The second Trump administration’s education agenda suffered two setbacks in federal court on Thursday, as judges ruled in separate cases that the U.S. Department of Education unlawfully canceled teacher-preparation grants and imposed new funding conditions for education research.
The rulings add to a growing pile of legal verdicts reversing or neutralizing the Trump administration’s efforts to assert unprecedented executive authority over federal spending, including for education.
They also come as the administration advances a slew of regulatory efforts that would give it more power to direct federal spending—and halt it—according to the president’s political priorities.
Lawmakers recently delayed implementation of the White House Office of Management and Budget’s high-profile grantmaking changes until mid-December at the earliest, but the Education Department is forging ahead with collecting public comments on rule changes of its own that it’s aiming to finalize by the end of 2026.
The Education Department’s rule changes “would give the administration more discretion on the reasons that they can cancel grants,” said Amanda Miller, who oversaw higher education programs for the agency under former President Joe Biden.
More than 100 lawsuits have challenged federal actions on K-12 and higher education since President Donald Trump’s second term began in January 2025, including more than 30 lawsuits over efforts to freeze, disrupt, or cancel education funding, according to an Education Week analysis.
Many, though not all, of those cases have culminated in rulings that the actions in question likely violated federal law and the U.S. Constitution. Even after those rulings, most cases remain ongoing and could take years to fully wrap up.
Here’s a detailed look at the latest rulings, and their implications for the broader landscape of legal battles over federal policy changes.
Teacher-preparation grants
“Agencies may not choose to reject, terminate, or otherwise penalize grant applications based on the very criteria Congress expressly require the agency to promote,” Kelley wrote.
The ruling also comes as the Education Department prepares to award 16 new SEED grants and 12 new TQP grants in the coming days, according to a Sept. 9 agency press release. Kelley barred the agency from applying the same executive order to decisions for awarding those grants.
Kelley’s ruling doesn’t mention relief for grantees affected by the terminations. Previously, she had ruled the Court of Federal Claims, not her court, has jurisdiction over restoring canceled funds.
Meanwhile, rulings have yet to arrive for recently filed cases challenging similar grant cuts affecting special education and English-learner services.
Education research funding
OMB recently unlocked some fiscal 2025 funds for IES more than a year later than usual, leaving the institute only a few months to spend them before their two-year window expires. The office continues to withhold more than $465 million in fiscal 2026 funds the institute was supposed to be able to access six months ago; those funds expire Sept. 30, 2027.
But in the OMB section of the conservative policy document known as Project 2025 (pages 76-82), Vought lays out a vision of the apportionment process as a tool for the president to impose political preferences on congressional spending.
For IES, OMB has executed apportionment actions with legally binding footnotes that require IES to comply with Trump’s anti-DEI executive order, as well as with an OMB-approved plan for spending the funds. Elsewhere, the Trump administration has slashed IES staffing and proposed massive funding cuts for the institute.
To make that case, OMB cited a single sentence in a federal spending law that mentions the office can attach footnotes to its apportionment filings. “The Court does not find that this ‘modest’ and ‘subtle’ footnote reference … authorizes the sweeping power to utilize binding apportionment footnotes to advance the Executive Branch’s policy objectives,” Burroughs wrote.
As for the delayed apportionments for IES funding, Burroughs declined to make a definitive ruling. Instead, she instructed the Education Department to report to the court on Sept. 28 whether it’s on track to finish spending the remaining $180 million in IES funds from fiscal 2025 by the Sept. 30 deadline.
“If it appears, as September 30 approaches, that Defendants have misled the Court and the funds will not be obligated by the deadline, the Court may reconsider whether there has been undue delay warranting injunctive relief,” Burroughs wrote.
Burroughs has also yet to rule on the continued withholding of fiscal 2026 funds for IES. Even so, plaintiffs hailed the ruling as an early victory.
“Setting aside the imposition of these Executive Order policy directives through the apportionment process ensures that OMB cannot leverage the apportionment process—and threaten agency officials with administrative and criminal penalties tied to that process—in order to dictate how congressional appropriations are spent,” says a statement from Protect Democracy, the transparency nonprofit representing the plaintiffs.
