Earlier this year, educators nationwide breathed a sigh of relief as the U.S. Department of Education began launching new competitions for grant programs the Trump administration had previously targeted with cuts and cancellations in 2025.
Competition announcements said the agency expected to award, among others, 25-35 new Innovative Approaches to Literacy grants (school libraries and books for low-income students); 30 new Supporting Effective Educator Development grants (educator preparation and training); and nine new HEP and CAMP grants, which support migratory students pursuing high-school and college credentials.
But in recent weeks, the department has announced it’s awarding only four new literacy grants and 16 new teacher-preparation grants. Both migratory education grant competitions, meanwhile, are moot—the White House announced late last week that the agency is rejecting $25 million Congress appropriated in February for those programs. And the department hasn’t sent out routine announcements with lists of newly funded projects, leaving the outcomes of other competitions unclear.
The Trump administration’s signature 2025 practice of abruptly canceling previously awarded competitive education grants has slowed this past year. Instead, for several dozen key programs Trump has twice proposed to eliminate, the Education Department is deploying subtler, infrequently used procedures that result in fewer new grant awards and less stability for funding recipients, including school districts and state education agencies.
On top of canceling congressional appropriations over lawmakers’ objections, the Trump administration has stalled expected grant competitions without announcements or explanations, and devoted larger-than-usual shares of program allocations to existing grantees’ awards—all while the agency lays the regulatory groundwork to more easily pull back funding.
Some of these decisions have already directly affected grant recipients. Since Trump took office, the department hasn’t run competitions for K-12 grant programs serving Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian students. Current grantees in those states have had to scale back programming, scramble for other funding sources, and lean more heavily than before on their representatives in Congress to secure funding.
The nonprofit Partners in Development Foundation runs pre-K and K-12 programs centered on serving Native Hawaiian communities, with more than 70% of its annual budget coming from a competitive Native Hawaiian Education Program grant from the Department of Education.
Roughly 10% of the organization’s 200-member staff—including teacher assistants and curriculum specialists—resigned earlier this year when its federal grant was on the verge of expiring. Only some have returned since Education Secretary Linda McMahon, spurred by a call from a Democratic U.S. senator, agreed to a temporary funding extension for the program.
“If there’s anything we learned from the last year and a half or so, we need to diversify our funding,” said Terry Nakamura, the organization’s chief operating officer. “Being primarily dependent on one federal source wasn’t a secure way to fund our programs.”
Concerns over competitive federal grants are particularly timely, experts say, as the Trump administration simultaneously advances sweeping grant rule changes that smooth the legal path for wider-scale grant disruptions in the Education Department and beyond.
“It’s their way of not giving out as many grants and, combined with their proposed new rules on frontloading, they are leaving the door open to talking back the funds after one year,” said Amanda Miller, who oversaw higher education programs for the department during the Biden administration, and now consults on federal grant issues.
Meanwhile, the agency has scattered staff who work on competitive grants across five other agencies, as top administration officials aim to convince Congress that the Department of Education is superfluous.
A spokesperson for the Education Department didn’t return requests for comment in time for publication.
How competitive education grants have traditionally worked
Congress annually supplies billions of dollars for competitive K-12 and higher education grants across dozens of programs geared toward specific topics and populations.
Funds from competitive Education Department grants roll out to grantees on a yearly basis for three to five years—an initial award at the start of the project period, followed by “continuation awards” at the beginning of each subsequent year.
The department typically spends a portion of that year’s congressional appropriation to supply current grantees with their continuation awards, then devotes the remaining funds—if any—to new grants awarded through a competitive process.
The agency also has the option to “frontload” a continuation award by “obligating,” or committing to spend, future years’ funding installments at the same time. An internal discretionary grants handbook last updated in 2023 warns staffers to use this mechanism sparingly.
“As a matter of policy, program offices avoid frontloading whenever possible, as it is ED’s goal to maximize the number of new awards to promote innovation in education,” the handbook says.
It’s not clear whether the agency still operates with that handbook as a guide. The department has frontloaded new and continuation awards across at least a dozen separate programs in recent months, according to program advocates, agency staffers, and state education agencies.
In prior years, frontloaded grants were a boon to grantees, who had permission from the agency to spend their full grant award, rather than wait for each year’s installment.
During a May 29 webinar previewing this year’s competition for the Title III National Professional Development program for instruction of English learners, a department staffer said the frontloaded awards will give grantees the flexibility to spend more than one-fifth of their five-year award in a single year if they need to.
“You don’t necessarily have to worry about every year getting a new fresh pot of money,” the staffer said.
But for some grant award notices the department has handed out in recent weeks, there’s a catch. Some that mention frontloading—like a Teacher and School Leader Incentive award for the Kansas Department of Education—emphasize that grant recipients “CANNOT access these funds” until the department tells grantees they’ve qualified for a continuation award.
The department is even frontloading grants for programs the second Trump administration itself established. The Idaho State Board of Education received a three-year, $4.8 million grant through the Career Pathways Grant Program, which promotes career exploration; the award notice for that grant includes the same restrictions on spending future-year frontloaded funds.
That language mirrors a proposal the department is advancing through the regulatory process that would make it easier for the agency to cancel previously awarded funds.
“While frontloading may be allowable, it’s clearly not the intent of Congress when they determine funding levels for these programs,” Miller said.
The new regulations—which the agency has said it wants to implement by the end of this year—would give the agency the authority to cancel in-progress grants for “convenience,” rather than exclusively for performance issues. They would also nix requirements for the department to make decisions about continuations on a predictable timeline.
“I think what they are trying to do is get it on paper obligated but not actually be committing to spending it, so it looks like they’re doing what they’re supposed to be doing, but it’s not actually a funding commitment,” said Josie Skinner, a founding partner of the Sligo Law Group and a former attorney in the Education Department’s office of general counsel.
For some grants frontloaded with fiscal 2026 funds, a cancellation once the new fiscal year has begun could result in those funds returning to the Treasury, since the period when they could be redirected to another grantee would have expired.
“Grantees and subrecipients that hire staff, sign contracts, or plan services on the strength of a large “awarded” figure could face significant reliance and wind-down costs if later access is denied,” says an analysis of the newly proposed regulations by Skinner’s firm.
Frontloading grants en masse may also be illegal. In 2024, the Government Accountability Office, Congress’ nonpartisan federal watchdog, said an award notice from the National Institutes of Health promising future-year continuations in advance doesn’t meet the legal standard for obligating funds.
The threat of lawsuits and court injunctions hasn’t deterred the Trump administration from canceling hundreds of previously awarded competitive grants.
“If I wanted to end a particular discretionary grant program, one way I could go about doing that would be to fully frontload a program and then next year terminate it,” Skinner said.
The Ed. Dept. is often giving out fewer awards than anticipated
Not all Education Department grant award announcements have fallen short of projections.
Four dozen universities last month received grants for special-education teacher preparation, compared with 35 the department said it expected to award.
But in many cases, the department is giving out far fewer new awards than it did for previous iterations of its grant programs.
For Innovative Approaches to Literacy, the department told applicants in May it planned to give out 25 new awards totaling $16.8 million, for an average of $672,000 per award. Instead, the agency announced Sept. 9 it’s awarding only four new grants totaling a combined $16 million.
Similarly, the listing for Supporting Effective Educator Development advertised spreading $90 million among 30 new grantees. Instead, the department will award roughly half that number of grants—even though the program has no current grantees after the Trump administration terminated all of them in early 2025.
The agency has also used a similar mechanism of “supplemental awards"—giving additional funds to grantees whose award periods are running out—to scale back the number of new awards.
The agency ran competitions for Full-Service Community Schools grants in 2018, 2019, 2020, 2022, and 2023, but hasn’t run any since then.
The department last December abruptly discontinued nearly 20 previously awarded community schools grants, prompting three ongoing lawsuits.
Then, this summer, the department quietly notified current grantees whose projects remained intact of an opportunity to apply for $50 million in supplemental awards, “intended to support and expand project activities currently being implemented across the FSCS program,” according to a department email to grantees obtained by Education Week.
The shortage of new grants extends beyond K-12. The number of colleges and universities receiving Strengthening Institutions grants this year is also lower than usual, even though the department quadrupled that program’s congressional appropriation of $102 million by reprogramming funding from other programs the administration says are unconstitutional.
Those new awards aren’t frontloaded; the federal law that governs higher education prohibits that practice. But the department’s guidelines for this year’s Strengthening Institutions competition do include new language encouraging applicants to “structure projects to maximize expenditures in year one of the grant and to ensure that year one outcomes can stand alone.”
Advocates lobbying for congressional appropriations for key programs worry that they’ll have a harder time making their case if there are fewer grantees to highlight.
“It makes it less inconvenient for the department for there to be no funding for the program,” said Jaci King, who consults on federal issues for the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education. “Then you don’t have existing grants that they will have made that don’t have funding subsequently.”
Grant disruptions have become a constant for many organizations
Even in cases where Congress has already agreed to support programs, though, disruptions have had lasting consequences.
Current Native Hawaiian Education Program grantees typically get the opportunity to compete for new awards long before their remaining funds expire. But, despite a $45 million allocation from Congress in 2025 and 2026, the agency hasn’t run a new competition for the program since Trump’s second term began, leaving current grantees increasingly fearful of losing federal support altogether.
This past May, with no competition on the horizon, Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, announced he had secured a commitment from Education Secretary Linda McMahon to supply an additional year of funding for the program’s current grantees, rather than letting their funding expire with no opportunity to compete for new awards.
The Partners in Development Foundation and other grantees—including the University of Hawaii, which has four active NHEP grants—spent the next few months wondering if that money would ever show up; it finally did on Sept. 8, more than two months after the previous grant had run out.
The persistent disruption has made operating as normal impossible for the PID Foundation. The organization’s CEO, Terry Nakamura, and his team spent much of the last year and a half developing and revising plans to dramatically scale back operations, including shutting down more than half of the organization’s classroom sites and shrinking the number of preschool slots for students ages 0 to 5.
Even now, with funding only assured through next July, the PID Foundation is scrambling to line up other sources of revenue.
“Normally we’re thinking about what we can do to better serve our mission, what are the new needs that are emerging,” Nakamura said. “There hasn’t been as much time for that.”
