Twenty-five ongoing projects related to special education got cancellation notices on Friday night from the U.S. Department of Education, imminently jeopardizing more than $30 million worth of federally funded efforts in 14 states to help educators better serve students with disabilities.
Cancellations for money that was due to arrive Oct. 1 hit five state education departments, three small nonprofit organizations, 12 universities, and the nation’s oldest K-12 school for the blind. All the affected competitive grants fall under Part D of the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act, the federal law that enshrines education rights for the nation’s 7 million K-12 students with disabilities.
Department officials told the 25 canceled grantees that each of their projects “is inconsistent with, and no longer effectuates, the best interests of the federal government.” In each case, the cancellation notices cite language from the grantees’ application materials that references diversity, equity, inclusion, racism, and related concepts.
There’s no precedent for an administration canceling this many ongoing IDEA Part D grants at once for any reason, let alone for political ones, said Larry Wexler, who oversaw Part D grants at the Education Department between 2010 and 2024.
In some cases, applications solicited during the Biden administration required prospective grantees to use language the new administration now aims to eradicate, Wexler said.
“People were told, ‘You’re going to get extra credit for having hiring practices that lead to diverse hiring,’” Wexler said. “People filled in the blanks to get credit for it, and now, they’re losing their grants.”
Organizations with canceled grants—including some that have received federal funding for decades—have just one week to submit an appeal letter. The department has offered little clarity on which appeals are likely to succeed.
Meanwhile, the agency has said it plans to redistribute the canceled funds to new grant recipients focused on training teachers to work directly with students with disabilities. Soliciting and evaluating a new round of grant recipients could take months, though.
A department spokesperson didn’t respond to a request for comment Monday. On Friday, press secretary Savannah Newhouse told Education Week the canceled funds “are being reinvested immediately into high-quality programs that better serve special-needs students.”
Canceled grants include efforts to support students with rare disabilities and train teachers
The department terminated the awards of a small fraction of grantees from five separate IDEA Part D funding streams:
- Four out of 49 state “deafblind” technical-assistance centers serving 1,000 students across eight states with visual and hearing impairments ($1 million total).
- Three out of 26 Community Parent Resource Centers—parent-led nonprofits that help parents of particular populations of students with disabilities understand their rights ($360,000 total).
- Four out of more than two dozen active State Personnel Development Grants, which fuel efforts to grow the pipeline of special education teachers, a position that districts commonly struggle to fill ($6 million total).
- Thirteen out of more than 100 active grants for university programs that fuel doctoral research and professional training for aspiring special education teachers ($3.8 million total).
- One technical assistance center (out of more than three dozen such centers) that helps states improve efforts to collect data on issues with disproportionate identification of students with disabilities ($3.5 million).
The department told Congress on Friday that hundreds more Part D grants are set to receive continuation awards for the fiscal year that starts Oct. 1—reassuring some advocates who had feared even steeper cuts.
“I am pleased to learn that most current Part D grants will be continued, a strong signal that the Department of Education plans to continue to support the 8 million infants, toddlers, children, and youth served by IDEA in the way Congress intended,” wrote Chad Rummel, the executive director of the nonprofit Council for Exceptional Children, in a statement Monday. “However, it is troubling to learn that some Part D grants will be terminated early, many of which were preparing personnel to work in high-needs areas of our profession.”
Some projects lost funding for including priorities required by law
The 25 awards that would have flowed to grantees on Oct. 1 were collectively worth $14.8 million for the coming year.
But the amount of terminated funds is larger when taking into account the multiple years left on some grant awards: including the 2025 award, two canceled projects had two years of funding left; 11 had three years of funding left; and seven had four years of funding left, according to an Education Week analysis of publicly available federal grant award data.
Eight of the canceled grants, or just shy of one-third, are located in states Trump won in the 2024 presidential election.
Each cancellation letter looks roughly the same and comes bearing two signatures: Diana Diaz, the deputy assistant secretary and acting assistant secretary in the department’s office of special education programs; and Murray Bessette, the principal deputy assistant secretary and acting assistant secretary in the office of planning, evaluation, and policy development.
The letters quote directly from passages of the grantees’ application submissions that clash with the Trump administration’s crackdown on programming that promotes diversity, equity, and inclusion.
The Wisconsin education department, for instance, got a cancellation notice for special education teacher training, Bessette and Diaz wrote, because the agency committed in its grant application to having 40 percent of job candidates come from “underrepresented and historically marginalized groups.”
The five-year program is wrapping up its first year and was slated to receive another $8.4 million between now and 2029. The agency is currently considering whether to appeal the cancellation, said spokesperson Chris Bucher.
Wexler, who led the creation of the State Personnel Development Grant program when Congress authorized it during the Clinton administration, said the program was always designed to let states determine their own needs. Wisconsin determined it needed, among other things, a more diverse teacher workforce.
“The research shows that minority children do better if they see someone as a teacher that looks like them,” Wexler said. “It’s not an evil thing.”
The cancellation letters don’t specify how long the appeals process will take or the criteria the Education Department will use to assess appeals. The department under Trump has given recipients of other affected grants similar opportunities to appeal, but the vast majority of recipients have not seen their awards restored.
Some have succeeded in having their awards reinstated through litigation.
Projects focused on fighting racism and emphasizing diversity lost federal support
A Department of Education spreadsheet circulated on Capitol Hill Friday night offers a paragraph of explanation for canceling each of the 25 projects.
All 25 explanations say the grantees have “proposed project activities that may conflict with the department’s policy of prioritizing merit, fairness, and excellence in education.” Some also say the project may “violate the letter or purpose of federal civil rights law.” Most paragraphs consist of directly quoted passages from the grant recipients’ application materials.
The department took issue with certain activities organizations have been doing to supplement their work, including regular racial-equity training, concerted efforts to become more diverse and inclusive, and programs designed to improve recruitment and retention for educators of color. In most cases, those efforts were only part of a larger project.
The Community Inclusion and Development Alliance in New York state lost its $120,000 grant for 2025 to provides resources for parents of children with disabilities because, per the department, it’s “designed to primarily serve Korean Americans,” although the organization included an extensive anti-discrimination pledge in its application.
Community parent-resource centers are required under federal special education law to pay special attention to “underserved parents of children with disabilities, including low-income parents and parents of limited English-proficient children.”
“Defunding community parent-resource centers is a despicable act by the administration,” said Wexler, who worked on special education at the department for more than 35 years.
In several instances, the administration cited efforts to dismantle racism as evidence that the programs may violate the law.
One Part D program drew the department’s ire for language on its grant application that said it “surfaces the impact of white supremacy and the history of whiteness on systems, works to disrupt and dismantle its effects, and facilitates action planning to build a more equitable system of education in its place.”
Another explanatory paragraph from the spreadsheet quotes from a plan to “encourage applications” from people from underrepresented backgrounds as evidence of a potential civil rights violation.
In addition to the 25 Part D cuts, the spreadsheet also lists nine Rehabilitation Services Agency grants slated for cancellation. The grants, worth a combined $3.6 million, were largely covering training for Braille and interpreter training, including for teachers.
Many Part D grants will continue—but uncertainty lingers
Recent days haven’t been all bad for Part D grant recipients. The department told congressional staff in an email on Friday that, in addition to the 25 Part D cancellations, it also intends to continue 464 IDEA Part D grants that have been awaiting their next round of annual funding.
In addition to the rest of the deafblind centers, personnel-preparation programs, and community parent-resource centers, that number includes all current grantees for several programs funded under Part D:
- Roughly 75 Parent Training and Information Centers, which supply resources and legal guidance to help parents of children with disabilities in their respective states navigate special education services.
- Four regional centers and one national center that support the parent-training centers and the community parent-resource centers.
- Several dozen Technology and Media Development initiatives, including for new tools to support instruction for children with disabilities.
Some programs have already received their continuation awards. Others received notice last week that their continuation awards are forthcoming, once they agree to new grant language committing them to upholding the Trump administration’s priorities and following existing federal civil rights laws.
But some grantees still haven’t gotten their continuation awards, even after finding out that the department told Congress it intends to send them.
One university professor who oversees a special education master’s program has had to tell interested students—many of whom are current educators—to hold off on enrolling because there’s no guarantee the federal Part D funding that helps cover their tuition will flow.
The professor, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of concern for their grant continuation, worries wavering enrollment numbers will lead the university to de-prioritize the program.
The onslaught of delays and uncertainty “can have a lasting effect even if we do get the funding eventually,” the professor said.
