California, other states sue Trump administration over clawback of COVID school funds
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- The Trump administration has argued the COVID-19 emergency is over, and school districts have had enough time to spend the funding.
- California argues the effects of COVID-19 learning disruptions are still being felt, and the clawback of funding is illegal.
California and a coalition of other states sued Thursday to block the Trump administration’s attempt to take back hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding intended to support the academic recovery of students whose education was disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic.
The previously awarded funding — including more than $200 million for California alone — is currently being used by schools for after-school and summer learning programs, student mental health services, new classroom technology and other infrastructure needs, all of which would be in danger if the funds are stripped away, California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta said in an interview with The Times.
While the COVID-19 emergency has ended, the negative impacts of school closures and on-line learning persist, with students across the country lagging behind academically, Bonta said.
The Biden administration had granted an extension to use the funds. But Education Secretary Linda McMahon announced last month that the funding would be immediately rescinded because the pandemic is over. Bonta called the action “arbitrary and capricious” and therefore illegal under federal law.
“The Biden administration extended the funding because the funding is not related to just a state of emergency. It’s related to ongoing challenges, like the ongoing mental health challenges that students are facing, that we all know about and that have been well documented, [and] the need to address learning loss,” Bonta said. “It’s a complete fallacy and a red herring to suggest that, since the state of the emergency is over, the funding should end, too.”
California’s lawsuit, which it filed alongside 14 other states and the District of Columbia in federal court in New York, alleges McMahon’s withdrawal of funding violates the Administrative Procedure Act, and calls on the court to preempt serious harm the withdrawal will cause to the states’ students by immediately restoring access to the funds through March 2026.
Neither the Education Department nor the White House immediately responded to a request for comment Thursday. Los Angeles Unified said in a statement that it has “mostly expended” its COVID-related funds, so the Trump administration’s actions “will not significantly impact” it. Other school districts in the L.A. region were unable to comment.
McMahon’s March 28 letter, sent to school districts around the country, was one of the latest moves by the Trump administration to eliminate or claw back federal funding previously allocated to the states — part of a wider effort by the administration to eliminate what it calls waste, fraud and overspending by a bloated federal government.
As Trump begins dismantling the Education Department, student loan services, civil rights enforcement and funding for disadvantaged students remain in limbo.
Trump has directed McMahon to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education, and in early March laid off about half of the agency’s employees, which California and other states are also suing to stop. Democrats have criticized Trump’s stated intention of shuttering the Education Department as illegal and reckless — it would take an act of Congress to shut it down entirely — and many in Congress similarly blasted McMahon’s attempt to rescind remaining COVID-19 funds.
In her letter, McMahon wrote that the school districts had been given ample time to spend the funding, missed their original deadlines for doing so, and would therefore be stripped of it. The Biden administration extension to spend the funding “does not change anything” or preclude the rescinding of the funds now, because the extension was “discretionary” and “subject to reconsideration.”
“Extending deadlines for COVID-related grants, which are in fact taxpayer funds, years after the COVID pandemic ended is not consistent with the Department’s priorities and thus not a worthwhile exercise of its discretion,” McMahon wrote.
She said that new extensions would be considered on “an individual project-specific basis,” upon request by districts.
In their own April 7 letter, Democratic members of Congress — including Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) and a handful of House representatives from California — called on McMahon to reverse the decision immediately, saying many districts had received extensions more than six months prior to McMahon’s letter and already allocated the funding.
The lawmakers called McMahon’s move an “abrupt and chaotic revision of policy” that was “not helpful to students,” and said they were alarmed by McMahon’s “lack of recognition of the lasting effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on our nation’s students.”
Scores nationwide and in California have yet to rebound from pandemic-era declines. Some outcomes continue to get worse. Low math and English scores, California and L.A. included, mark the nation’s report card.
The lawmakers pointed to recent National Assessment of Educational Progress results, which showed national scores below pre-pandemic levels in all grades and subjects, and continued high rates of chronic absenteeism.
The lawmakers alleged McMahon’s decision was “yet another way this administration is seeking to strip educational opportunities for students in order to pay for tax cuts for billionaires and large corporations.”
Bonta said there may be a lawful way for the White House and the Education Department to carefully review educational funding and reassess individual grants, but McMahon’s sweeping decision — on the argument that COVID-19 disruptions have ended — was “not it.”
Thursday’s lawsuit is the 13th filed against the current Trump administration by Bonta’s office, and not the first based on allegations that the Trump administration has violated the Administrative Procedure Act.
“We believe he has broken the law again here and in the process deprived children, America’s students, of critical funding,” Bonta said. “We’re not going to stand for it and we’ll see them in court.”
The funding in question was originally allocated under two 2021 measures, the American Rescue Plan Act and the Coronavirus Response and Relief Supplemental Appropriations Act.
California was joined in the lawsuit by Arizona, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon and the District of Columbia. Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro also joined, though the state — represented by a Republican attorney general — did not.
Other litigation is also pending against the Education Department.
A lawsuit brought by the Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates and two parents last month alleges the Trump administration’s hollowing-out of the department has hampered investigations by its Office for Civil Rights into school-based discrimination.
“Even as OCR generally stopped investigating complaints from the public based on race or sex discrimination, it cherry-picked and, on its own initiative, began targeted investigations into purported discrimination against white and cisgender students,” the complaint alleges.
On Thursday, several additional parents and students with pending discrimination claims joined the case, which asks the court to “restore the investigation and processing capacity of OCR and to process OCR complaints promptly and equitably.”
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