced it was making "substantial" layoffs of federal workers during the shutdown, including 466 Education Department employees.