Trump Can Cut Teacher-Training Programs for Now, Supreme Court Says

S E E D E D   C O N T E N T

WASHINGTON—A 5-4 Supreme Court gave the Trump administration the go-ahead to cancel federal  teacher-training grants  that the administration said promoted diversity programs.

The high court on Friday lifted an order that had kept the funds flowing to eight states that argued the president had unlawfully terminated millions of dollars in funding.

The decision was the Trump administration’s first win in seeking Supreme Court action over lower court orders pausing its policies. In a handful of previous cases, the court, typically by 5-4 votes, declined to intervene.

This time, however, Justice Amy Coney Barrett joined fellow conservative Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh in siding with the Trump administration. She previously had joined Chief Justice John Roberts and liberal Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson to leave lower court orders in place. The latter four were in the minority Friday, voting to keep the grants alive while litigation over their cancellation proceeds.

The grants at issue totaled  $600 million , according to the states bringing the lawsuit, $65 million of which had yet to be distributed.

The court said that disputes over federal contracts like the education grants ordinarily belong in the Court of Federal Claims, a specialized body in Washington. A federal district court in Boston had found the government likely violated the Administrative Procedure Act, a 1946 statute that sets out rules to promote transparent and reasoned policymaking by the executive branch.

The Supreme Court majority took seriously the administration’s claim that unless the grants were frozen, there was little chance it could recover the funds should it ultimately prevail at the litigation’s end.

“No grantee ‘promised to return withdrawn funds should its grant termination be reinstated,’” the court said. On the other hand, if the grantees win in the end, “they can recover any wrongfully withheld funds” through additional litigation. If they cancel programs for which funding has been cut, “any ensuing irreparable harm would be of their own making,” the court said. The brief order was unsigned, as is typical in emergency matters.

Jackson, joined by Sotomayor, said the majority seized upon technical reasons to intervene in the case without respect to evidence suggesting that the administration lacked a lawful basis to cancel the grants. She noted that the government had terminated the grants en masse without any showing that the grantees failed to comply with the terms of the programs, which were intended in part to produce more teachers for underserved communities.

“It would be manifestly arbitrary and capricious for the Department to terminate grants for funding diversity-related programs that the law expressly requires,” she wrote.

Attorney General Pam Bondi welcomed the decision. “This Supreme Court ruling vindicates what the Department of Justice has been arguing for months: local district judges do not have the jurisdiction to seize control of taxpayer dollars, force the government to pay out billions, or unilaterally halt President Trump’s policy agenda,” she said.

California Attorney General Rob Bonta, a Democrat, said he would continue to pursue the education funds. “California and our multistate coalition remain committed to fighting, so that our kids—especially those in high-poverty or high need schools—have access to qualified, talented teachers and a quality education,” he said.

The administration, which  is trying to dismantle  the cabinet-level Education Department, sent letters in February terminating two programs Congress established to address nationwide teacher shortages, which have been particularly acute in certain communities and subject areas.

A coalition of states led by California filed suit in Boston to stop the cancellations in their states, arguing that Trump officials sidestepped legal requirements for transparency and reasoned explanations when making policy changes.

A federal judge paused the cancellations, finding the states’ suit was likely to succeed, and the First Circuit Court of Appeals, also in Boston, rejected the administration’s appeal.

Both programs, the Teacher Quality Partnership, created in 2008, and the Supporting Effective Educator Development grants, established in 2015, include references to diversity, such as favoring programs that train teachers who can provide “instruction to diverse populations, including children with disabilities, limited English proficient students, and children from low income families.”

According to the lawsuit, the funds typically go to teacher-education programs at schools such as California State University, Chico, which “received a three-year SEED grant in 2022 to address a chronic shortage of qualified teachers in rural northeastern California,” and Montclair State University in New Jersey, where two TQP grants funded a residency that “recruited and trained 140 highly qualified educators to serve in urban school districts.”

The Education Department sent recipients form letters listing several possible reasons for canceling the grants, such as those that “DEI initiatives or other initiatives that unlawfully discriminate,” “conflict with the Department’s policy of prioritizing merit, fairness, and excellence,” or “otherwise fail to serve the best interests of the United States.”

The letter “does not reach the level of a reasoned explanation; indeed it amounts to no explanation at all,” U.S. District Judge Myong Joun, an appointee of former President Joe Biden, said in issuing a temporary restraining order that kept money flowing to grantees in the plaintiff states of California, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Colorado, Illinois, Maryland, New York and Wisconsin.

In her emergency appeal to the Supreme Court, acting Solicitor General Sarah Harris characterized Joun’s order as one of many lower court decisions that improperly interfere with the president’s prerogative to manage the government.

“The aim is clear: to stop the Executive Branch in its tracks and prevent the Administration from changing direction on hundreds of billions of dollars of government largesse that the Executive Branch considers contrary to the United States’ interests and fiscal health,” she wrote.

“One grant, for example, ‘funded a project that involved a ‘racial and ethnic autobiography’ that asked whether individuals ever ‘felt threatened? marginalized? privileged?’ and how they would ‘seek to challenge power imbalances,’ ” she wrote. Another “sought to ensure that teachers were “purposeful in implementing cultural and SEL [social-emotional learning]/DEI practices with fidelity.”