The Supreme Court is allowing the Trump administration to cancel $65 million in education grants targeted as part of President Donald Trump’s pledge to eliminate so-called diversity, equity and inclusion efforts.
In a 5-4 ruling Friday, the justices granted the administration’s request to terminate the grants while litigation over the issue proceeds. The high court’s action lifted an order a federal judge in Boston issued last month blocking the administration from terminating the grants for teacher-training programs in eight Democratic-led states that sued to restore the grants.
Chief Justice John Roberts and the court’s three liberal justices dissented from the high court’s ruling.
The high court’s move comes as the Trump administration is seeking to cancel grants, terminate contracts and fire workers at federal agencies across the government.
But courts have blocked several of those attempts after a wave of lawsuits filed by Democratic-led states, nonprofit groups and federal employee unions.
The justices’ ruling Friday in the dispute over the teacher grants is the first major win for the Trump administration’s cost-cutting agenda and his efforts to curb DEI practices across the federal government.
In an unsigned order endorsed by all the court’s conservatives other than Roberts, the majority signaled that it did not believe the case warranted the extraordinary relief of a restraining order against the federal government. The majority said the states backing the suit have the funds to continue the teacher-training programs while the states fight in court to recover the federal funding.
The states “have represented in this litigation that they have the financial wherewithal to keep their programs running. So, if respondents ultimately prevail, they can recover any wrongfully withheld funds through suit in an appropriate forum,” the high court’s three-page order said.
The majority seemed to have little sympathy for the states, declaring that “any ensuing irreparable harm would be of their own making” if they choose not to fund the programs themselves. The majority also suggested the states filed suit in the wrong court, because disputes about federal contracts are ordinarily heard by a different tribunal in Washington, the Court of Federal Claims.
However, Justice Elena Kagan said in a two-page dissent that her colleagues in the majority erred by taking up the matter on an emergency basis rather than letting the litigation play out.
“In my view, nothing about this case demanded our immediate intervention,” the liberal justice wrote. “Rather than make new law on our emergency docket, we should have allowed the dispute to proceed in the ordinary way.”
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, also questioned the urgency of the issue. “It is beyond puzzling that a majority of Justices conceive of the Government’s application as an emergency,” Jackson wrote in a 17-page dissent.
However, Jackson foresaw “devastation” from the abrupt funding halt. She also waded into the details of the legal fight, arguing that the administration’s cancellation of the grants was at odds with Congress’ intent in setting up the programs.
“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. “The agency’s abruptness leaves one wondering whether any reasoned decisionmaking has occurred with respect to these terminations at all.”
Roberts did not join either of the written dissents and did not explain his vote to deny the administration’s request.
The programs at issue in the Supreme Court’s ruling were created by Congress to recruit and train teachers to work in “underserved” communities and to seek out educators from “underrepresented populations” and “who reflect the communities in which they will teach.”
One of the programs, the Teacher Quality Partnership, was created in 2008 under President George W. Bush. The other, the Supporting Effective Educator Development program, was authorized by Congress in 2015, under President Barack Obama.
In defending the Trump administration’s actions, the Justice Department had urged the justices to use the case to send a message reining in what it called the “fiscal micromanagement” of the U.S. government by federal district court judges.
“This Court should put a swift end to federal district courts’ unconstitutional reign as self-appointed managers of Executive Branch funding and grant-disbursement decisions,” acting Solicitor General Sarah Harris wrote.
The states that filed suit contend that the recipients of the grants, in many cases state colleges and universities, were using the money consistent with Congress’ intent and that the terminations inflicted havoc on both the institutions as well as the teachers being trained with the funds. The states also argued that the Education Department is required to go through notice-and-comment rulemaking to alter the goals of the grant programs.
U.S. District Judge Myong Joun, a Biden appointee based in Boston, ruled March 10 that the Education Department had provided no “reasoned explanation” for the grant terminations, which he found were “arbitrary and capricious.”
Another federal judge in Maryland also ordered the Trump administration to continue funding the same types of grants for members of specific education-related groups who filed a separate suit over efforts to terminate the programs.
The Supreme Court’s ruling on the teacher grants is its second on a spending-related matter brought to the court by the Trump administration on an emergency basis since Trump was sworn in for a second term in January.
Last month, the justices split, 5-4, as they declined to lift a lower court order requiring the federal government to pay about $2 billion in already-incurred bills for foreign aid grants and contracts the Trump administration sought to cancel. The broader import of that order was murky because officials had already missed the judge’s deadline to pay the bills.
Hassan Ali Kanu contributed to this report.
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