Updated: This article was updated to include a third judge’s ruling.
Three federal judges on Thursday significantly limited the Trump administration’s ability to enforce a series of orders it’s issued telling the nation’s schools and colleges to eliminate much of their diversity, equity, and inclusion programming or risk losing federal funds.
Judges in the District of Columbia, Maryland, and New Hampshire all found the Trump administration’s anti-DEI efforts didn’t pass legal muster, but for slightly different reasons. Their orders came in response to three separate lawsuits led respectively by the NAACP, the American Federation of Teachers, and the National Education Association.
The judges’ orders came the same day states and school districts faced a deadline from the U.S. Department of Education to sign a certification that their schools aren’t using what the administration has termed “illegal DEI practices.” The certification represented the latest directive from the Education Department since it instructed schools to eliminate DEI programs in February.
The judge in Maryland, Stephanie Gallagher, an appointee of President Donald Trump during his first term, found the administration hadn’t followed proper procedure in directing schools to eliminate DEI programs, which she said represented a significant policy change. She also found that the directive overstepped the federal government’s authority with respect to curriculum, which it’s prohibited by law from influencing or prescribing.
“The government cannot proclaim entire categories of classroom content discriminatory to sidestep the bounds of its statutory authority,” Gallagher wrote in her 48-page opinion in response to AFT’s lawsuit.
In response to the NEA’s lawsuit, in New Hampshire, Judge Landya McCafferty—an appointee of President Barack Obama—said in an 82-page order the administration’s directives were unconstitutionally vague and overstepped the federal government’s authority over schools.
Because the directives have neither defined DEI programs nor DEI practices that violate federal civil rights law, and because the penalties for noncompliance are so steep, McCafferty wrote, schools run the risk of “overcorrecting” and eliminating “all vestiges of DEI to avoid even the possibility of funding termination.”
The Education Department has not detailed what it considers to be impermissible DEI practices.
McCafferty told the Trump administration it can’t enforce its anti-DEI directives—including the April certification requirement—at any school or college where staff members are represented by the National Education Association, which sued in early March to stop the anti-DEI directives.
Gallagher limited her order to the initial mid-February letter that instructed schools and colleges to remove essentially any race-based programming. She effectively postponed the effective date of the document until the AFT’s case before her plays out.
She didn’t specifically rule on the anti-DEI certification order to states and schools, but said that, if it stems from the mid-February letter, then the Education Department wouldn’t be able to enforce it.
Meanwhile, the judge overseeing the NAACP’s challenge to the anti-DEI directives, Dabney Friedrich in the District of Columbia, blocked the Trump administration’s enforcement of its certification directive.
A Trump appointee, Friedrich agreed that the directive was vague and that the certification order, with its tight timeline, “further exacerbates vagueness concerns.” But she didn’t rule as Gallagher did that the directives represented new policy, so she didn’t find the Education Department had violated the federal law governing how agencies issue new regulations.
An Education Department spokesperson didn’t respond Thursday to a request for comment on the judges’ orders or information about its next steps in either case.
The unions and their allies that filed the lawsuits celebrated Thursday’s rulings.
“The federal government has no authority to dictate what schools can and cannot teach to serve its own agenda, and this ruling is an important step in reaffirming that,” Sarah Hinger, deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s racial justice program, which partnered with the NEA, said in a statement.
“The court agreed that this vague and clearly unconstitutional requirement is a grave attack on students, our profession, honest history, and knowledge itself,” AFT president Randi Weingarten said in a statement. “It would hamper efforts to extend access to education, and dash the promise of equal opportunity for all, a central tenet of the United States since its founding.”
Derrick Johnson, president and CEO of the NAACP, called the ruling in his organization’s case “a victory for Black and Brown students across the country, whose right to an equal education has been directly threatened by this Administration’s corrosive actions and misinterpretations of civil rights law.”
The Trump administration’s anti-DEI directives have built on each other
The first anti-DEI directive came in mid-February, when the Education Department issued a Dear Colleague letter telling schools and colleges to eliminate virtually any DEI-related programming or risk losing federal funds. It based the directive on the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2023 decision outlawing affirmative action in college admissions, though legal experts have said the administration’s interpretation of that ruling is overly broad.
The department followed up with an anti-DEI portal on its website to collect reports from the public on schools’ use of DEI and a “frequently asked questions” document that clarified that not all race-based programming automatically violates federal civil rights law. Still, the FAQ document didn’t define DEI, and it asserted without evidence that schools “veil discriminatory policies with terms like ‘social-emotional learning’ or ‘culturally responsive teaching.’”
In her order, McCafferty said the FAQ document “does not ameliorate the opacity of the 2025 [Dear Colleague] Letter, but rather, exacerbates it.”
In early April, the Education Department ordered state education chiefs and school districts to sign a certification saying they abide by Title VI of the Civil Rights Act—which prohibits race-based discrimination in federally funded programs—and that they don’t use “illegal DEI practices” as a condition of continuing to receive federal funds.
The certification, which was due April 24, similarly didn’t define DEI.
The consequences of these directives’ vagueness, McCafferty wrote, are real.
“An elementary school teacher could seek to establish a class culture of equitable and inclusive treatment by asking her students sign a collective pledge to follow the ‘Golden Rule’ for the entire school year,” she wrote. “It is more than arguable that such a practice would come within” the dictionary definition of DEI.
“These are not hypotheticals,” she wrote. “School teachers throughout the country are asking themselves these and similar questions in the wake of the [Dear Colleague letter.]”
States so far have split on the DEI certification
The judges issued their orders just as states and school districts faced a deadline to sign the anti-DEI certification document.
As of April 24, 17 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico have said they would sign the certification while 19 have declined to sign it, according to an Education Week tally. The others have either said they’re still reviewing the order or haven’t made public comments.
States’ approaches to the certification order have varied.
New Hampshire, where the NEA filed the lawsuit, was among the earliest states to say it would sign, and it has publicly posted individual districts’ responses on a state website.
Some state chiefs have signed it, but are not asking districts to do so. Others are asking districts to sign, but haven’t yet disclosed whether state leaders will as well. Many have responded with letters certifying their districts follow federal civil rights laws but pushing back against the prohibition on DEI and declining to sign the Education Department-provided certification form.
Though it’s standard for states and districts to certify compliance with anti-discrimination laws to receive federal funding, experts have said an effort of this magnitude is unusual.
State chiefs from both parties have said their schools already certify compliance as part of plans they file with the Education Department under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, and have argued the request hasn’t gone through any kind of regulatory or public-comment process.
Some have also argued it violates a federal law aimed at minimizing the administrative burden caused by federal agencies’ information requests.
