It was after 10 p.m. on Feb. 10, 2025, when Stephanie Lee Behm Cross opened an email notifying her that the U.S. Department of Education had terminated her federal teacher-training grant, effective immediately. Going to sleep was no longer an option.
Cross, a professor of education at Georgia State University here, first had to call 23 university employees whose salaries were funded entirely by the grant to tell them she could only guarantee them pay for one more day.
Since 2015, across several multimillion-dollar federal grants, Cross and her team established a teacher-residency program at Georgia State, recruiting dozens of new teachers and supplying hundreds of current public school teachers in partner districts across the state with financial support, training, and mentorship to help them facilitate tough conversations about race in classrooms, and understand more clearly how their students'—and their own—backgrounds and experiences informed their needs in the classroom.
“There’s no way I could have done any of this work without all of these people on my team,” Cross said.
Cross’ employees ultimately got paid with university funds for the rest of the week after the cancellation. Then they went on furlough for a month. Eventually they lost their jobs altogether. Two suffered anxiety attacks that landed them in the emergency room. Several no longer work in education.
The post-cancellation period was so stressful, Cross recalls, that she and her colleagues avoided checking in with each other to see how they were doing, dreading the inevitable negativity.
So Cross was bewildered a week after the cancellation notice by an email with some less dreary news: The American Educational Research Association had chosen her project for an award celebrating innovative approaches to federal grant-funded work.
“I just remember forwarding it to folks in our leadership team and saying, ‘You’re not gonna believe this,’” Cross said.
The award now sits on a shelf in Cross’ office—a bittersweet reminder of work she’s proud of, but also of progress unfulfilled.
Nationwide, hundreds of researchers—as well as public school districts, charter school systems, colleges and universities, state education agencies, and nonprofit organizations—found themselves confronting similar contradictions last year, as the second Trump administration implemented an unprecedented crackdown on previously awarded federal grants.
Cross’ in-progress project was one of more than 30 that simultaneously lost remaining funding from the Department of Education’s Supporting Effective Educator Development program—itself just one of more than 30 competitive grant programs the agency targeted with abrupt and unprecedented cuts totaling more than $2 billion last year.
A spokesperson for the Education Department said the Trump administration redirected the revoked funds to projects in other programs, and launched new competitions for the teacher-training programs this year with a focus on “career pathways and workforce readiness, promoting evidence-based literacy, and meaningful learning.”
“Taxpayer dollars should support preparing teachers for meaningful student learning, expanding the pipeline of high-quality teachers, and retaining top talent—not funding divisive ideology or racial preferences,” Savannah Newhouse, the agency’s press secretary, told Education Week in a statement.
The funding shakeup wasn’t limited to the Education Department. At least 14 other federal agencies also canceled or disrupted grants affecting education in 2025, including for expanding digital technology access, modernizing school buildings, recruiting volunteer tutors, purchasing local produce for school meals, and preventing school violence.
The sum of revoked federal dollars is virtually incalculable, as no comprehensive list of terminated grants exists. The same goes for the toll on instructional programming, research efforts, and the services and jobs for children and adults nationwide.
Susan Ophelia Cannon, an assistant professor of elementary- and middle-grades education at the University of Georgia, was devastated—if not shocked—in April 2025 when she got a cancellation notice for the remainder of her National Science Foundation grant for improving math instruction.
The grant hadn’t come as easily as it went. Cannon—one of Cross’ former mentees—spent most of the spring 2023 semester workshopping her project’s structure and budget; asking peers for feedback on rewrites; securing commitments of support from advisory boards; and chasing down resumes from every colleague she mentioned in the application as a collaborator.
“I remember being at the beach with my kids, staying in the cabin, working on the rest of the aspects of the grant,” Cannon said.
Now, with remaining funding revoked midway through her five-year project and so many others, and threats of even more federal funding changes looming, Cannon fears that needed improvements in America’s K-12 classrooms will be even harder to enact.
“Even if five years may seem like a really long time, it barely scratches the surface of what it takes to support sustained change,” Cannon said.
A National Science Foundation spokesperson declined to comment. On April 18, 2025, the agency released a “statement of NSF priorities” that emphasized a focus on projects that “aim to create opportunities for all Americans everywhere.”
“Research projects with more narrow impact limited to subgroups of people based on protected class or characteristics do not effectuate agency priorities,” the statement read.
Trump-friendly states weren’t spared grant funding cuts
The second Trump administration has targeted states run by political opponents with funding cuts and policy crackdowns in education and beyond. But the rest of the country hasn’t been spared, either.
Here in Georgia, Trump won 115,000 more votes in 2024 than then-Vice President Kamala Harris. But his administration has repeatedly slashed funding that supports not only researchers like Cross and Cannon, but the state’s K-12 students and educators as well.
The University of Georgia lost half a million dollars from the Department of Education for training teachers to work with students with disabilities, and another $70,000 from the National Institutes of Health for a research effort that involved students at six middle schools experimenting with a new immersive computer program for exploring genetics and the human body.
The Clayton County School District lost $2.6 million in Career-Connected High Schools funds that were fueling career and technical education—one of Education Secretary Linda McMahon’s stated priorities.
The neighboring Gwinnett County system lost $2.8 million it was anticipating for a bilingual education expansion project.
The nonprofit Southern Regional Education Board, based in Atlanta, saw half a million dollars in Supporting Effective Educator Development funds disappear before completing a three-year investigation into supporting early-career teachers in Oklahoma—another stateTrump won and that’s controlled by Republicans.
And the Atlanta-based equity assistance center that helps school districts in 11 southern states advance integration and inclusion efforts has faced one existential threat after another: a canceled grant (later restored), a program shift to a new federal agency, and most recently the Education Department’s proposed rescission of all the regulations that establish the program.
“We’re helping communities and students and school systems that really, truly need these supports but literally can’t afford it,” said Eshé Collins, a civil rights attorney who runs the Region II center out of the Southern Education Foundation offices downtown here.
Warning signs emerged before Trump took office
For some affected grantees, warning signs of the crackdown to come emerged even before the 2024 election.
In 2022, Georgia passed a law prohibiting schools and colleges from using curriculum materials that touch on “divisive concepts.” Twenty other states now have similar laws.
Soon after the Georgia policy took effect, Cross started hearing from university leaders who wanted to protect her work—at that time funded by an earlier SEED grant that finished without interruption—from potential exposure to proponents of the new policy. After some tough negotiations, Cross and the university agreed to take the project website down.
“I remember saying to each other, ‘We don’t want to get our funding shut down,’” said Cross, who shared with Education Week her personal views, not the university’s.
Cannon started getting similar questions from her supervisors after Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, in February 2025 published a list of 3,400 National Science Foundation grants that were paying for, as he put it, “questionable projects that promoted Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) or advanced neo-Marxist class warfare propaganda.”
Cannon’s project is on the list. “Chairman Cruz has requested significant scrutiny of awards listed in the database,” the press release said.
Two months after the database was released, Cannon’s cancellation letter arrived. NSF last year issued similar letters to more than 1,500 grantees; almost all of them, according to an analysis by the Urban Institute, referenced “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” “gender and sexuality,” or other phrases the Trump administration has moved aggressively to eradicate.
Cannon had been working to equip early-career math teachers with technology tools and instructional approaches that engage students more effectively than traditional lectures.
She wants math students to feel less like silent audience members and more like active collaborators. And she pushes teachers to be more aware of their own biases when it comes to subconscious decisions like whose raised hand to acknowledge first.
“Equity work, in the five or 10 years leading up to Trump, was kind of a theme and an expectation for most conference proposals: How is this work supporting all students, but also supporting students that are marginalized in particular, to address opportunity gaps?” Cannon said. “I don’t think that work is problematic.”
Two separate lawsuits—one from 16 Democratic state attorneys general, the other from a coalition of science advocacy groups—sued the Trump administration last year over the NSF grant cuts. But judges in both cases denied preliminary injunctions, allowing the grants to remain canceled while the legal cases continue to play out.
When grants get canceled, confusion reigns
For many Trump-era grant cancellations, the affected dollar amount listed on a spreadsheet doesn’t capture the full impact of the funding loss on the grantees—and others touched by their work.
The College Park, Ga.-based nonprofit organization Metro Community Ministries in 2022 won a two-year grant from the Environmental Protection Agency for a program in which high school students conduct workshops about the Clean Water Act and safe drinking water with local community organizations.
“We wanted to encourage young people to have this knowledge,” said Lorna Pallares, the organization’s chief operations officer. “Young people love knowing something adults don’t.”
In 2024, the EPA approved a one-year extension to give the group more time to spend its remaining funds.
But in spring 2025, as part of broader rollbacks of programs funded by the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act, a legislative package addressing climate change, the Trump administration canceled hundreds of EPA environmental justice grants, including the one for Metro Community Ministries, as well as at least three dozen others that had connections to K-12 schools or programming for school-age children, according to an Education Week analysis.
Almost all of the group’s money was already spent by the time the cancellation hit. Still, leaders had to cancel three more student-led workshops they hoped to host.
“We had already met our goals,” Palleres said. “...But because the contract wasn’t up, we wanted to do one final project and end with a bang.”
A federal judge in June ruled that the Trump administration’s cancellation of the environmental justice grants violated the law. The judge followed up on July 22 ordering the agency to restore the canceled funding.
An EPA spokesperson didn’t respond to a request for comment in time for publication. When it cut the environmental justice grants, the agency said it was part of an effort to "[put] a stop to wasteful DEI and environmental justice programs being funded by taxpayers.”
Back at the University of Georgia, Cannon’s National Science Foundation grant cancellation experience started with confusion.
She and one of her graduate students were in the middle of a hotel stay the night the cancellation notice came through, preparing for a conference presentation the next day. They could no longer charge their hotel cost to the grant, and they weren’t sure they could describe their research to fellow attendees as ongoing or grant-funded.
Bigger questions awaited back at home. Would the university cover tuition for Cannon’s students so they could complete the multi-semester path to the math coaching endorsement they had been seeking? (Ultimately, yes.)
The salary for Cannon’s post-doctoral assistant from England? (Yes, but only for a couple more months.)
What about for her graduate assistant? (Yes, part-time for the rest of the semester, primarily working with another instructor, and voluntarily helping out Cannon on her own time.)
Cannon herself lost two-thirds of the summer pay she had been expecting.
But among her biggest frustrations is that her students who got their coaching endorsements never got the additional year of mentorship and support that would have helped them translate what they learned into more concrete action in their home school districts—many of them in rural parts of the state where most teachers lack similar certifications.
“It’s an inefficient use of funds because you’ve funded the original person, but you’ve pulled the funding that would have allowed them to share that knowledge with the people in their communities,” Cannon said.
Grant protocol reforms could lead to more terminations
Part of what stings about the abrupt cancellations, grantees said, is the knowledge that judges have agreed the agencies broke protocol to target their work.
Now, the Trump administration is moving to reshape those protocols to fit its approach to funding cuts. The White House Office of Management and Budget recently closed the public comment period on a regulatory proposal for sweeping changes to federal grantmaking rules that would codify agencies’ authority to terminate grants at any time for any reason.
In almost every case last year, no matter the agency, the letters notifying grantees of sudden funding cuts came with a memorable if terse rationale: The project in question “no longer effectuates the priorities” of the Trump administration.
Earlier this month, a judge ruled the federal government violated the law when it used that phrase to justify canceling grants.
Several federal agencies, including the National Science Foundation, recently acknowledged in federal court that they used keyword searches for terms disfavored by Trump administration officials to determine which grants to cancel. Separately, the Department of Energy acknowledged in a recent court filing that it targeted grants from states whose leaders or voters are primarily Democratic.
Agencies also justified the cuts by pointing to aspects of grantees’ applications that the previous administration had required them to include, like an emphasis on involving participants from underrepresented groups.
A slew of advocates, Democratic elected officials, and even some Republicans have urged OMB to reverse the proposed grant rule changes. Members of the public have done the same in tens of thousands of online comments on the proposal.
At the same time, interest in federal grants appears to be surging. In a July 30 letter to Congress, Education Secretary Linda McMahon touted record numbers of applications for competitive grants this year.
Cross told Education Week she has heard from more colleagues than ever before that they’re planning to apply for Education Department funding. One colleague who also received a cancellation notice told her they absolutely would not apply for another federal grant; then, when the next grant competition launched, they did anyway.
Pallares, from Metro Community Ministries, said she recently heard from a federal agency that her competitive grant application was one of 300 that had been denied; only 10 received funding. Donations from the public have been slower of late because of broader economic constraints, she said.
“We definitely are applying for anything that might fit our footprint,” she said.
But the decision to contend again for federal dollars isn’t easy for everyone. Cross waffled on a near-daily basis during this summer’s application period for the latest iteration of the SEED program.
How, she wondered, could she pass up an opportunity to continue the work she felt so passionate about?
But, she counters, how could she look prospective employees in the eye and convince them to sign on for a grant-funded job that recently vanished overnight? And what if the federal government decides to cut funding for other researchers at her university as punishment for her alleged infractions?
Legal action challenging Trump-era grant cuts has been only fitfully successful. One lawsuit challenging the SEED cuts resulted in a court ruling that temporarily restored the revoked funds for Cross’ work—but the victory lasted only for a few weeks before the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the ruling.
The American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education and its co-plaintiffs dropped the lawsuit in March.
“The litigation underscored the programs’ importance to developing the U.S. educator workforce and helped reinforce Congress’s commitment to funding them in FY2026,” AACTE told affected members in an email in March. “With the primary goals of the litigation achieved, we have decided to conclude the case.”
Another lawsuit challenging the teacher-preparation grant cuts is still playing out—but it only covers grantees from the eight plaintiff states; Georgia isn’t one of them.
Ultimately, with days left before the deadline, Cross submitted an application for a new SEED grant.
If she gets it, she’ll hire new colleagues, and operate under a new project name. She’ll run the project without a complete picture of how well the previous iteration worked—the project’s third-party evaluator never finished its final report after Cross’ team was unable to pay the remaining costs.
But her core mission—giving aspiring teachers a sturdier platform from which to support their students’ diverse needs—won’t change.
“They’re trying to make us question the research we do,” Cross said. “I don’t mind pushback.”
