Trump's actions to abolish the Education Department, and what happens next

President Donald Trump has unleashed a flurry of orders and actions designed to reshape the federal government’s role in education since taking office for the second time. He directed Education Secretary Linda McMahon to shrink the agency she oversees, while other cuts have been initiated by Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency. Shuttering the Education Department entirely would take an act of Congress, but the administration laid off about half of its workers, floated plans to shift its work to other departments, and cut millions of dollars for education research, teacher-training programs and other projects funded through agencies as varied as the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Agriculture, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Department of Health and Human Services, among others.

At the same time, Trump is calling for a larger federal role in certain areas of education. His administration is redefining what the federal government considers discrimination in schools and on college campuses, eliminating diversity, equity and inclusion policies among others that it describes as “woke” and punishing academic institutions it says discriminate against white and Asian people by taking into account race in hiring, housing, admissions and other practices.

The administration is also aggressively investigating colleges over alleged antisemitism and policies that are inclusive of transgender students, and in some cases canceling colleges’ federal funding. It has threatened the visa status of international students over minor legal infractions.

Many of the administration’s actions have been challenged in court but are already influencing how schools and colleges operate. This map shows which colleges and K-12 schools are being investigated.

We’ve compiled the administration’s major education actions below and are updating this list as Trump’s second term unfolds. Tell us how the effects of these executive actions are unfolding in your communities, child care centers, schools and colleges. Email us: editor@hechingerreport.org. Learn how to reach us securely.

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Week 49 (Dec. 29)

The Justice Department sued the Commonwealth of Virginia over state laws offering in-state tuition and financial assistance to students who are undocumented. The agency has filed similar suits against six other states, arguing that their laws discriminate against U.S. citizens who must pay out-of-state tuition.

The Department of Health and Human Services will pause child care payments in Minnesota following a viral video by a right-wing influencer alleging fraud in some child care centers, according to a social media post from Deputy Secretary Jim O’Neill. The pause affects about $185 million for centers that serve children from low-income families. While Minnesota has acknowledged cases of fraud in social services spending in recent years, Gov. Tim Walz said this move by HHS was motivated by politics rather than evidence of misspending.

HHS also paused child care funding to all states, according to ABC News. HHS spokesperson Andrew Nixon told the news organization that child care centers receiving federal funding are required to send the agency their “administrative data” for review. Cindy Lehnhoff, director of the National Child Care Association, told NPR that the freeze could trigger center closures, affecting both families who receive federally subsidized care and those who don’t and potentially driving parents out of the workforce.

Week 49 (Dec. 22)

The federal government said that beginning in January, it will start garnishing the wages of student loan borrowers who are in default, meaning they have not made a payment in more than 270 days, or 9 months. Up to 15 percent of wages could be withheld from borrowers who do not pay off the loan or make other payment arrangements, though borrowers have the right to appeal a garnishment. In May, the administration announced that it would bring back financial penalties for loan defaults, ending a five-year pause that began during the pandemic. At that time, an estimated 5 million borrowers were in default.

The Education Department announced it will review Brown University’s response to a December 13 campus shooting that killed two students and wounded nine others. The administration will investigate whether Brown violated a section of the Higher Education Act known as the Clery Act, which requires colleges to meet certain security requirements to remain eligible for federal student aid. By January 30, 2026, Brown must submit a list of information including an “audit trail” detailing arrests and campus police call logs between 2021 and 2025.

Week 48 (Dec. 15)

The Education Department canceled tens of millions of dollars in community service grants that helped schools and colleges in low-income communities provide food, housing and other resources for families, according to Education Week. The schools were in the middle of the five-year grants and were set to receive the next round in two weeks when a dozen or more programs were notified they would not receive the rest of the money.

The Education Department is awarding $256 million in grants to expand and support “evidence-based literacy instruction,” the agency announced. The purpose of the funding was to expand on literacy initiatives that have already had positive outcomes for students, the agency said, and nearly two-thirds of the grant money will support projects in rural communities.

The Education Department announced the Presidential 1776 Award, a national competition in which high school students can compete next year for three scholarships of up to $150,000. Students are invited to participate in three rounds of multiple choice and verbal tests of their civics and history knowledge.

The Education Department is sponsoring a $15 million competition where states will launch “talent marketplaces” aimed at making it easier for job seekers to build and get recognized for their skills. The Trump administration says the prize money will go to up to 10 states that come up with plans — like credential registries — for their marketplaces.

The Department of Health and Human Services announced it’s creating special career fairs for students at Historically Black Colleges and Universities, and will offer paid fellowships to HBCU students interested in public service. The fellowship program is named after Roy Wilkins, an NAACP leader who once received the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

The Department of Health and Human Services cut several multimillion dollar grants to the American Academy of Pediatrics after the group criticized Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy’s policies, The Washington Post first reported. The money supported work on issues including earlier identification of autism, mental health, adolescent health and rural access to health care.

Week 47 (Dec. 8)

The Education Department announced that it had reached a proposed settlement with Missouri to end a Biden-era student loan repayment plan known as the SAVE Plan (or Saving on a Valuable Education). The plan, which had been challenged by a collection of Republican states, allowed borrowers in some cases to pay $0 per month and get loans forgiven in as little as 10 years. The agreement, which needs to be approved by the courts, would move all 7 million borrowers enrolled in SAVE to other repayment plans.

The Trump administration announced a new “earnings indicator” that will flag whether graduates from a particular college or program are making more, on average, than someone in the same state who has only a high school diploma. Instead of having to look up the information on a separate website, prospective students will be able to see if a program failed when they fill out the FAFSA, which is the form students submit when they are applying for federal financial aid.

The Justice Department issued a final rule repealing a 50-year-old civil rights standard, known as “disparate impact,” that has been used to fight racial bias in schools, among other institutions. Under the standard, local governments and organizations were ineligible for federal funding not only if they intentionally discriminated, but also if they imposed policies that produced a disparate impact on protected demographic groups such as women, LGBTQ+ people and people of color. The Justice Department said the rule was itself discriminatory.

The Justice Department sued Minneapolis Public Schools, alleging that several policies designed to recruit and retain teachers from underrepresented groups are discriminatory. The department’s lawsuit cites language in a contract with the city’s teachers union that protects teachers of color from “last-in, first-out” layoff policies, as well as a “Black Men Teach Fellows” program it said gave certain benefits to Black male teachers that were not available to others. A spokesperson for the district told several news outlets she could not comment, citing the litigation.

The Department of Education awarded more than $208 million in mental health grants to 65 states and school districts, more than half of which serve rural communities, the agency announced Thursday. The announcement comes about eight months after the department said it was cancelling more than 200 mental health grants for schools, saying they violated the Trump administration’s interpretation of civil rights law because of diversity, equity and inclusion components. More than a dozen states are challenging the cuts in court. In September, the agency said it would award $270 million in mental health grants to hire social workers, counselors and school psychologists.

Week 46 (Dec. 1)

The Education Department informed colleges and universities of a new way of reporting foreign gifts and contracts of more than $250,000. The Trump administration has previously accused higher education institutions of a lack of transparency around foreign funding and threatened to withhold federal grants from those that don’t comply with reporting rules.

The Department of Education ordered roughly 250 Office for Civil Rights staffers to return to work and help clear a backlog of cases, according to a document obtained by USA Today. The employees were let go in March but sued over the firings and are on administrative leave as the case winds through the legal system. The department said it would not rehire the employees permanently.

The Department of Justice’s Legal Counsel released an opinion saying that racial quotas and preferences in the Department of Education’s Minority Serving Institutions programs are unconstitutional. The MSI programs, which include Hispanic Serving Institutions, Native American Serving Non-Tribal Institutions and Asian American and Native American Pacific Islander Serving Institutions, support colleges and universities that educate a certain share of students from a particular ethnic or racial group.

Week 45 (Nov. 24)

The Trump administration is suing the University of Pennsylvania, arguing that the institution hasn’t complied with a subpoena in an investigation into antisemitism on campus. The subpoena asked for names and personal contact information for possible witnesses and victims of the alleged antisemitism, including members of Jewish groups and clubs on campus and employees of the university’s Jewish studies program. Hundreds of students, faculty, alumni and others have signed a petition supporting the university’s decision to withhold that information.

The Education Department said it is reviewing whether the University of California, Berkeley, violated the Clery Act, which requires higher education institutions to maintain campus safety standards in order to qualify for federal financial aid. Education Secretary McMahon said the university had allowed a campus protest of a Turning Point USA chapter to become “unruly and violent,” two months after the conservative group’s founder, Charlie Kirk, was assassinated.

The Trump administration reached a deal with Northwestern University, in which the school agreed to pay $75 million to restore federal research funding and settle investigations into alleged antisemitism. The agreement also requires the university to revoke a 2024 agreement it made to end encampments protesting the Gaza war, and the university’s medical school to make changes to policies regarding transgender care, The New York Times reported.

Week 44 (Nov. 17)

The Trump administration announced it was moving six programs within the Department of Education to other federal agencies, perhaps the most brazen step to date in its efforts to dismantle the federal education agency. The Department of Education said it had created agreements with the Department of Labor, the Department of Interior, the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of State to take over aspects of the education agency, including administering funds for Elementary and Secondary Education as well as higher education workforce programs. The Department of Interior will take “a greater role” in administering Indian Education programs, the agency said in a press release.

Many education groups expressed concern about those actions. “Spreading services across multiple departments will create more confusion, more mistakes and more barriers for people who are just trying to access the support they need,” Randi Weingarten, head of the American Federation of Teachers, said in a statement.

The State Department is proposing to suspend 38 universities from Diplomacy Lab, a program that matches academic researchers with State Department policy offices, over alleged diversity, equity and inclusion in hiring, The Guardian reported. If the proposal moves forward, banned universities such as Stanford, Johns Hopkins, Yale and George Washington would be replaced by other institutions including Liberty and Brigham Young.

The Department of Justice sued California over its policy of offering in-state tuition rates to students who are undocumented. The state is the sixth to face a lawsuit over such policies, which the Justice Department says discriminate against U.S. citizens from other states who are not eligible for the lower, in-state tuition rates.

Week 43 (Nov. 10)

The Department of Justice is investigating protests at the University of California, Berkeley, during an event held there by the conservative group Turning Point USA, Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon said in a social media post. University spokesperson Dan Mogulof said several people were arrested at the event and condemned any violence around it, CNN reported.

The Education Department is restructuring a grant program that helped colleges support students facing housing or food insecurity and increased the number of highly skilled teachers graduating from historically Black colleges and universities. The Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education will now focus on artificial intelligence; civil discourse; accreditation; and short-term, workforce-aligned academic programs. The department expects to award grants in these new areas by the end of the year.

The president signed an executive order advanced by first lady Melania Trump that is aimed at improving educational and employment opportunities for former foster youth. It creates an online platform to connect former foster youth with jobs and other opportunities and boosts their access to education and training vouchers, among other steps.

Week 42 (Nov. 3)

The Trump administration reached a deal with Cornell University to reinstate roughly $250 million in federal funding. In exchange, Cornell will pay $30 million to the federal government; invest another $30 million in “research programs that will directly benefit U.S. farmers”; and provide college admissions data to the government, among other requirements. The Trump administration had been investigating Cornell over alleged antisemitism and discrimination in programs designed to advance diversity.

Week 41 (Oct. 27)

The Trump administration said it had finalized new rules for the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, which began in 2007 as a way to incentivize people to work in public service. Under the new rules, employees of organizations that work with undocumented immigrants, perform gender reassignment surgeries or participate in other activities the administration deems illegal will not be eligible, the Education Department said. Critics decried the new regulation. “This rule aims to penalize nonprofit organizations whose work does not advance Trump’s political views,” said Viviann Anguiano, of the left-leaning Center for American Progress, in a statement.

Some 120 TRIO programs, including one at SUNY Adirondack, lost their grant money at least in part because they said they hoped to enroll an equal number of male and female students, the advocacy group Council for Opportunity in Education said, confirming reporting by Inside Higher Ed. TRIO programs support underrepresented students getting into and through college. Council President Kimberly Jones said all of the canceled programs referenced DEI–related goals or work in their applications, or they said the program would have been located in the respective college’s DEI office. Some of the DEI offices have since been closed, however, but those grants were still canceled.

Week 40 (Oct. 20)

The Justice Department said it will monitor the University of Virginia through 2028 to ensure the university is not engaging in what the federal government called unlawful racial discrimination in admissions, hiring and other facets of its operations. In exchange, DOJ will close investigations into UVA’s admissions policies and other possible civil rights violations, and UVA will become eligible for grants and federal awards in the future. UVA will have to certify every quarter that it is complying with DOJ’s “Guidance for Recipients of Federal Funding Regarding Unlawful Discrimination.”

Week 39 (Oct. 13)

The Education Department agreed in court to resume canceling the debt of some student loan borrowers after the Trump administration paused loan forgiveness earlier this year. The American Federation of Teachers and others sued the administration over the pause, in part because it could prove costly for borrowers on income-driven repayment plans. These borrowers committed to decades of paying down their loans, and some reached their respective obligation for payments this year but could not apply to have their outstanding debt erased. A temporary tax break exempts canceled student loan debt from being counted as income on federal taxes, but it expires at the end of this year.

Week 38 (Oct. 6)

The Education Department was among several agencies that began laying off workers to make good on the president’s threats to cut the federal workforce during the government shutdown, news organizations reported. Some 466 Education Department employees lost their jobs.

Nearly all staff in the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services were cut, according to NPR. The office oversees roughly $15 billion in special education funding and services for students with disabilities. “The harm these cuts will cause for the 7.5 million students with disabilities across the country is only beginning,” Rachel Gittleman, president of AFGE Local 252, a union that represents many Education Department employees, told NPR.

Virtually everyone in the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education was laid off, USA Today and other outlets reported. Agency staff in many other areas also lost their jobs, including those who support historically Black colleges and universities, charter schools, tribal colleges, civil rights reviews, arts education and more, according to USA Today.

All the remaining staff who support the 21st Century Community Learning Centers, the primary federal funding stream for after-school and summer learning, were cut, according to the nonprofit Afterschool Alliance. Without those staff, the alliance said, “we risk having more children and youth unsupervised and at risk, more academic failures, more hungry kids, more chronic absenteeism, higher dropout rates, more parents forced out of their jobs, a less STEM-ready and successful workforce, and a child care crisis that is even worse.”

Week 37 (Sept. 29)

The Education Department unfroze money for TRIO programs, a group of eight options that help underrepresented students get into and through college. Hundreds of millions of dollars appropriated by Congress for the current academic year had been withheld. In letters, groups of lawmakers in the House and Senate urged Trump, McMahon and OMB Director Russell Vought to release the money, some of which colleges expected Sept. 1.

HHS formally blocked Harvard from access to future federal grants and government contracts after the agency’s Office for Civil Rights found that the university acted “with deliberate indifference” toward antisemitism over the last two years. Harvard can challenge the move before it becomes final. Harvard had already been disqualified from future federal grants from the Education Department for similar reasons, and other federal investigations and actions against Harvard are also ongoing.

The Department of Education announced $153 million in civics grants to colleges and nonprofits with a focus on American history and civics. The higher education grants will support hosting seminars across the country for the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. The nonprofit grants will focus on “strengthening history and civics instruction in K-12 classrooms.”

The Education Department demanded records and a response to questions from Virginia’s Fairfax County Public Schools following reports that a high school social worker allegedly scheduled and paid for a student’s abortion. The same staff member allegedly pressured another student to terminate her pregnancy, the Education Department said. The district was given three weeks to investigate and respond to the agency.

The Trump administration found the Minnesota Department of Education and the Minnesota State High School League in violation of Title IX for allowing transgender students to participate in female sports and use female locker rooms and bathrooms, HHS and the Education Department said in a statement. The state groups were given 10 days to rescind their guidance on transgender students in sports and meet other requirements or face enforcement actions, the agencies said.

The Federal Communications Commission is ending E-rate funding for Wi-Fi mobile hotspots for school buses. The agency also reversed a Biden-era rule that allowed libraries to use the money to lend mobile hotspots. Schools had been able to use the funding since 2023 to purchase mobile hotspots that gave students access to the Internet while on or around the buses and let them borrow the hotspots from school libraries. A press release from the FCC announcing the cancellation said it would “no longer support the use of scarce taxpayer dollars to fund unsupervised screen time for kids without accounting for the risks.”

The Education Department changed the out-of-office messages of some furloughed federal workers to reflect a partisan message about the government shutdown — without notifying the employees, news outlets reported. “Unfortunately, Democrat senators are blocking passage of H.R. 5371 in the Senate, which has led to a lapse in appropriations. Due to the lapse in appropriations, I am currently in furlough status,” the messages say in part. Some of the employees worried that the message would put them in violation of the Hatch Act, which bans them from political activity in federal buildings or on the job. Education Department spokeswoman Madi Biedermann said, “The email reminds those who reach out to Department of Education employees that we cannot respond because Senate Democrats are refusing to vote for a clean CR and fund the government. Where’s the lie?”

The Department of Education resumed a loan forgiveness program that it paused over the summer, The Washington Post reported. Borrowers who are enrolled in the Income-Based Repayment plan and have been paying their student loans back for 25 years received notices they are eligible for relief. Critics noted that borrowers in other income-driven repayment plans, such as Income-Contingent Repayment, are still awaiting forgiveness.

The Trump administration offered priority for federal funding to universities that agree to a compact promising, among other things, to freeze tuition, limit enrollment of international students, not consider race or other characteristics in admission or hiring and do nothing that could “punish, belittle and even spark violence against conservative ideas.” American Council on Education President Ted Mitchell called the proposal “another instance of the administration weaponizing federal funding to achieve its ideological and political aims,” and California Gov. Gavin Newsom vowed to block public and private colleges or universities in the state from getting state aid if they took the deal. The chairman of the board of the University of Texas, Kevin Eltife, was among the few to react positively to the idea, saying he “look[ed] forward to working with the Trump Administration on it.”

The Justice Department asked the Education Department to investigate the University of Nevada’s efforts to support undocumented students. In a letter to Education Secretary McMahon, Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon said that the school appears to be spending money on financial aid and career support for students who lack papers, in violation of the law. A spokesperson for the university said it was reviewing the letter, a local news outlet reported.

The Education Department reversed a decision to cut funding for students with both hearing and vision loss, after ProPublica reporting on the elimination of some $1 million in annual grants to four programs that support those students. But rather than restoring funding to those groups, the agency rerouted the money to a different organization, the National Center on Deafblindness, which said it would pass the money on to the four programs, according to ProPublica.

Week 36 (Sept. 22)

The California State University system said it had been notified of an investigation by the Trump administration over allegations of antisemitism. Chancellor Mildred García sent an email on Sept. 26 saying that the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission was contacting faculty and staff to “speak with them about their experiences on campus.” In addition, the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights has accused the system of “racial discrimination” because of its connections with the nonprofit PhD Project, which aims to diversify business education and leadership.

The Department of Education released two proposed priorities for its grantmaking: “meaningful learning” and career and technical education and workforce learning. The first includes strengthening core instruction in math, expanding access to high-quality materials and expanding high-impact tutoring, while the second includes aligning workforce development programs with state priorities, building the skilled trades and expanding pre-apprenticeships.

The Education Department said it will spend $500 million to help grow charter schools. The funding, coming after a recent announcement of $60 million for the sector, is for use on buildings and on replicating successful charter schools and represents another nod to the Trump administration’s support of school choice. Federal charter school spending largely held steady during the Biden administration, after getting a boost during Trump’s first term. Charter schools receive public dollars but are independently run.

The superintendent of Des Moines Public Schools in Iowa was arrested by ICE. The agency said Ian Roberts, who became superintendent of the district in 2023 and is a native of Guyana, came to the United States in the 1990s on a visa. According to ICE, Roberts “was given a final order of removal by an immigration judge in May of 2024” and did not have authorization to work in the country.

The Trump administration is considering a plan to alter the federal grantmaking process to give an edge to colleges and universities that have pledged to adhere to its values around hiring, admissions and other areas, The Washington Post reported. A senior White House official said the plan, which would be released in the coming months, was an effort to bring universities into compliance with administration policies across the board, rather than investigating and cutting funding to colleges on an individual basis. Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education, told the Post that the outlines of the proposal amounted to an attack on “institutional autonomy, on ideological diversity, on freedom of expression and academic freedom.”

Months after abruptly ending two grant programs for mental health in K-12 schools, the Education Department said it was starting two new grant programs, totaling about $270-million, to benefit school psychologists, Education Week first reported. The focus of the new programs is narrower than that of the canceled programs, which were aimed at school counselors and social workers as well as school psychologists. They also do not have a goal of diversifying the profession, and colleges and universities aren’t eligible, only state departments of education and school districts.

The Department of Education threatened to withhold $30 million in funding from Florida’s Broward County Public Schools if it doesn’t end a partnership with a national student leadership program, Latinos in Action, WLRN reported. In a letter to the school district, the education agency’s Office for Civil Rights said the group “appears to be explicitly organized around the concept of Latino ethnicity” and thus engages in “textbook racial discrimination.” Broward school board chair Debra Hixon said that the district does not have a Latinos in Action class, as the department suggested, but instead offers an after-school club through the group and uses its curriculum in leadership classes and that those opportunities are open to students of all races and ethnicities.

HHS awarded $50 million in grants to researchers studying different aspects of autism’s environmental and genetic causes. The awards to the 13 projects, all but one led by universities, were made on the same day as a press conference that President Trump used to make unproven or debunked claims linking autism to acetaminophen use during pregnancy and childhood vaccines.

Week 35 (Sept. 15)

The Education Department said it was redirecting money to charter schools, U.S. history and civics programs, historically Black colleges and universities and tribally controlled colleges and universities. The money is being repurposed from programs the agency said are “not in the best interest of students and families,” including grant programs designed to support college students who are Black, Hispanic, Asian or Native American. The agency said it plans to award $500 million to charter schools, more than $160 million to U.S. history and civics programs, and $495 million to HBCUs and TCCUs.

Service academies will accept scores from the Classic Learning Test, an alternative to the SAT and ACT that emphasizes the Western canon and Christian ideas, starting in 2027, Politico reported. The test is championed by conservatives; in 2023, Florida’s state university system approved it for use in college admissions.

The Education Department said its Office for Civil Rights had found Loudoun County Public Schools in violation of Title IX for its treatment of two male students. The Virginia district had suspended the students after they allegedly harassed a transgender student in a locker room. OCR said the district “failed to meaningfully investigate” the male students’ complaints “concerning the presence of a member of the opposite sex in male-only intimate spaces,” yet investigated the other student’s sexual harassment complaint about the boys. The district declined to comment.

The Department of Justice sued the Rhode Island Department of Education and the Providence Public School District, arguing that its Educators of Color Loan Forgiveness Program discriminates against white teachers. Under the program, new teachers in the Providence district who identify as Black, Hispanic, Asian, American Indian and/or two or more races can qualify for up to $25,000 in loan forgiveness, DOJ said. In a statement to CNBC, the district and state Education Department said they worked with DOJ to reach a resolution on the program and had not been informed of the lawsuit.

The Education Department published a proposed rule on “promoting patriotic education.” The proposal would prioritize civic education in Education Department grantmaking. “To truly understand American values, the tireless work it has taken to live up to them, and this country’s exceptional place in world history is the best way to inspire an informed patriotism and love of country,” Education Secretary McMahon said in a statement.

The Education Department said it would partner with more than 40 conservative groups, including Turning Point USA, Moms for Liberty and the Heritage Foundation, to create educational programming about patriotism and civics. The America 250 Civics Education Coalition, whose work will be tied to the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States, will create a college speaker series, among other efforts, the department said. Turning Point Education’s Chief Education Officer Hutz H. Hertzberg said his organization “is more resolved than ever to advance God-centered, virtuous education for students flourishing across our nation.”

The Trump administration told school district leaders in Chicago, New York City and Virginia’s Fairfax County that it was planning to withhold $67 million in federal funding for magnet schools over alleged civil rights violations, the New York Post and other outlets reported. At issue in New York and Fairfax County were district policies on transgender student participation in sports and use of locker rooms and bathrooms. In Chicago, the funding threat concerns the district’s “Black Student Success Plan,” which the administration says is racially discriminatory. New York Mayor Eric Adams said the city’s public school system should rethink its policies on transgender students.

Trump signed a proclamation adding a $100,000 fee for new applicants to the H-1B nonimmigrant visa program, which brings highly skilled workers in certain fields to the United States for temporary jobs. “Some employers, using practices now widely adopted by entire sectors, have abused the H-1B statute and its regulations to artificially suppress wages, resulting in a disadvantageous labor market for American citizens,” the proclamation said. Critics of the fee say it will make it harder for universities to fill faculty and research positions and for K-12 schools to fill vacancies for teaching jobs.

The Education Department gave Harvard 20 days to provide admissions data or face further consequences as part of a review by the Office for Civil Rights into whether the university has been illegally using race as a factor in admissions. The department also said it will place Harvard on “heightened cash monitoring” status because of concerns over the university’s financial position. The new financial designation puts Harvard at risk of losing all federal student aid funding, the department said.

Week 34 (Sept. 8)

The Trump administration canceled a $34.9 million contract with Indiana’s Purdue University for a low-income student college prep program citing DEI violations. Purdue’s contract with the state-run and federally funded program GEAR UP was operating in 10 districts and was supposed to run through 2031. GEAR UP exists in states around the country and has shown success increasing high school graduation rates and college enrollment, but on Sept. 12, the Trump administration said that Purdue’s application promised “culturally responsive teaching” as well as DEI training for managers and abruptly canceled the contract.

The administration published its “Make Our Children Healthy Again” report, a set of policy recommendations spearheaded by HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The document includes proposed changes to school nutrition policy, including removing current restrictions on whole milk sales in schools and limiting or banning the use of artificial food dyes. The report also says the administration will promote more physical activity in after-school programs and launch an awareness campaign to reduce screen use in schools.

The National Center for Education Statistics, after shedding most of its staff as part of the administration’s goal of dismantling the Education Department, is hiring again. The agency, which oversees administration of the NAEP, the Nation’s Report Card, said it is hiring for eight positions, after all the staffers dedicated to NAEP were fired in March as part of a mass downsizing.

Read more: Behind the latest dismal NAEP scores

The Energy Department said it would not go through with rescinding a rule requiring schools to allow girls to try out for certain boys sports teams if there’s no equivalent team available for girls, K-12 Dive reported. The agency received more than 21,000 comments about the rule change since it was proposed in May, many of them critical of the plan.

The Education Department said it was canceling about $350 million in funding for grant programs designated for minority-serving institutions. The canceled grant programs include those for nontribal colleges that serve many Native students, predominantly Black institutions, Hispanic-serving institutions, Asian American and Native American Pacific Islander-serving institutions and more. The Education Department said the programs discriminate by “conferring government benefits exclusively to institutions that meet racial or ethnic quotas.”

The Trump administration announced a new hub for federal workforce development programs that it described as a next step in the process of transferring responsibility for workforce development programs from the Education Department to the Labor Department. Some of the programs the Labor Department will oversee include adult education and family literacy programs along with career and technical education programs. Some career and technical education groups said the move will be bad for the people trying to use these programs.

The Education Department’s Office of Federal Student Aid said it was expanding the mission of its ombudsman’s office, which handles borrower complaints, to include providing students and families with information on the benefits and risks of student loans. “Given that federal student loan debt is nearing $1.7 trillion, and loan defaults and delinquencies remain at record highs, the Office of the Ombudsman will be refocused as the Office of Consumer Education and Ombudsman,” the education agency said. The process of submitting a complaint on the FSA website about student loans or FAFSA also changed, which some lawmakers said will be a hardship for borrowers and students applying for financial aid.

Students’ right to pray in school will be outlined in a forthcoming Education Department rule, Trump said, as part of a speech at the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C., about his commitment to protecting religious freedom. Trump brought to the stage a 12-year-old student from California, Shea Encinas, who said he was forced to read to a younger student a book, “My Shadow is Pink,” that was in conflict with his religious beliefs.

Parents who speak out with concerns about “radical gender and racial ideology” should not be silenced or punished, Attorney General Pam Bondi wrote in a memo to U.S. attorneys and FBI Director Kash Patel, and her agency will work to identify and respond to credible threats against parents and violations of their federal rights. “Let me be clear: when school board members, administrators, and other government officials threaten law-abiding parents, they can and will be held accountable.”

Week 33 (Sept. 1)

FCC Chair Brendan Carr said he is proposing ending subsidies for wireless hot spots on school buses and from libraries, which were introduced during the Biden administration. Carr said the proposal “will end the FCC’s illegal funding unsupervised screen time for young kids,” Reuters reported. Critics warned the proposal would widen the digital divide. “These tools have been lifelines for students who lack reliable internet at home, ensuring they can keep up with assignments, access resources, and participate fully in today’s digital learning environment,” Mark Colwell, of the nonprofit group Mission Telecom, said in a statement.

The Department of Justice is suing Illinois for offering in-state tuition and scholarships to immigrants who live in the state and lack legal status. The agency, which has previously filed similar complaints against Texas, Minnesota, Oklahoma and Kentucky, says such practices discriminate against U.S.-born, out-of-state residents who do not qualify for the lower tuition. A spokesperson for Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker defended the state laws on tuition, saying they are consistent with federal policy.

To be a part of the federal Vaccines for Children program, state groups providing immunizations must honor any local religious and conscience exemptions from vaccine requirements, the HHS Office for Civil Rights reminded participants. The agency said its letter is part of a larger HHS effort to strengthen enforcement of laws protecting conscience and religious exercise.

Week 32 (Aug. 25)

The Education Department froze hundreds of millions of dollars for some TRIO programs, which are intended to help underrepresented students get into and through college. Letters from groups of lawmakers in the House and Senate urged Trump, Education Secretary McMahon and OMB Director Russell Vought to release the money, some of which colleges expected Sept. 1. Although Congress already approved spending for TRIO, the president has proposed eliminating it. The Education Department said the money is being withheld only temporarily. Schools will know by the end of the month if the money will materialize.

The Trump administration has canceled and paused millions of dollars in federal grants for K-12 schools, saying the grantees’ projects are no longer in “the best interests of the federal government,” according to Education Week. Among those are IDEA Part D grants, which include $1 million annually for special education services for students who are deaf and blind, four of more than two dozen state personnel development grants, and 13 out of more than 100 grants to universities that paid for doctoral research and professional training for aspiring special education teachers, Education Week reports.

HHS sent letters to 46 states and territories demanding that they remove references to gender identity in their federally funded sex education curriculum, known as the Personal Responsibility Education Program. The agency gave the states and territories 60 days to comply or risk losing federal dollars.

International students would have a limited amount of time to study in the United States unless they repeatedly apply for extensions to remain here, according to a proposed rule from DHS. The change would reverse a practice in place since 1978 allowing foreign students to enter the country for an undefined period of time. “For too long, past Administrations have allowed foreign students and other visa holders to remain in the U.S. virtually indefinitely, posing safety risks, costing untold amount of taxpayer dollars, and disadvantaging U.S. citizens,” a DHS spokesperson said. International students likely would be turned off by the proposed rule and choose to attend college elsewhere, some advocates said.

After changing the way student visas are vetted, adding reasons to revoke student visas and trying to block international students from attending some U.S. institutions, Trump said he would allow 600,000 students from China to study in the United States, which would more than double the number of Chinese students enrolled in higher education now. Trump made the statement during a meeting with South Korean President Lee Jae Myung at the White House. “I hear so many stories about, ‘We are not going to allow their students,’ but we are going to allow their students to come in. We are going to allow it. It’s very important — 600,000 students.”

Read more: International students are rethinking coming to the U.S. That’s a problem for colleges

Medical schools must incorporate more training about nutrition, HHS and the Education Department said, given how many Americans are plagued by diet-related chronic health diseases. Medical education groups were given until Sept. 10 to submit plans detailing how they would meet the requirement. Before the Trump administration demand, a group of professors already had called for updating and upgrading nutrition education in medical schools.

The Education Department said the school district in Burlington, Massachusetts, may have violated the rights of parents who opted their students out of a survey on topics that included questions about drug and alcohol use, sexual encounters and gender identity. The federal agency said the district’s actions could be a violation of the Protection of Pupil Rights Amendment, which allows parents to exempt their children from participating in such surveys. Several complaints were filed with the Education Department’s Student Privacy Policy Office, which is investigating the allegations.

The Trump administration is cutting funding for campus-based child care at roughly a dozen colleges over accusations that the schools educate young kids about race and gender or prioritize race in hiring practices, The Washington Post reported. The money comes from the federal Child Care Access Means Parents in School, or CCAMPIS, program.

The Education Department said it had found Denver Public Schools in violation of Title IX for maintaining gender-neutral bathrooms. The agency gave the school district 10 days to make changes, including reverting all of its bathrooms to single sex. In a statement, Denver Public Schools said it disagreed with the findings and argued that the agency had never sent staff to visit the high school with the bathroom in question or interviewed teachers or students.

The Trump administration ended the National Blue Ribbon Schools program, created in 1982 to recognize high-achieving schools. The Education Department said the move to end the long-standing program was “in the spirit of Returning Education to the States.” In a letter to state chiefs, the Education Department said, “Awards conceived by those closest to the communities and families served by local schools will do more to encourage meaningful reforms than a one-size-fits-all standard established by a distant bureaucracy in Washington, D.C.”

Week 31 (Aug. 18)

The Trump administration said it will not defend the Hispanic-Serving Institution program, a decades-old designation that qualifies universities with significant shares of Hispanic students for federal grants. The state of Tennessee and the anti-affirmative action group Students for Fair Admissions had sued the government in June over the HSI program, arguing that many public universities in the state serve Hispanic students but do not meet the “arbitrary ethnic threshold” for the grants.

The Education Department announced that it had found George Mason University in violation of Title VI for “illegally using race and other immutable characteristics in university practices and policies, including hiring and promotion.” To resolve the violations, the agency said the Virginia university’s president would need to issue a personal apology for promoting illegal practices, among other steps.

The Department of Education told a federal judge in a court filing that it would begin rehiring laid-off workers in its Office for Civil Rights. The reinstatement of the roughly 25 employees came a day after the judge said the Education Department was not complying with his June order to bring them back, Education Week reported.

HHS pulled federal funding for a sex education program in California after the state declined to remove references to transgender and nonbinary people and to gender identity, The Guardian and other outlets reported. California, in a letter to the Trump administration, said the curriculum was medically accurate, important for young people and their health, and in line with the law.

Haverford College is being investigated by the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights after what the agency called “credible reports” that the college had failed to respond to discrimination against and harassment of Jewish and Israeli students. The investigation was at least the 80th such probe by the Trump administration into colleges and schools for alleged antisemitism or shared ancestry discrimination.

The Education Department has rescinded guidance requiring schools to accommodate students who are learning English, The Washington Post reported. The move followed a July memorandum from DOJ to federal agencies instructing them to follow Trump’s declaration of English as the “official language” of the United States. A spokesperson for the Education Department told the Post that the 2015 guidance was rescinded because it was “not in line with Administration policy.”

The Education Department released a draft rule that would exclude from the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program employees of groups it said “are undermining national security and American values through illegal means, and therefore not providing a public service.” Critics decried the proposed rule as a political stunt. “By using a distorted and overly broad definition of ‘illegal activities,’ the Trump administration is exploiting the student loan system to attack political opponents,” Kristin McGuire, president of the health advocacy group Young Invincibles, wrote in a statement.

The Education Department released guidance warning colleges and universities against using federal work-study dollars to pay students to engage in voter registration and other work it called political. The guidance rescinded a Biden administration rule from 2024 approving work-study funding for election-related activities if “they are not associated with a particular interest or group.”

The Education Department said it was placing five Virginia school districts — Arlington, Fairfax, Loudoun and Prince William counties along with the city of Alexandria — on “high-risk status” and would scrutinize all reimbursements to them. The move came days after the agency said it would begin the process of suspending or terminating federal funding to those districts after their leaders declined to change policies on transgender students. Officials from those districts said the policies, such as allowing students to use bathrooms based on their gender identities, were in line with antidiscrimination laws.

The Readiness and Emergency Management for Schools technical assistance center, which helps schools prepare for active shooter incidents, cyberattacks and other emergencies, told its affiliates that it would shut down on Sept. 18, EdWeek reported. Its director did not offer an explanation for the shutdown and did not respond to a request for comment from EdWeek.

Week 30 (Aug. 11)

The Defense Department said it would no longer consider race in admissions at its military academies as part of a settlement with the group Students for Fair Admissions. The agreement said that the Pentagon had determined that considering race and ethnicity in admissions “does not promote military cohesiveness, lethality, recruitment, retention, or legitimacy; national security; or any other governmental interest.”

The Education Department opened an investigation into four school districts in Kansas for alleged Title IX and Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, or FERPA, violations. According to a complaint filed by the Defense of Freedom Institute, a conservative group, the districts — Topeka, Shawnee, Olathe and Kansas City —have policies that allow transgender students to participate in sports and use bathrooms in accordance with their gender identity, and prevent educators from disclosing information about a student’s gender identity to their parents.

Week 29 (Aug. 4)

DOJ said it had found George Washington University in violation of federal civil rights by acting “deliberately indifferent” to hostility facing Jewish, American-Israeli and Israeli students and faculty. The university was given until Aug. 22 to decide whether it would enter a voluntary agreement with the government or face “enforcement” measures.

In an executive order about federal grants oversight, the president demanded an additional layer of review of scientific grant awards — by political appointees — to ensure they are not in conflict with “the national interest.” The order cited federal funding for drag shows in Ecuador, training for doctoral candidates in critical race theory and grant awards that supported DEI initiatives, promoted Marxism and other anti-American ideologies.

The Trump administration said it is investigating Harvard University’s patents tied to federal research dollars to see if the school is compliant with government regulations surrounding intellectual property. Commerce Secretary Howard W. Lutnick told Harvard’s president in a letter that the university had until Sept. 5 to submit a complete list of patents that were supported by federal dollars, among other information.

The Trump administration is seeking more than $1 billion from the University of California, Los Angeles to resolve an investigation into alleged antisemitism on the campus, according to news reports. The administration has cut about $500 million in federal research funding to the university, which it said it would reinstate if UCLA paid the $1 billion penalty.

Trump issued a memo requiring colleges to submit admissions data to the Department of Education to ensure they are complying with the 2023 Supreme Court decision striking down affirmative action. Education Secretary Linda McMahon directed the National Center for Education Statistics to revamp its auditing process for the data, which includes data on test scores and grades, disaggregated by race.

The Justice Department sued Oklahoma over a state law giving tuition breaks to undocumented students at public universities, which it described as discriminating against out-of-state residents who are citizens. The state’s Republican attorney general, Gentner Drummond, filed a motion in support of the lawsuit, news outlets reported.

The Education Department announced an investigation into Baltimore City Public Schools following allegations that the district had “tolerated numerous incidents of anti-Semitic harassment and discrimination.” The investigation was prompted by a complaint alleging bullying against Jewish students, including the performance of Nazi salutes.

The Education Department proposed eliminating data collection on transgender and nonbinary students, according to a notice in the Federal Register that was reported by K-12 Dive. That information, which includes incidents on bullying and harassment faced by transgender and nonbinary students, is part of the Civil Rights Data Collection, a mandated survey of all public school districts.

Week 28 (July 28)

The Education Department said Wagner College agreed to change several policies and practices related to athletes to settle an investigation over a transgender student’s participation in a women’s fencing match during the 2024-25 season. Among the shifts: barring transgender students from competing on women’s sports teams and using female bathrooms and locker rooms. USA Fencing, which sponsored the April match, also changed its policies regarding transgender athletes.

DOJ released guidance for recipients of federal funding that underscored the administration’s position that DEI activities run afoul of federal civil rights law. “This Department of Justice will not stand by while recipients of federal funds engage in illegal discrimination,” Attorney General Pamela Bondi said in a statement.

DOJ said it had found the University of California, Los Angeles in violation of federal civil rights law for failing to protect Jewish students from antisemitic harassment and abuse. The government then froze more than $300 million in federal research funds, news outlets reported. University Chancellor Julio Frenk called that “a loss for Americans across the nation whose work, health, and future depend on the groundbreaking work we do.” The Los Angeles Times later reported that at least nine DOJ attorneys assigned to investigate antisemitism in the UC system resigned after feeling pressure to conclude campuses had violated the law. The education division at the DOJ has been decimated by resignations.

The Trump administration announced a deal with Brown University to resolve an investigation into the school for alleged antisemitism. Under the agreement, Brown will pay $50 million to state workforce development groups over a decade, and comply with administration policies such as bans on transgender athletes and race-conscious practices. In exchange, the federal government will restore $510 million in withheld federal research funding. The administration did not insist on the appointment of a federal monitor to oversee the deal, The New York Times reported.

The Trump administration warned Duke University that it may be violating federal civil rights law and could lose access to federal money if allegations about racial preferences in its recruiting, student admissions, scholarships and financial aid, mentoring and enrichment programs, hiring, promotion and other arenas prove to be true. HHS and the Education Department said the university must immediately review policies and practices at its medical school and health care system for the illegal use of racial preferences and act to stop them. The administration then froze $108 million in federal funds for Duke’s medical school and health care system, two administration officials told The New York Times.

The Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights said it was looking into whether Duke and the Duke Law Journal violated federal law by considering race, color, and/or national origin to select law journal members. Law journal editors typically are selected based on their analysis of an appellate court decision and personal statement, among other criteria. But OCR, citing an article in The Washington Free Beacon, said the Law Journal circulated a packet last year that allowed select applicants to earn extra points based on personal statements that referenced their race or ethnicity and whether they held a leadership position in an affinity group.

Trump signed an executive order reviving the Presidential Fitness Test, which beginning in the 1950s was used by schools to measure kids’ physical fitness. President Barack Obama replaced the test in 2013 with a program that was more holistic in its approach.

Week 27 (July 21)

The Trump administration plans to release more than $5 billion in money it had withheld from schools for programs that supported teacher training, English learners, academic enrichment and more, The Washington Post reported. Lawmakers from both parties had demanded the release of the funds, and the funding freeze was also being challenged in court. A senior administration official told the Post that the administration’s review of the frozen funds had concluded.

The Education Department announced an investigation into the Oregon Department of Education over allegations that it allowed trans athletes to play on teams aligning with their gender identity. The federal agency said the investigation was sparked by a complaint from America First Policy Institute, a nonprofit group closely aligned with the agenda of President Trump.

Five school districts in Northern Virginia violated Title IX for allowing students to access bathrooms and locker rooms based on their gender identity, the Education Department said. The federal agency had been investigating the five districts — in the counties of Arlington, Fairfax, Loudoun and Prince William and the city of Alexandria — since February. It gave the districts 10 days to rescind policies that permitted students to use facilities based on their gender identity, among other demands.

The Trump administration and Columbia University reached an agreement to settle federal investigations into allegations that the school failed to protect Jewish students from harassment. The deal restores Columbia’s federal research funding, the university said. In exchange, the school will pay a $200 million fine, agree not to consider race in admissions and hiring, and move forward with earlier agreements it made with the government to reduce antisemitism.

The Education Department said it opened investigations into five universities that offer scholarships for students in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, program. The administration said the schools — the University of Louisville, University of Michigan, University of Nebraska, University of Miami and Western Michigan University — may be violating federal civil rights law that prohibits discrimination on the basis of national origin.

The Justice Department opened its second investigation into Virginia’s George Mason University over allegations that it engaged in discrimination on the basis of race, color or national origin. The Education Department is also investigating the university over similar allegations. The university’s board said it would “respond fully and promptly to the requests from the U.S. Government.” DOJ later said it planned to review a faculty senate resolution praising GMU President Gregory Washington, The Washington Post reported.

The Education Department said it was suspending the cancellation of student loans for borrowers in income-based repayment plans, according to a notice posted on the Federal Student Aid website. The department said it needed to temporarily halt the cancellation of loans as it implemented a court order that affected other income-driven repayment plans.

Education Secretary Linda McMahon announced that she would make advancing artificial intelligence in education a priority for federal grantmaking. Her agency also issued guidance on responsibly using artificial intelligence in education.

The president signed an executive order requiring the Labor Department to address whether college athletes can be considered employees of the schools they play for, now that colleges athletes can profit from the use of their name, image and likeness, The Associated Press reported. The NCAA changed its policies in 2021 to allow college athletes to make money from deals with brands and sponsors. The policy change and lawsuits from athletes have “created an out-of-control, rudderless system in which competing university donors engage in bidding wars for the best players, who can change teams each season,” the order stated.

Week 26 (July 14)

Education Secretary Linda McMahon said she would move ahead with deep staffing cuts at the agency, following a Supreme Court order clearing the way for the termination of more than 1,000 of its workers. Within hours of the order, the Education Department sent notices to employees telling them they would be let go on Aug. 1, CNN reported.

The Education Department said it opened a foreign funding investigation into the University of Michigan, alleging that a review of the school’s records found “inaccurate and incomplete disclosures.” The department cited the recent arrest of two Chinese scientists linked to the school and gave it 30 days to send additional documents including tax records related to foreign funding and agreements between the university and foreign governments, companies and organizations. The university said it would cooperate with federal investigators.

The Trump administration began shifting the management of career and technical education and other workforce programs from the Education Department to the Department of Labor, the agencies said. Education Secretary Linda McMahon said the move — which had been on pause until a Supreme Court order this week effectively greenlit administration efforts to shrink the Education Department — would increase efficiency and reduce duplication of programs.

The Education Department will unfreeze about $1.3 billion for after-school and summer school programs that was withheld from school districts earlier this month, Republican Sen. Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia said in a social media post. Nearly $7 billion in federal funding earmarked for teacher training, before- and after-school programs, English learners and migrant education typically distributed July 1 was held back by the Trump administration. Ten Republican senators had written to Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought in protest of the decision, saying it was at odds with the administration’s pledge to return education to the states.

The Education Department said it was immediately implementing certain higher education provisions in the Republican “big, beautiful bill.” Those include changes to income-based repayment and the Parent PLUS Loan programs, loan limits for part-time students, public service loan forgiveness and more.

A State Department office responsible for vetting foreign students’ social media posts when weighing whether to revoke their visas had no standard definition of antisemitism and regularly considers criticism of Israel in its work, a senior State Department official said in court during a trial over the Trump administration’s efforts to deport some foreign students. John Armstrong, the senior bureau official in the Bureau of Consular Affairs, said in testimony that his agency regularly considered speech or actions that it saw as hostile toward Israel, such as calls for limiting military aid to Israel or “denouncing Zionism,” The New York Times reported. Armstrong said he could not remember any communication from his agency that defined antisemitism.

Week 25 (July 7)

Interest will begin accruing Aug. 1 on student loans for nearly 8 million borrowers enrolled in the Biden-era SAVE repayment plan, the Education Department said. The SAVE plan — which tied loan payments to income, cut payments to $0 a month for many borrowers and forgave loans after several years of payments — had been on hold since last summer when it was blocked in court. The Education Department told SAVE borrowers to enroll in other income-driven repayment options instead, but remaining in loan forbearance — avoiding payments even as interest accrues — is also an option.

Some career and technical education, adult education and Head Start programs for young children were determined to be off limits to undocumented immigrants, the Education Department and HHS said. The agencies cited an executive order from February, Ending Taxpayer Subsidization of Open Borders. HHS said a preliminary analysis estimates that the change would free up to $374 million, roughly 3 percent of the agency’s budget.

The Education Department said it was investigating allegations that George Mason University in Virginia illegally considers race and other characteristics in decisions about hiring and promotion. A complaint filed with the department cited a March email from the university’s president that said GMU did not need to change its hiring, promotion and other university policies, and noted the presence of so-called equity advisers for faculty recruiting who consider race, sex and other characteristics. The department said it also opened a separate investigation into allegations that the university has not sufficiently addressed what it called a “pervasively hostile environment for Jewish students and faculty.”

The Education Department said it was investigating whether the Connetquot Central School District in Long Island, New York, was trying to stop using its Native American mascot and imagery, the Thunderbirds. The agency found last month that a New York Department of Education policy banning Native American mascots in the state violates federal law. The Connetquot investigation began after a complaint from the Native American Guardians Association, a nonprofit group that defended the Washington Redskins’ name and other Native-themed sports team logos.

Two federal agencies told Harvard’s accreditor that, because they found it is violating federal nondiscrimination laws, it may fail to meet the requirements of accreditation by the New England Commission of Higher Education. Without accreditation, Harvard cannot operate. The notice was based on the Health and Human Services Department and Education Department investigations and findings of antisemitism on campus, including during its 2024 commencement ceremony.

The Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights said in court documents that it dismissed 3,424 complaints between March 11 and June 27 “consistent with OCR’s Case Processing Manual,” Politico reported. Of those, 96 complaints were resolved, the agency said, because of a lack of evidence during an investigation. Another 290 complaints ended in voluntary agreements, settlements or technical assistance. In that same time frame, OCR received 4,833 complaints, launched 309 investigations based on those complaints and began 26 investigations on its own — without a formal complaint being filed. About half of the Education Department’s staff, including many people working on civil rights investigations, have been fired since the start of the Trump administration, which also redefined the mission of its civil rights office and closed several regional civil rights offices.

Week 24 (June 30)

HHS issued a notice emphasizing that in teen pregnancy-prevention programs, “federal funds may not be used to indoctrinate America’s children with radical ideologies or other inappropriate material” and cited a recent Supreme Court decision that it said safeguards parents’ right to protect their children from content that undermines their religious beliefs.

The Education Department said that the University of Pennsylvania agreed to restore titles and awards to female athletes who competed against transgender students in the past as one part of an agreement to resolve violations of federal Title IX law. In addition, the university will adopt “biology-based definitions for the words ‘male’ and ‘female,’” the Education Department said, and apologize to athletes who competed against transgender students.

Nearly $7 billion in federal funding earmarked for teacher training, before and after-school programs, English learners and migrant education has been withheld by the Trump administration. The money, approved by Congress for these programs, is typically distributed July 1. “Decisions have not been made concerning submissions and awards for this upcoming academic year,” read an email to states that was sent by the Education Department and reviewed by Education Week. “Accordingly, the Department will not be issuing Grant Award Notifications obligating funds for these programs on July 1 prior to completing that review.” The Office of Management and Budget said an initial review showed schools used some of the money to support immigrants in the country illegally or promote LGBTQ+ inclusion, the Associated Press reported.

The Trump administration said it found that Harvard violated the federal Civil Rights Act over of its treatment of Jewish and Israeli students, faculty and staff, and it faces losing all federal money if it does not address those violations. Already, billions in federal grants have been withheld from Harvard, and the Trump administration is trying to prevent the institution from enrolling international students. The decision, from the HHS Office for Civil Rights, cited what it called “Harvard’s deliberate indifference towards that discrimination directed towards Jewish and Israeli students.”

The Montcalm Area Intermediate School District in Michigan said it would end the use of seclusion with students with disabilities, change how it restrains students and improve special education services for students with disabilities to end an investigation that began a little more than two years ago, the Department of Justice said. In the investigation, the Justice Department found that students with disabilities in the 12,000-student district were secluded and/or restrained more than 2,400 times and that the district used seclusion and restraint incorrectly.

Week 23 (June 23)

University of Virginia President James E. Ryan stepped down to help resolve a federal investigation into the school’s DEI policies. DOJ officials demanded Ryan’s resignation, telling the school that he had not dismantled DEI policies and misrepresented steps the university had taken on DEI, according to The New York Times. Legal experts told the Times they were not aware of any previous case of an administration pressuring a university to remove its leader in order to resolve a DOJ investigation.

The Justice Department sued Minnesota over a state law that allows undocumented students to be eligible for in-state tuition. DOJ said the law discriminated against American citizens from other states who are not eligible for the same tuition break. The lawsuit is the third DOJ filed in recent weeks against states that have these policies.

HHS announced it was investigating the Minnesota Department of Education and the Minnesota State High School League over a transgender teen competing in a girls’ softball competition. The agency said allowing trans students to participate in female sports discriminates against females and violates Title IX.

The Justice Department said it was investigating the University of California system and individual campuses over the UC 2030 Capacity Plan, which outlines how the university system should grow enrollment and reflect California’s diversity. The Justice Department said it was looking into whether that means the system is discriminating against some prospective and current employees and others based on their race and sex, in violation of federal law.

The Education Department said it had determined that the California Department of Education and California Interscholastic Federation violated Title IX by allowing transgender students in girls sports and intimate spaces. The state was given 10 days to act on several federal requests related to transgender student participation in sports or face consequences, including referral to the Department of Justice. Among the requests: notify groups that run school athletics programs that they are forbidden from allowing transgender students to participate in female sports and use female facilities; adopt biology-based definitions of the words “male” and “female”; restore to female athletes individual records, titles and awards given to transgender students participating in those competitions; and apologize to those girls.

Week 22 (June 16)

The State Department said it would resume interviews for international student visas but that applicants’ social media accounts would be reviewed for alleged “hostility” toward the United States. The department had paused the process for foreign students to receive visas last month, as part of a broader crackdown on universities. Education advocates said they hoped the new screening would not deter international students from coming to the United States.

The Department of Justice filed a lawsuit challenging Kentucky’s policy granting in-state tuition at public colleges to students who are undocumented. The department said the policy discriminates against U.S. citizens from other states who are not afforded the same tuition break. A spokesperson for Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, a Democrat who was named in the lawsuit, said the policy predates his tenure and that he should not be a party to the complaint.

The Trump administration said next month it will stop providing specialized care for LGBTQ+ youth through its National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, a service that has handled about 1.3 million calls, texts and chat messages since 2022. A national survey last year found that 39 percent of LGBTQ+ young people seriously considered suicide in the past year — including 46 percent of those who are transgender and nonbinary. The Trump administration budget proposal for next year foreshadowed the shift, though it said overall funding for the 988 hotline would not change. The Health Department’s annual budget “does not, however, grant taxpayer money to a chat service where children are encouraged to embrace radical gender ideology by ‘counselors’ without consent or knowledge of their parents,” Rachel Cauley, a spokesperson for the White House’s Office of Management and Budget, told The Hill.

California has 60 days to remove all mention of gender identity from its federally funded sexual education curriculum or face possible cuts to the program, the Trump administration said. The federal Administration for Children and Families said that when it reviewed California’s Personal Responsibility Education Program materials, it found what it called “egregious content teaching young students that gender identity is distinct from biological sex and that boys can identify as girls.”

Week 21 (June 9)

The Education Department intensified its scrutiny of the Minnesota Department of Education and the Minnesota State High School League after a transgender student participated in a recent girls softball match and the student’s school went on to win a state championship. The state agency and league were already under investigation for possibly violating Title IX because of state policies that allow student athletes to compete in sports based on gender identity; now a federal team that includes the Justice Department will investigate. The Minnesota attorney general earlier sued the Trump administration over its interpretation of Title IX.

The Trump administration created a plan and interagency agreements to outsource Education Department work on student loans and career, technical and adult education programs, Politico reported, citing court documents. A May 21 agreement would transfer up to nearly $2.7 billion to the Labor Department to administer programs now run by the Education Department. The initiatives include Perkins Title I grants to states and Title II grants under the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act, plus adult literacy programs and other career and technical education. A separate agreement would allow the detailing of nine Education Department employees to the Treasury Department to handle student loans and Federal Student Aid programs.

Week 20 (June 2)

The Trump administration in an emergency appeal asked the Supreme Court to lift a federal judge’s order blocking it from dismantling the Education Department and firing nearly 1,400 of its workers. The May 22 order said the mass firings prevented the department from fulfilling legally required services and programs and could not be carried out without the approval of Congress, which established the Education Department in 1979.

The president issued a proclamation preventing foreign students from entering the country to study at Harvard, arguing that it would jeopardize national security to allow the school to continue hosting them. The proclamation also asked the State Department to consider revoking student visas for foreign students already at Harvard. It followed a decision last month by a federal judge in Boston to temporarily block an effort by the DHS to revoke the visa certification that allows Harvard to enroll foreign students.

The Justice Department sued Texas over a 20-year-old law allowing undocumented students to receive in-state tuition at public universities. Within hours, the state agreed to end the practice. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton celebrated the end of the law, saying in a statement that it had discriminated against American citizens who do not reside in Texas by requiring them to pay higher tuition than undocumented immigrants living in Texas.

The Education Department said it notified Columbia University’s accreditor that the school was “in violation of federal antidiscrimination laws” regarding its treatment of Jewish students and no longer meets accreditation standards. Education Secretary Linda McMahon said she expected the accreditor, the Middle States Commission on Higher Education, to keep the department informed of any actions taken as a result. A Columbia spokesperson told USA Today that she was aware of the letter and that the university “is deeply committed to combating antisemitism on our campus.”

The Education Department paused a plan to garnish Social Security benefits from people who’d defaulted on their student loans, several news organizations reported. A spokesperson for the department said the agency had not garnished any such benefits since collections on student loans restarted in early May.

The Department of Justice threatened legal action against California public schools unless they stopped allowing transgender students to participate in girls sports. In a letter sent to schools in the state, Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon said a California Interscholastic Federation bylaw permitting trans student participation in sports amounted to “unconstitutional sex discrimination” against female athletes. A spokeswoman for the California Department of Education told The New York Times that the agency was preparing guidance for school districts on how to respond.

The Education Department launched investigations into a university and a school district over whether they allowed males to join and live in what it called female-only intimate and communal spaces. The agency’s Office for Civil Rights is investigating the University of Wyoming after it allowed a man to join the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority. It is also investigating Jefferson County Public Schools in Colorado over a policy that says students will be “assigned to share overnight accommodations with other students that share a student’s ‘gender identity.’”

The Trump administration returned most of the roughly 400 books pulled from a Naval Academy library earlier this year because of concerns that they contained messages of diversity, equity and inclusion, The 19th reports. The books were removed after orders from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and included Maya Angelou’s “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird” and Elizabeth Reis’ “Bodies in Doubt: An American History of Intersex.” Some 20 books remain unavailable pending a review, the Defense Department said, but did not provide details to The 19th about which titles.

Week 19 (May 26)

Harvard University will lose its remaining federal contracts, the General Services Administration told the school in a draft letter obtained by The New York Times. The planned cuts of about $100 million come on top of $3.2 billion in contracts and funds the Trump administration has already frozen. In its letter, the GSA accused the university of failing to take steps to combat antisemitism and engaging in racial discrimination in its hiring and admissions processes. Harvard is suing the administration, alleging that it is violating the university’s First Amendment rights.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered his department to review the support available to military families who homeschool their children and look into “the feasibility of providing facilities or access to other resources for those students.”

The Education Department is investigating the Green Bay Area Public School District, in Wisconsin, for allegedly discriminating against a white student with dyslexia by not providing him “timely and adequate” special education services. The investigation came after a complaint from the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, a right-leaning group, which alleged that a district “success plan” gives services to students based on “priority” racial groups. The Green Bay district told Wisconsin Public Radio that it had received the complaint, but declined further comment.

Week 18 (May 19)

Harvard can no longer enroll international students, DHS said. DHS said Harvard had not provided information about its foreign students as the cinagency requested, including records about misconduct. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said the decision applies both to incoming students and students already enrolled: They must transfer to another institution for the coming academic year. In a letter dated May 22, Noem gave Harvard 72 hours to comply with a host of records requests if it wants to preserve its ability to enroll international students. A federal judge temporarily blocked the ban from taking effect.

The Justice Department said it will use a law designed to recover money lost to fraud, the False Claims Act, to investigate universities. It said an institution could be in violation of the act “when it encourages antisemitism, refuses to protect Jewish students, allows men to intrude into women’s bathrooms, or requires women to compete against men in athletic competitions.” In announcing the new DOJ Civil Rights Fraud Initiative, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche wrote that colleges and universities cannot accept federal funds while discriminating against their students.

Harvard will lose another $60 million in federal contracts, the Health and Human Services Department said. The agency cited what it called Harvard’s “continued failure to address anti-Semitic harassment and race discrimination.”

The Trump administration withheld hundreds of millions of dollars in federal money states largely use to provide child care subsidies to low-income families, The 74 reported. Child Care Development and Block Grants were anticipated to arrive at the start of April. In testimony before the Senate, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said his agency was behind the decision to withhold the money. The 74 reported that it’s unclear if the funding is delayed due to personnel challenges or being held back for a more substantive reason.

The Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights launched an investigation into an admissions policy for a science and technology magnet high school in Fairfax County, Virginia. In 2020, Fairfax schools changed the admissions process for Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology to a holistic policy based on socioeconomic status and other factors. Though the Supreme Court declined to take up a challenge to the policy in 2024, the Virginia attorney general revived the debate by submitting a complaint to the federal Education and Justice departments, saying the school now discriminates against Asian American students.

Columbia University violated federal civil rights law by acting with “deliberate indifference towards student-on-student harassment of Jewish students” since the start of the Israel-Hamas war, the civil rights arms of the federal Education and Health and Human Services departments said. In a statement to Axios, Columbia said the finding is part of ongoing discussions with the federal government and that it is committed to addressing antisemitism and other forms of harassment on campus. HHS said it is encouraging Columbia to propose an agreement that would result in meaningful change for Jewish students.

Week 17 (May 12)

The Department of Education rescinded a nearly $38 million fine against Grand Canyon University, the university said. The fine was levied by the Biden administration, which alleged that the university misrepresented the cost of its doctoral programs. Grand Canyon denied any wrongdoing and appealed.

Nearly 2 million federal student loan borrowers who applied for a payment plan aligned to their income are stuck in a backlog of applications and still waiting to be approved or denied, the Education Department said in a court filing just days after it began withholding money from tax refunds and other federal payments from borrowers in default. The Education Department shared the backlog as part of a response to a lawsuit by the American Federation of Teachers, which sued the Trump administration for cutting off access to income-driven repayment plan applications on the Education Department’s website, CNBC reported. The agency directed borrowers to apply for income-driven repayment plans if they could not afford their student loan payments.

Grants that pay for internet access for rural and low-income families and businesses were frozen, with President Donald Trump calling the money distributed via the Digital Equity Act racist, including $35 million for Maine and more than $15 million for Indiana. The act, part of a bipartisan infrastructure law former President Joe Biden signed into law in 2021, provided about $2.75 billion in grants to help states and territories craft plans to make internet access more equitable and then put those plans into motion. Only some states received their shares of the money before Trump took office.

The federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is scrutinizing Harvard’s hiring practices, investigating whether the university discriminated against white, Asian, male and heterosexual workers. The EEOC said, in a memo first reported by The Washington Free Beacon, that Harvard documents show that from 2013 to 2023, the share of tenured white male faculty decreased, from 64 percent to 56 percent. The EEOC was created by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which was primarily intended to address discrimination against Black Americans in all aspects of life.

Harvard will lose another $450 million in federal grants, the Trump administration’s Joint Task Force to Combat Antisemitism said, on top of $2.2 billion that was previously cut. The new grant cancellations, which the task force said stemmed from the university’s failure to “confront the pervasive race discrimination and anti-Semitic harassment plaguing its campus,” included grants from eight federal agencies. Harvard President Alan Garber disputed those allegations in a letter, saying the university has taken steps to root out antisemitism and is in compliance with the law.

The Health and Human Services Department said its Office for Civil Rights was investigating a “prestigious Midwest university” to determine whether it discriminated against Jewish students. HHS did not name the university. A complaint raised concerns about whether the campus climate, academic direction and institutional policies ensure there is no discrimination of students based on race, color or national origin.

Federal grants for charter schools were increased by $60 million, the Education Department said, for a total of $500 million in federal dollars that support the public but independently run schools. The department did not specify where additional grant dollars came from. The grants can be used to help charter schools pay for buildings, replicate or expand and share innovative ideas. The Trump administration has said it wants to expand and boost school choice, including charter schools.

The Defense Department plans to cap indirect cost reimbursement rates for universities at 15 percent, according to a memo from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. The move follow similar steps by the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy and NIH. Universities have sued those agencies over the caps, arguing that they harm research and require congressional approval.

Week 16 (May 5)

The University of Washington faced a review by the departments of Education, Health and Human Services and the General Services Administration following violence and arrests at the institution. Protesters had demanded the school end what they called a “targeted assault” on “pro-Palestine activism and activists” and occupied a building, The Seattle Times reported. The Trump administration said that the University of Washington, which condemned the violence, must do more to guarantee Jewish students a safe and productive learning environment.

The Education Department warned Harvard that it would be ineligible for new federal research grants unless it complied with Trump administration demands including combating antisemitism on campus and ending policies that consider a student’s race, news organizations reported.

Colleges and universities were warned that they could lose access to federal student loan dollars and Pell Grant money if too many of their former students default on their student loans. The Education Department told institutions they should begin “proactive and sustained outreach” to former students who are behind on their student loan payments.

The Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights initiated an investigation into the Saratoga Springs City School District in New York, the agency said, after its school board adopted a resolution that said, with regard to “transgender and gender-expansive students,” the district will “ensure their right to use facilities and participate in activities and sports consistent with their gender identity.” Rep Elise Stefanik, a Republican, wrote to Education Secretary Linda McMahon last month to draw attention to the district and ask for a look into whether it is violating Title IX.

The Education Department said it was terminating the Ready to Learn grant program, which had been used to pay for educational programs on public television. An Education Department spokeswoman said the money was being used to pay for “racial justice programming.” “Molly of Denali” and “Lyla in the Loop” are among the programs that were supported by the grant.

Western Carolina University faces an investigation from the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights, the agency said, because its approach to transgender students may violate Title IX. It cited a May 7 article in National Review that included excerpts from campus officials’ emails, including one in which the university’s chief compliance officer wrote that “we are not making changes based on this EO,” referring to an executive order signed by the president that recognizes only two genders, male and female. The Trump administration also said the investigation was triggered by reports that the North Carolina university allowed a transgender student to room with a female in a girls’ dormitory and that it opened an investigation against a female student for asking a transgender student to leave a female locker room.

The Education Department said it will investigate the University of Pennsylvania over concerns about the accuracy of its foreign funding records, saying the university did not disclose any foreign gifts or contracts until February 2019, though it was required to do so under federal law long before that. Tom Wheeler, the department’s acting general counsel, said the investigation is intended to ensure “that universities cannot conceal the infiltration of our nation’s campuses by foreign governments and other foreign interests.”

Library books across the armed services related to diversity, anti-racism or gender issues were targeted for elimination. According to a Defense Department memo, every military educational institution, including war colleges and service academies, was given until May 21 to pull these materials off shelves pending a review and possible disposal. The memo said the move was part of the department’s work to enforce an earlier directive from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and an executive order about eliminating race-based and sex-based discrimination in the armed forces.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth in a memo called on the military service academies to certify that their admissions policies “apply no consideration of race, ethnicity, or sex.” The directive followed his Jan. 29 memo banning race-conscious admissions policies at the academies. “Selecting anyone but the best erodes lethality, our warfighting readiness, and undercuts the culture of excellence in our Armed Forces,” he wrote.

The Trump administration eliminated funding for a climate research program at the University of Washington, The Seattle Times reported. Officials with the program, the Northwest Climate Resilience Collaborative, were told in a letter from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that their roughly $1 million grant was being canceled in order to “streamline and reduce the cost and size of the Federal Government.”

In another move to expand school choice, the Trump administration revived a piece of the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act, requiring states to define and identify “persistently dangerous” schools and give parents the option to send their children elsewhere. Historically, the provision has been little used and was intended to refer to physical danger a student may face, but a letter the administration sent to states appears to widen the definition. “For instance, a State might find that persistently poor academic performance makes a school unsafe for students,” the letter says.

The administration initiated a third round of cuts at the National Science Foundation, which included eliminating its Division of Equity in Excellence in STEM team. The division was dedicated to removing barriers that keep women and other underrepresented groups from entering science, technology, engineering and math fields. Its work recognized teachers for excellence in math and science instruction.

Week 15 (April 28)

The president released his 2026 budget request to Congress, which calls for deep cuts to education spending, among many areas. The proposal would reduce the Education Department by 15 percent, or $12 billion, including a 25 percent cut to Title I spending for high-poverty schools. It would also cut preschool development grants, adult education programs and funding for the Office for Civil Rights, while consolidating some 24 K-12 and special education grant programs into two funding streams. The proposal boosts support for new charter schools, increasing their federal funding by $60 million, or 8.3 percent. Presidential budget requests almost never make it through Congress without significant changes.

The Justice Department ended a decades-long desegregation order on Plaquemines Parish schools in Louisiana, and additional orders may also be lifted, The Associated Press reported. Dozens of districts, mostly in Alabama, Georgia and Mississippi, remain under desegregation orders that date as far back as the 1960s.

The Department of Transportation canceled $54 million in grants to seven universities for projects it described as “woke.” The projects included a University of Southern California effort to promote equal access to transportation for disadvantaged communities, a New York University project to expand e-bikes to low-income individuals in transportation deserts, and transportation-related environmental justice work at the University of New Orleans.

The Education Department planned to cancel $1 billion in mental health grants for schools created after the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, in 2022, saying they violate the purpose of civil rights law, The Associated Press reported. The grants, created by the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, were intended to help schools hire more psychologists, counselors and other mental health staff. The cuts became public in a social media post from conservative activist Christopher Rufo, who posted grant document excerpts that outlined goals for hiring counselors who are not white and other DEI policies.

The Trump administration is making it easier for colleges and universities to switch accreditors going forward by allowing institutions to forgo an extensive review process before making the shift, the Education Department said in a Dear Colleague letter. The change was intended to act on a recent executive order on accreditation. The Education Department also said it is lifting a Biden-era ban on accepting and reviewing applications for potential new accreditors and told one group that applied to become an accreditor its request is no longer on pause.

The Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights is investigating a school district in Illinois for allegedly segregating and stereotyping students through so-called required “privilege walks” for staff and students and district-sponsored segregated affinity groups. The Education Department said the investigation into the Evanston-Skokie School District 65 arose from a complaint filed by a teacher, and that the district potentially violated the Civil Rights Act by sponsoring groups for students and staff that are formally restricted on the basis of race, hosting training sessions to increase racial literacy and pressuring educators to acknowledge “white skin privilege,” among other things.

The Trump administration created new guidelines for canceling an international student’s legal status, The Associated Press reported. A document from Immigration and Customs Enforcement shared in a court filing says a valid reason now includes the revocation of the visas students used to enter the U.S. In the past, the AP said, if a student’s visa was revoked, they generally could stay in the U.S. to finish school. They simply would not be able to reenter if they left the country.

The Title IX Special Investigations Team, a joint initiative of the Education and Justice departments, opened an investigation into the Washington state education department over reports that it required school boards to adopt policies permitting transgender students to participate on sports teams and use bathrooms and locker rooms that match their gender identity. The federal government said the requirements potentially violated the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, or FERPA, and the Protection of Pupil Rights Amendment, or PPRA, along with Title IX.

The Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights said it is launching an investigation into Chicago Public Schools’ “Black Student Success Plan,” saying that the initiative discriminates against students of other races. The plan, unveiled in February, calls for hiring more Black male teachers, increasing the retention rate of Black educators, and decreasing the Black student suspension and expulsion rate, among other goals.

The University of Pennsylvania was found by the Trump administration to have violated federal Title IX law by allowing 2022 graduate Lia Thomas, who is transgender, to compete on the women’s swim team and use women-only bathrooms and locker rooms. The administration gave the university 10 days to resolve the violations by agreeing to comply with Title IX in its athletics programs, restore titles and awards to women who competed against Thomas, and apologize to female athletes who lost to Thomas. Education Department civil rights cases typically take months or years to resolve; the Trump administration case against UPenn, which also faces losing $175 million in federal dollars over the case, began in early February.

The civil rights offices of the Education and Health and Human Services departments announced investigations into Harvard University and the Harvard Law Review, saying there are reports of “race-based discrimination permeating the operations of the journal.” The agencies said they received information that policies and practices for journal membership and article selection may violate Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. The administration said it will examine Harvard’s relationship with the journal, including financial ties, oversight procedures, selection policies and other documentation for membership and article publication.

The Education Department said it will continue to operate its online library, known as ERIC, after allowing it to lapse last week. DOGE tried to make significant cuts to the document repository, used by 14 million people a year, and allowed funding to run out April 23, ending the ability of the Education Department to add new research reports and documents to the library. Still, ERIC’s $5.5 million annual budget has been cut by half.

States can no longer offer undocumented students in-state tuition at public universities, according to an executive order on immigration. The attorney general and homeland security secretary, the order said, will work to stop the enforcement of state and local laws and policies that favor immigrants in the country without full legal status. That includes state laws that provide in-state higher education tuition to undocumented students but not to out-of-state American citizens, the order said.

The Department of Labor canceled a teacher apprenticeship contract. The contract was for the Educator Registered Apprenticeship Intermediary, which said in a LinkedIn post announcing the cancellation that it works with partners in 35 states to design, launch and expand teacher apprenticeship programs. ERA, led by a group of nonprofits and women-owned businesses, said its materials will remain on its website for anyone to use.

Week 14 (April 21)

The Trump administration put most of the staff of AmeriCorps, the federal agency that deploys about 200,000 volunteers a year to work with schoolchildren and other groups, on paid leave. In 2024, people participating in AmeriCorps programs, many of whom are ages 18-26, supported nearly 9,000 K-12 students in out-of-school programs and painted or renovated nearly 228,000 school rooms, according to its annual report.

The Trump administration is reactivating the visa registrations of thousands of foreign college students. Officials had abruptly canceled the registrations in recent weeks, causing mass confusion about the students’ legal status. Several judges around the country had already granted restraining orders preventing the government from deporting the students until the matter could be resolved. The action still leaves some students with questions about their legal ability to stay in the U.S.

The president signed several executive orders that touched on a wide range of education issues. For K-12 education, the orders promote training in artificial intelligence and roll back school discipline policies developed during the Obama and Biden administrations. The orders related to higher education forbid college accreditors from evaluating colleges on DEI initiatives, require colleges to disclose more information about foreign funding, promote expansion of apprenticeship programs, and create an initiative to support historically Black colleges and universities.

The federal government said it would resume collecting payments from federal student loan borrowers in default for the first time since 2020, at the start of the pandemic. Later this summer, the Federal Student Aid Office will notify borrowers who remain in default that a cut of their pay will be taken to repay their loans. More than 5 million borrowers have not made a monthly payment in over a year, the Education Department said.

To reduce costs, the National Assessment Governing Board voted to kill more than a dozen of the tests that comprise the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP. The main reading and math tests, which are required by Congress, were preserved. A now-defunct schedule of testing included all of these exams.

Read more: A smaller Nation’s Report Card

The Education Department said it is investigating the University of California, Berkeley, over whether it filed inaccurate or incomplete foreign funding disclosures. The investigation is related to money the university received from the Chinese government in 2023. And the department said it will shift foreign funding disclosure oversight of universities from the Federal Student Aid Office to the department’s Office of General Counsel.

NIH won’t give universities with DEI programs or that boycott Israeli companies any new grants, the agency said. The NIH notice also says grantees found to have violated these terms can lose NIH awards and would have to return federal research dollars.

The Energy Department told the University of Maine to stop work on three offshore wind projects, NOTUS reported. The three stop-work orders, one involving a federal grant of $12.6 million, said the university failed to comply with “national policy assurances” — rules grant recipients must follow to use federal dollars. Those rules include Title IX, which is at the center of a conflict between Maine and the federal government because Maine has allowed transgender teens to play on high school sports teams.

The Trump administration sent text messages to many faculty and staff at Barnard College, a women’s college affiliated with Columbia University, to collect information about alleged antisemitism at Barnard, one of a number of actions targeting elite colleges and their handling of antisemitism, The Intercept first reported. The message said it was from the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and included a link to a survey asking those who received it to say if they identified as Jewish or Israeli and whether they had been subjected to harassment.

The Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights launched an investigation on behalf of New York residents who wanted to keep Native American names and mascots in their schools. In 2023, New York moved to ban schools from using tribal names and mascots, saying they promoted harmful stereotypes. Residents in Massapequa, on Long Island, appealed directly to Trump in their fight to keep the “Chiefs” name for their school district. “LONG LIVE THE MASSAPEQUA CHIEFS!” the president posted on his Truth Social platform.

Week 13 (April 14)

The National Science Foundation canceled more than 400 grants to universities and other research institutions, according to a list obtained by The New York Times. NSF also froze all new grants, Nature reports. NSF said it was canceling existing grants that are not in line with its priorities, “including but not limited to those on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and misinformation/disinformation.”

Some $2.2 billion in multiyear grants to Harvard were frozen by the Trump administration’s Joint Task Force to Combat Antisemitism, along with another $60 million in multiyear contracts. That followed Harvard’s rejection of a collection of conditions that called for changing its admissions policies, including how it screens international students; changing hiring policies, including hiring people with a more diverse range of viewpoints; ending all DEI programs and services; auditing certain programs for antisemitism; changing how it disciplines students; and providing a way for anyone associated with Harvard to report violations of these demands to the institution and the federal government. Harvard lawyers rejected those demands, saying they “go beyond the lawful authority of this or any administration.” In a letter to the Harvard community, President Alan Garber said the university has taken steps to address antisemitism and plans to do more but that the administration’s demands went too far. “No government — regardless of which party is in power — should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue,” he wrote.

The White House threatened Harvard with the loss of another $1 billion in federal money for health research, The Wall Street Journal reported. The threat appeared to be in response to Harvard making public a list of demands from Trump administration officials. The administration was surprised when Harvard released the letter to the public, the Journal said.

NIH staff members were instructed to freeze all funding to Brown, Cornell and Northwestern universities, along with Harvard, according to internal emails reported on by journalists with The Brown Daily Herald, Nature and Science. The administration accused those universities of doing too little to combat antisemitism.

Trump suggested Harvard, which has an endowment of $53 billion, lose its tax-exempt status. “Perhaps Harvard should lose its Tax Exempt Status and be Taxed as a Political Entity if it keeps pushing political, ideological, and terrorist inspired/supporting ‘Sickness?” the president posted on his Truth Social platform. Harvard, like most private and public universities, is tax-exempt and largely avoids paying taxes on its investment income or donations it receives. Congress created a 1.4 percent endowment tax that affects some of the nation’s wealthiest universities during Trump‘s first term, however, including Harvard.

The IRS reportedly looked into whether to revoke Harvard’s tax-exempt status, though a White House spokesman said the agency began to do so before the president’s social media post. Education Secretary Linda McMahon told CNN that it was her “guess” that the IRS was looking at the tax exempt statuses of other universities. Under federal law, the president cannot request that the IRS investigate or audit specific targets.

Harvard must turn over records detailing its student visa holders’ “illegal and violent activities” by the end of April or face losing the ability to enroll international students, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said. She also said her agency was canceling $2.7 million in grants to Harvard.

The Education Department accused Harvard of failing to properly disclose large donations from foreign sources and demanded that the university provide the government with information on all foreign gifts, grants and contracts since Jan. 1, 2020. A university spokesperson, Jason Newton, disputed the government’s contention that Harvard had not disclosed information on foreign gifts larger than $250,000.

A letter of demands the Trump administration sent to Harvard may have been sent by mistake, The New York Times reported. University officials had been in talks with the administration’s Joint Task Force to Combat Antisemitism over its concerns with the institution. When the letter arrived, however, its demands were so extreme that Harvard decided it would not be able to reach a deal with the task force and instead decided to challenge the requests, the Times reported.

The Trump administration announced plans to lay off almost all employees of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — cutting the staff of around 1,700 to 200. The agency has already been thrown into turmoil, significantly affecting its work on student loans. A federal judge paused the plan, writing there was cause to believe it would “decimate the agency and render it unable to comply with its statutory duties.”

The Department of Justice sued Maine over its refusal to comply with a ban on transgender girls participating in female sports, according to Attorney General Pam Bondi. DOJ said Maine was in violation of Title IX, the federal law prohibiting sex-based discrimination in schools. Maine’s governor, Janet Mills, had objected to the Trump administration’s interpretation of Title IX and said transgender students’ participation in sports was protected in state law.

The Trump administration sought to deport Mohsen Mahdawi, a Columbia University student and legal permanent resident in the United States, for leading pro-Palestinian demonstrations. Mahdawi, who is Palestinian, was detained by immigration officials after arriving at an immigration services center in Vermont intending to take a test that would allow him to become a naturalized citizen.

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Week 12 (April 7)

The Education Department said it was working to cut all federal education money to Maine and would refer its Title IX investigation into the Maine Department of Education to the Justice Department for enforcement. The investigation centered around allegations that Maine allowed transgender athletes to compete in female sports and use women’s bathrooms, in violation of new Trump administration orders. The same day, a federal judge said the USDA must “unfreeze and release” any federal funding that the agency froze or refused to pay Maine over the alleged Title IX violations.

The Energy Department announced it was changing its policy for supporting universities’ indirect or overhead costs on research grants. In a move similar to one taken by NIH earlier in the year, that spending was capped at 15 percent. The Energy Department, which spends more than $2.5 billion a year on grants to more than 300 colleges and universities, said that the new policy would result in cuts to universities of about $405 million. In response, a group of higher education associations and research universities sued, saying the move would “devastate scientific research.”

The Air Force Academy has ended race- and gender-based preferences in admissions, the Justice Department said in a legal filing. The filing was in response to a lawsuit against the academy for allegedly discriminating against applicants by taking race into account.

HHS said its Office for Civil Rights initiated an investigation into a grantee, the nonprofit group Academy Health, for allegedly using racial preferences in selecting recipients of a scholarship program. The agency said the practice violates Title VI.

Education Secretary Linda McMahon said in a Fox News interview that the new Title IX investigations unit, a collaboration between her agency and the Justice Department, would investigate an incident at a USA Fencing event in which an athlete was allegedly disqualified for protesting a transgender opponent.

The Justice Department said Illinois and six universities canceled a scholarship program after the federal law enforcement agency threatened to sue, calling the program discriminatory because it was open only to people of certain races.

The Trump administration froze more than $1 billion in federal grants for Cornell University and $790 million for Northwestern University. The two universities were among those being investigated for their handling of antisemitism on campus. The funding freeze largely involved grants from the Agriculture, Defense, Education, and Health and Human Services departments.

The administration announced it was cutting nearly $4 million in federal funding for climate change research at Princeton University. In a statement about the cuts, the Department of Commerce said some of the research, which was conducted in partnership with NOAA, “promotes exaggerated and implausible climate threats, contributing to a phenomenon known as ‘climate anxiety,’ which has increased significantly among America’s youth.” The Commerce Department, which houses NOAA, also said the agency would halt funding for “educational initiatives aimed at K-12 students.”

The Trump administration took steps to place Columbia University under a consent decree, a legal arrangement that would put a federal judge in charge of monitoring whether the higher education institution had changed its practices, according to The Wall Street Journal. In exchange for a restoration of $400 million in federal funding, Columbia had previously agreed to changes that included empowering security officers to make arrests and reassigning control of its Middle East studies department.

Week 11 (March 31)

Milwaukee Public Schools won’t get help investigating lead poisoning from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the agency said, because HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. eliminated the team that does that work. Milwaukee and Wisconsin’s state health department requested the CDC’s help in late March because many schools in the city were found to be exposing children to “significant lead hazards.” Federal experts were asked for help developing a strategy to test and triage Milwaukee public school students for lead poisoning and with outreach to the community, CBS News reported.

The Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights ended an agreement with the school district in Rapid City, South Dakota, which had been under investigation since 2010 for steering Native American students away from gifted classes and overdisciplining them compared to their peers. Last year, the district and the federal government agreed on actions the district would take to address those problems. But on March 27, OCR sent a follow-up letter to the district, saying it was no longer required to make any changes because the agreement was in conflict with the Trump administration’s prohibition on DEI.

In a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court sided with the Trump administration’s cuts to teacher-training grants in eight states. The cuts were made as part of a broader crackdown on programs that the White House claimed promoted DEI. Chief Justice John Roberts sided with the high court’s three liberal justices in the ruling. While the decision temporarily allowed the White House to stop the funding, the ruling was not the end of the road for the grant programs; the decision sent the case back to a lower court for further argument.

The Trump administration revoked the visas of students at several California universities, including the University of California campuses in Los Angeles, San Diego, Berkeley, Davis and Irvine as well as Stanford University, the Los Angeles Times reported. In a campus message, UC San Diego Chancellor Pradeep Khosla said five students had their visas revoked and a sixth student was “detained at the border, denied entry and deported to their home country.” Neither the State Department nor DHS explained to the outlet why the visas were canceled.

The Trump administration was poised to block $510 million in grants and contracts to Brown University, one of 60 higher education institutions under investigation for alleged antisemitism, according to news reports. Christina H. Paxson, the president of Brown, had previously said that if her university found its freedom of expression and organizational independence threatened, “we would be compelled to vigorously exercise our legal rights to defend these freedoms.”

The Education and Justice departments announced a new “Title IX Special Investigations Team” to streamline probes into allegations of trans students participating in girls’ sports and other examples of “gender ideology.”

Public schools face losing federal money if they don’t assure the Education Department they have nixed any program that wrongly promotes DEI, acting Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Craig Trainor said. “Federal financial assistance is a privilege, not a right. When state education commissioners accept federal funds, they agree to abide by federal antidiscrimination requirements. Unfortunately, we have seen too many schools flout or outright violate these obligations, including by using DEI programs to discriminate against one group of Americans to favor another,” he said. States were given 10 days to gather assurances from school districts and share those certifications with the Education Department. The department cited the 2023 Supreme Court ruling striking down the use of race-conscious college admissions as the basis for its action.

Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said money sent to Maine schools from the USDA for “administrative and technological functions” would be frozen, a move aimed at punishing the state for Title IX violations because a transgender athlete participated in girls’ athletics. “You cannot openly violate federal law against discrimination in education and expect federal funding to continue unabated,” Rollins said. “This is only the beginning, though you are free to end it at any time by protecting women and girls in compliance with federal law.” Money for school meals, subsidized by the Agriculture Department, was not affected, the letter said. “If a child was fed today, they will be fed tomorrow,” Rollins wrote.

American diplomats have been ordered to research the social media posts of student visa applicants and those applying for other types of visas to prevent people who have criticized the United States and Israel from entering the country, The New York Times reported. Secretary of State Marco Rubio gave the directive in a cable sent to diplomats in late March. He specified that the applicants whose social media posts should be scrutinized are those with suspected terrorist ties; those who had a student or exchange visa between Oct. 7, 2023, and Aug. 31, 2024; or those whose visa was terminated since that October date, the start of the Israel-Hamas war.

Dozens of research grants to Princeton University were suspended by the Trump administration, the institution said in a campus message. It was not clear why the grants, from federal agencies including the Department of Energy, NASA and the Defense Department, were put on pause, university President Christopher Eisgruber said. The collective value of the grants was unclear.

At least five regional Head Start offices — in Boston, New York, Chicago, San Francisco and Seattle — were closed as a result of the Trump administration’s downsizing of the Department of Health and Human Services.

The U.S. Naval Academy removed about 400 books from its library ahead of a visit by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth in response to the Trump administration’s war on DEI programs, a Navy spokesman told The Washington Post. The report did not say which books were removed.

Maine was threatened with the loss of federal dollars for education if its Department of Education did not comply with demands from the Trump administration about transgender athletes. Maine had been under pressure to prevent transgender students from participating in female sports and was directed to sign an agreement by April 11 that would forbid that. “By refusing to comply with Title IX, MDOE allows — indeed, encourages — male competitors to threaten the safety of female athletes, wrongfully obtain girls’ hard-earned accolades, and deny females equal opportunity in educational activities to which they are guaranteed under Title IX,” the Education Department’s acting Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Craig Trainor said.

The departments of Education, Health and Human Services and the General Services Administration announced that some $9 billion in grants to Harvard and its affiliates would be scrutinized by the federal Joint Task Force to Combat Antisemitism, along with more than $255 million in federal contracts. The agencies said the review was to ensure Harvard was complying with federal regulations, “including its civil rights responsibilities.” “While Harvard’s recent actions to curb institutionalized anti-Semitism — though long overdue — are welcome, there is much more that the university must do to retain the privilege of receiving federal taxpayers’ hard earned dollars,” said task force member Josh Gruenbaum.

The Education Department said it sent letters to all the states encouraging them to take advantage of existing flexibility in federal funding to expand school choice. The letter described how up to 3 percent of funds from Title I, the federal program for low-income students, can be used to “expand education options” for parents by supporting tutoring, dual enrollment, career and technical education and other priorities.

Week 10 (March 24)

Education Secretary Linda McMahon told states still in the midst of spending the last of Biden-era Covid relief dollars that their time is up, according to several news outlets. She canceled extensions the Education Department gave states — through early 2026 — to spend the money, some of which already has been committed to vendors and contract workers. In Maryland, for instance, the state said it had plans to spend $360.7 million on high-dosage tutoring, summer school and other ways to help students whose academic performance has nosedived since the pandemic.

The Justice Department said it launched compliance reviews of Stanford University; UC, Berkeley; UCLA; and UC, Irvine to look into whether the institutions are illegally considering race in their admissions practices. The use of race-conscious college admissions was undone by a 2023 Supreme Court case, but the practice was banned in California years earlier — in 1996.

The Administration for Children and Families within HHS asked California to provide curriculum and program materials for a sex education program that receives federal dollars. ACF said in a statement it would review the program to make sure it was “medically accurate and age-appropriate.”

The Office for Civil Rights within HHS said it began an investigation into five medical schools over allegations that they consider race, color, national origin or gender in their admissions, in violation of executive orders signed by the president. HHS did not name the schools, but one is in California; the agency said it had received a complaint about discrimination at the institution. National Review reported that Johns Hopkins University and Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center were among the other institutions and that the review into them was prompted by complaints from conservative legal group the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty.

The Education Department sent letters to all states warning them not to take any steps that would prevent parents from reviewing student records, including those related to gender identity or gender plans, or risk losing federal funding.

The Education Department’s Student Privacy Policy Office announced an investigation into California’s state education agency for alleged violations of the Family Educational Rights Privacy Act, known as FERPA. The Education Department said the state agency had “abdicated the responsibilities FERPA imposes” by enforcing a new California state law that allows school staff to withhold information about a student’s gender identity from their parents. The law was passed to prevent “forced outing” of students after a handful of California districts introduced policies requiring school staff to tell parents if students changed their pronouns. A day after announcing the California investigation, the Department of Education said it was also launching a similar investigation into Maine.

HHS said in a social media post that it referred Maine to the Department of Justice for not complying with federal Title IX law. The move came a day after leaders of the Maine Principals’ Association and Greely High School said they would not sign a proposed agreement from the Trump administration requiring Maine to stop allowing transgender high school athletes to compete in girls sports, the Portland Press Herald reported. The Maine Department of Education also was expected to refuse to sign the agreement, the Press Herald said. Signing the agreement, local officials in Maine said, would violate the Maine Human Rights Act.

The Naval Academy no longer includes race as a factor in admissions, according to court documents filed by the Trump administration. America’s military academies were exempted from a Supreme Court ruling in 2023 that barred other colleges and universities from using race in admissions, but the Trump administration has said that all elements of the armed forces must operate free from “any preference based on race or sex.”

Trump signed an executive order ending collective bargaining for workers in agencies with national security missions. The American Federation of Teachers, which represents affected employees in Defense Department schools and Department of Veterans Affairs hospitals, called the move “retaliation” against workers who’d protested government cuts.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the State Department has revoked more than 300 student visas because the students who held them were involved in protests or acts to destabilize American college campuses. “We gave you a visa to come and study, and get a degree not to become a social activist that tears up our university campuses,” Rubio said, speaking at a press conference in Guyana. “We’re looking every day for these lunatics that are tearing things up. … It might be more than 300 at this point.”

The Education Department said it had revoked Biden-era waivers allowing colleges in California and Oregon to use federal money on services to help immigrant students who lack papers. The agency said that use of the money amounted to “entitlements to illegal immigrants.”

Read more: Undocumented college students agonize as Trump term nears

The Trump administration filed an emergency application with the Supreme Court seeking the green light to cancel $65 million in teacher-training grants. The administration says the grants violate its order prohibiting DEI initiatives. A federal judge had ordered the administration to pause the cancellation as he considered a lawsuit brought by eight states challenging the termination of the training grants.

The Education Department has received requests from Iowa and Oklahoma to waive many requirements attached to their federal education money, The Associated Press and other outlets reported. Iowa has asked the department to convert its federal money into a block grant, with few spending requirements. Oklahoma’s block grant proposal requests more flexibility to use the money for private and religious school options.

As part of federal investigations into concerns about antisemitism, the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights is asking universities for the names and nationalities of students who might have harassed Jewish students or faculty, The Washington Post reported. Civil rights attorneys working for the administration told the Post they wondered if the break with precedent meant the administration would target or deport foreign students on those lists who participated in protests about the Israel-Hamas war.

The Department of Education reopened the income-driven loan repayment plan application for student borrowers. The agency said it had taken down the application temporarily to comply with a court injunction stemming from a lawsuit brought by a group of Republican attorneys general over a Biden-era repayment plan. But its removal prompted a lawsuit from the American Federation of Teachers, whose leader, Randi Weingarten, accused the Education Department of “effectively freezing the nation’s student loan system.”

The Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights announced investigations into Portland Public Schools and the Oregon School Activities Association over allegations related to the participation of trans students in girls’ sports.

A University of Alabama graduate student from Iran, Alireza Doroudi, was reportedly arrested by immigration officials. DHS called Doroudi a security threat, but his lawyer said he had not been informed of any such allegations. Additionally, a Russian medical researcher working at Harvard since 2023 was forced to leave the country after frog embryos were found in her luggage weeks earlier when she was returning from a trip to a French lab involved with her work. The punishment is typically a fine. Kseniia Petrova had been arrested in 2022 in Russia for protesting the Ukraine war.

A federal judge ruled that a Columbia University student who participated in pro-Palestinian demonstrations cannot be detained as she fights deportation. Yunseo Chung, a legal permanent resident who emigrated from South Korea to the United States when she was 7, was arrested earlier this year after a protest at Barnard College and sued the Trump administration for trying to deport her. Her lawsuit details the lengths to which immigration officials have gone to try to capture and deport her, which include Secretary of State Marco Rubio personally identifying her for deportation, according to a memo released as part of her legal challenge. In the memo, Rubio wrote that her continued presence “would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.” The administration argues the move is part of its efforts to address antisemitism.

Federal immigration officials detained a Tufts University graduate student from Turkey, according to her lawyer and the university. The student, Rümeysa Öztürk, had recently co-authored an op-ed in the student newspaper calling for Tufts’ president to divest from Israeli corporations, among other steps. The Trump administration, however, did not have evidence showing Öztürk engaged in antisemitic activities or made public statements supporting a terrorist organization days ahead of detaining her with the intention of deporting her, The Washington Post reported. As a result, the State Department said she could be deported under a law that allows for revoking a visa at the secretary of state’s discretion.

The scrutiny of Columbia University and cancellation of $400 million in federal grants and contracts over concerns about its response to antisemitism should be a warning to other universities, said Josh Gruenbaum, a member of a federal task force on combating antisemitism. Columbia agreed to a litany of requests from the Trump administration, including to change how it oversees disciplining students, to implement rules on when and where demonstrations on campus are allowed to take place and to add oversight to its department of Middle East, South Asian and African Studies as a first step to unlocking the money withheld. “Other universities that are being investigated by the Task Force should expect the same level of scrutiny and swiftness of action if they don’t act to protect their students and stop anti-Semitic behavior on campus,” Gruenbaum said in a statement.

Week Nine (March 17)

Columbia University agreed to a collection of demands from the Trump administration so it could begin negotiations over $400 million in federal grants and contracts that were withheld over concerns about the university’s handling of antisemitism on campus, according to news reports. Columbia’s interim president issued a letter addressing how students should be disciplined as well as when and where students can protest and how they must identify themselves during any demonstrations. The letter also announced new supervision of the Middle East, South Asian and African Studies department along with the adoption and enforcement of a formal definition of antisemitism.

Student loan oversight and special education services will be moved out of the Education Department to other agencies, the president said. The vast federal student loan portfolio, involving more than 40 million borrowers who hold more than $1 trillion in debt, would immediately shift to the Small Business Administration, Trump announced on the same day the SBA disclosed it would cut more than 40 percent of its staff. He added that HHS “will be handling special needs and all of the nutrition programs and everything else,” though it was unclear which nutrition programs he was referring to. The National School Lunch Program is already administered by the USDA.

Trump signed an executive order instructing Education Secretary Linda McMahon to begin dismantling the Department of Education. The order did not call for shutting the department entirely, as that would require congressional action. But it guided the secretary to further diminish the agency, which had already undergone mass layoffs. “Instead of filtering resources through layers of federal red tape, we will empower states to take charge and advocate for and implement what is best for students, families, and educators in their communities,” McMahon said in a statement. She added: “We will continue to support K-12 students, students with special needs, college student borrowers, and others who rely on essential programs.” In remarks at the White House, Trump noted that he holds teachers in high esteem, whether a part of unions or not, and that shifting power to states is “going to work. Absolutely it’s going to work.” He also said, regarding abolishing the agency, “Everybody knows it’s right. … We have to get our children educated. We’re not doing well with the world of education in this country, and we haven’t for a long time.”

Sen. Bill Cassidy, who leads his chamber’s committee on education, said he would introduce legislation to abolish the Education Department. “I agree with President Trump that the Department of Education has failed its mission,” the Louisiana Republican said.

In its latest action against pro-Palestinian college students and faculty, the Trump administration wants an international Cornell graduate student to surrender to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, according to news reports. Momodou Taal, a Cornell doctoral student who is a citizen of Gambia and the United Kingdom was one of several student activists who disrupted a Cornell career fair, leading Cornell to require him to study remotely this term.

The Illinois Department of Education, Chicago Public Schools and the Deerfield Public Schools District 109 in Illinois are being investigated for violating federal Title IX law, the Education Department said. The investigations by the Office for Civil Rights center around complaints of girls being forced to share locker rooms with boys.

Federal immigration agents detained a postdoctoral fellow at Georgetown University, accusing him of promoting antisemitism and Hamas propaganda. The fellow, Badar Khan Suri, was in the United States legally from India on a student visa and was studying peace building at Georgetown. His lawyer said he was innocent and the university said it was not aware of him engaging in any illegal activity. A judge ordered the Trump administration not to deport Suri.

The White House said in a post on X that it had paused $175 million in federal funding for the University of Pennsylvania over the participation of transgender students in girls sports. The money being withheld came from DOD and HHS, and a separate Education Department review of the university is ongoing, according to the White House.

Less than a month after opening an investigation into Maine’s education agency, the Education Department announced that its Office for Civil Rights had found the state Education Department in violation of Title IX for allowing transgender students to compete in girls sports. The federal agency, along with HHS, gave the Maine Department of Education 10 days to agree to certain steps, including directing every public school in the state to comply with its rules on Title IX, or “risk imminent enforcement action including referral to the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) for proceedings.”

The USDA said it had restored funding to the University of Maine System following a compliance review related to Title IX. The agency said the university system had informed it that it does not allow male athletes to participate in women’s sports.

More than 70 grants for training new teachers, canceled by the Education Department, must be reinstated, a federal court ruled. The $600 million in grants for the Supporting Effective Educator Development (SEED) Program, Teacher Quality Partnership (TQP) Program, and Teacher and School Leader Incentive (TSL) Program, support preparation of teachers across the country and are a major pipeline for educators in rural communities. Losing the federal grants would harm low-income kids and schools, the judge said. (The plaintiffs in the case, in an earlier press release, said the Education Department’s actions affected over 100 grants.)

The Trump administration has begun rehiring thousands of fired probationary federal employees after a judge ruled the terminations were illegal, according to The Washington Post and other outlets. The ruling affects employees at more than a dozen agencies, including the Education Department. Some of the rehired workers reportedly have been placed on administrative leave.

Week Eight (March 10)

The Education Department said it cut its workforce by nearly half, from 4,133 employees to 2,183 this week, after layoffs, voluntary resignations and retirements since Trump took office. In a statement, the agency said the reduction in staff is “part of the Department of Education’s final mission.” The statement also said it “will continue to deliver on all statutory programs that fall under the agency’s purview, including formula funding, student loans, Pell Grants, funding for special needs students, and competitive grantmaking.”

The Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights lost about half its staff in job cuts. As a consequence, seven of its 12 regional offices were closed. The office in the past investigated issues including accusations of racial or sex discrimination, and its biggest share of complaints was related to students with disabilities. Since Trump took office it closed cases related to the banning of books and worked to root out efforts related to DEI.

A Trump administration executive order called for, among other cuts, the elimination of the Institute of Museum and Library Services. In a statement decrying that announcement, the nonprofit American Library Association said that eliminating the federal agency would cut “off at the knees” services it supports, including early literacy development, summer reading programs for kids, employment assistance for job-seekers and science, technology, engineering and math programs.

The Trump administration ratcheted up the pressure on Columbia University over concerns about what it called the institution’s failure to protect faculty and students from antisemitic violence and harassment. In a letter, the Education Department and three other federal agencies said the university must ban masks that allow protesters to obscure their identity — and require those who do wear masks to wear their Columbia identification on the outside of their clothing if they are masked; place the Middle East, South Asian and African Studies department under academic receivership for a minimum of five years; adopt and enforce a formal definition of antisemitism; and discipline students with expulsion or a multiyear suspension for participating in encampments or the occupation of a building last year. A day later, the university said that was just the type of punishment it meted out. (Editor’s note: The Hechinger Report, which produced this article, is an independent unit of Columbia University’s Teachers College.)

Federal immigration agents arrested two foreigners, including a Columbia student, who participated in Gaza war protests at the university last year. They also revoked the visa of a second student. A Brown University medical professor was deported, presumably to her home country of Lebanon, despite a judge’s order.

The Education Department said it opened investigations into about four dozen universities because of work that it said may contradict a Dear Colleague letter sent in February about ending the use of racial preferences in colleges and schools. The agency listed 45 colleges that will be scrutinized by its Office for Civil Rights because they partner with The PhD Project, an organization that supports people pursuing doctoral degrees. The Education Department described the group as limiting eligibility based on the race of applicants. OCR is also investigating six universities it said may have awarded race-based scholarships — including the University of Alabama and the University of South Florida — and another because it runs a program that segregates students on the basis of race. The Education Department later updated the list, changing University of Alabama to University of Alabama at Birmingham, without explanation, the Alabama Daily News reported. The University of Alabama had previously eliminated race-based scholarships.

The Education Department said it hosted a “listening session” with six people who had stopped or reversed their gender transitions, as well as parental rights advocates and others. The agency’s head, Linda McMahon, along with an HHS representative, discussed steps they are taking to roll back recognition of transgender people and combat “gender ideology.”

Sixty universities were sent letters from the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights, saying they face punishment if they do not protect Jewish students on campus, “including uninterrupted access to campus facilities and educational opportunities.” The colleges are those already under investigation for violating Title VI of the Civil Rights Act relating to antisemitic harassment and discrimination. The schools include Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Princeton, Harvard, Yale and UC, Berkeley.

The USDA notified the University of Maine System that it was cutting off tens of millions of dollars to the university while it “evaluates if it should take any follow-on actions related to prospective Title VI or Title IX violations.” Title VI prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color or national origin; Title IX prohibits sex-based discrimination. The USDA and the Education Department began examining the university for gender-related civil rights violations last month, the day after Trump and Gov. Janet Mills had a public confrontation over the state’s refusal to ban transgender athletes from competing in girls sports. The University of Maine System later said the USDA reversed its decision. It has $63 million in active USDA awards and about $35 million has yet to be paid out.

Week Seven (March 3)

Education Secretary Linda McMahon was tasked with revising eligibility requirements for the popular Public Service Loan Forgiveness program under an executive order Trump signed. The order said that the program — which forgives some of the education debt for people who work in government and certain nonprofit jobs for a decade — “has misdirected money into activist organizations.” The order “appears to target groups supporting undocumented immigrants, diversity initiatives or gender-affirming care for children, among others,” The New York Times reported.

The Senate confirmed Linda McMahon, the former wrestling executive and head of the Small Business Administration, as Trump’s education secretary. In a message to the agency, she said, “Our job is to respect the will of the American people and the President they elected, who has tasked us with accomplishing the elimination of bureaucratic bloat here at the Department of Education — a momentous final mission — quickly and responsibly.”

The Trump administration canceled $400 million in federal contracts and grants to Columbia University over what it said was the school’s “continued inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students.” The cancellations followed an announcement four days earlier that a new interagency Task Force to Combat Antisemitism was reviewing those contracts. In a press release, the administration said the cuts were preliminary and additional cuts could follow.

The Education Department said it was investigating a Washington state school district for allegedly permitting transgender athletes to compete in girls sports.

The Education Department said it planned to investigate the District of Columbia Public Schools system over whether it was failing to meet the needs of students with disabilities.

Some $660 million from the USDA that pays for food at some child care programs was cut off, including about $12 million for Massachusetts, according to the School Nutrition Association. The Local Food for Schools program links farms and ranches to child care programs no more than about 400 miles away — and limits the types of foods that states can buy to those considered minimally processed. The USDA’s Agricultural Marketing Service said in a letter to Massachusetts that the money “no longer effectuates agency priorities and that termination of the award is appropriate.” The administration later repurposed that money to be used as part of its plan to address a major national bird flu outbreak, Politico reported.

Week Six (Feb. 24)

Trump, in an executive order, designated English as the official language of the United States. More than 30 states have already passed legislation making English their official language, according to reporting from the Associated Press. Immigration advocates told The Washington Post they worried that the order could be used against schools that provide instruction in other languages to immigrant students.

The Department of Education released a “frequently asked questions” document following up on its earlier Dear Colleague letter threatening to pull funding from schools that engage in race-conscious practices. The letter notes, among other points, that the department does not control school curricula and states that celebrations of events such as Black History Month do not run afoul of the guidance as long as they are open to all.

The Education Department sent an email to employees offering buyouts ahead of what the agency described as a “very significant” reduction in force, according to news reports. Some employees noted that the offer of up to $25,000 amounted to less than they would receive in severance and unused leave compensation through a reduction in force order.

The Education Department unveiled its “End DEI” portal, which it described as a public portal for parents, students, teachers and others to submit complaints about DEI efforts and other activities it said amounted to discrimination on the basis of race or sex.

Peggy Carr, who led testing at the Department of Education, was put on leave, The Washington Post and other outlets reported. Carr had been appointed in 2021 to a six-year term as commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, which administers the landmark test known as NAEP.

The USDA reinstated the 1890 National Scholars Program, a scholarship for rural students to attend historically Black colleges and universities, or HBCUs, after outcry over its suspension the previous week.

DOGE cut some $18 million in grants from the Department of Labor’s Office of Apprenticeships, reports The Job newsletter. The grants were to provide employers with technical assistance on apprenticeships, among other work. The Labor Department also terminated its Advisory Committee on Apprenticeships.

NOAA withdrew funding for Maine Sea Grant, housed at the University of Maine, in the middle of a four-year award. The suspension of the grant followed a public spat between Gov. Janet Mills and Trump at the White House over his executive order on transgender athletes. On March 5, Sen. Susan Collins said the Department of Commerce, which houses NOAA, agreed to renegotiate funding for the Maine Sea Grant.

Week Five (Feb. 17)

The Education Department announced more than $600 million in cuts to teacher-training programs it said were educating teachers in “divisive ideologies.”

The Education Department canceled 18 grants totaling $226 million to a network of regional and national centers that provide materials and support to states and education systems. It accused the centers of promoting “race-based discrimination and gender-identity ideology.”

The Education Department eliminated a Biden-era rule requiring federal review of how states approve and monitor certain authorizers of charter schools. Under the old rule, South Carolina had faced the loss of federal money because of what the Education Department had said was inadequate oversight of charter schools.

The Education Department canceled a long-term trend assessment for 17-year-olds, part of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as the Nation’s Report Card or NAEP. A department spokesperson told The 74, which first reported the news, that that portion of the test had not been conducted since 2012 and was, therefore, not a “very effective longitudinal study.”

The department’s Office for Civil Rights initiated an investigation into the Maine Department of Education and Maine School Administrative District 51 over allegations of transgender athletes competing in sports that align with their gender identity.

The USDA said it would launch a compliance review of the University of Maine because of what the agency called the state of Maine’s “blatant disregard” for Trump’s executive order, banning transgender athletes from women’s sports. The University of Maine is a land-grant university that the USDA said has received more than $100 million from its Agricultural Research Service and the National Institute of Food and Agriculture.

Week Four (Feb. 10)

An Education Department Dear Colleague letter threatened to withhold federal funds from schools, colleges and other education institutions that take into account race in their programs, training, admissions and other practices. The letter, which cited the 2023 Supreme Court decision striking down affirmative action in college admissions, said academic institutions that consider race in their practices are engaging in discrimination.

“The Department of Education is a big con job,” Trump said in a briefing, adding, “I’d like it to be closed immediately.” In her confirmation hearing the next day, Linda McMahon, his nominee for education secretary, seemed to support Trump’s calls to dismantle the agency. But she said funding for most programs would remain intact.

The Education Department rescinded guidance from the Biden administration that said name, image and likeness payments to college athletes had to comply with Title IX and be proportionate between men and women.

The Education Department sent letters to a collegiate and a high school athletic association urging them to strip awards it said had been “wrongfully credited” to transgender athletes. It further announced two investigations into other school athletic associations it said were in violation of Trump’s executive order banning transgender athletes from competition, and said it would investigate five Virginia school districts for permitting transgender students to use bathrooms and other facilities that align with their gender identity.

Read more: Losing homeschool data

The Institute of Education Sciences, the Education Department’s research arm, saw major cuts, including the termination of 89 contracts it said totaled nearly $900 million. The actual total may be significantly smaller, as some of the grants, which included evaluations of how the government spends education funds and efforts to improve math and reading instruction, had already been paid out. Also canceled were census-like data collections that track student progress.

The Education Department canceled $350 million in contracts and grants for regional educational laboratories, which provide technical assistance to schools, and four equity assistance centers. The department said those grants and contracts supported “wasteful and ideologically driven spending.”

The Trump administration’s efforts to lay off probationary employees hit agencies including the Department of Education and the Bureau of Indian Education. Education Department staff who lost their jobs reportedly included those in the Office for Civil Rights, communications, financial aid and the legal department.

The Trump administration laid off dozens of employees at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, including those responsible for responding to complaints from student borrowers. Staff had been set to start a new process for more efficiently getting students the help they needed.

Schools and universities that require students to be vaccinated against Covid face the loss of federal funding under a new executive order.

The Education Department reversed Biden-era reporting requirements under the Carl D. Perkins Career and Technical Education Act of 2006 that it said were overly burdensome and subjected school districts to “bureaucratic red tape.”

The White House created the “Make America Healthy Again” commission, to be led by HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and charged it with evaluating the “prevalence of and threat posed” to children by antidepressants, antipsychotics, mood stabilizers, stimulants and weight-loss drugs.

Much of the staff at the two federally run tribal colleges, Haskell Indian Nations University in Lawrence, Kansas, and Southwestern Indian Polytechnic Institute in Albuquerque, New Mexico, were cut, as part of large-scale job cuts by the Trump administration and DOGE.

Week Three (Feb. 3)

Trump signed an executive order barring trans girls and women from participating in women’s sports and withholding federal funding from entities that refuse to comply.

The Education Department announced it would investigate San Jose State University, the University of Pennsylvania and the Massachusetts Interscholastic Athletic Association for allowing trans athletes to participate on sports teams for women or girls.

Read more: ‘Just let me play sports’

The Trump administration announced it would reduce to 15 percent the “indirect cost payments” that NIH includes in its research grants to universities, hospitals and research institutes. Those overhead costs help cover facilities and administrative expenses; some institutions said the cuts would cripple research.

The Education Department opened investigations into five universities where it said widespread antisemitic harassment had been reported: Columbia; Northwestern; Portland State University; UC, Berkeley; and the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.The Defense Department began restricting access to books and learning materials in the school system it oversees for the children of military families, citing the Trump administration’s crackdown on DEI programs, according to The Washington Post.

The Education Department updated the Free Application For Student Aid (FAFSA), which high school and college students use to apply for federal money to pay for college, to remove the ability to mark anything but male or female as a student’s gender. Students who have to make any correction to a form already submitted for the 2024-25 or 2025-26 academic year will have to also update this piece of the form, the Federal Student Aid office said.

Week Two (Jan. 27)

A far-reaching pause on the distribution of federal grants and loans across agencies, including the Education Department and HHS, which oversees Head Start, quickly led to confusion. Court orders have blocked the effort, and the White House said it had pulled back the memo, but some Head Start providers, among other entities, reported they still had limited or no access to federal funds weeks later.

The Office for Civil Rights opened an investigation into Denver Public Schools over a gender-inclusive bathroom. The school board voted in 2020 to require all district schools to have at least one all-gender bathroom.

Notices were sent to about 50 Education Department staffers that they had been put on leave. The employees were reportedly dismissed because of their connection, however limited, to DEI work.

Trump issued an executive order to eliminate what the White House called radical indoctrination in K-12 schools. The order said federal dollars would be stripped from schools where there is “illegal and discriminatory treatment and indoctrination, including based on gender ideology and discriminatory equity ideology.”

In a collection of actions to tackle antisemitism, including cataloging complaints about the issue against K-12 schools and colleges and universities, the president said he “will quickly cancel the student visas of all Hamas sympathizers on college campuses” and order the Department of Justice to “quell pro-Hamas vandalism and intimidation, and investigate and punish anti-Jewish racism in leftist, anti-American colleges and universities.”

On school choice, an executive order directed the education secretary to issue guidance within 60 days about how states can use federal dollars to support K-12 educational choice initiatives. It also orders the heads of other agencies — including the Labor Department; HHS, DOD and the Interior Department, which houses the Bureau of Indian Education — to review how grants and funding in their control can be used to send students to private or charter schools.

The Education Department withdrew Biden administration rules about applications for federal charter school grant programs that it said “included excessive regulatory burdens and promoted discriminatory practices.” The agency also said it would quickly make available $33 million in federal grants for charter management organizations that it said had been stalled by the Biden administration.

Race-conscious admissions policies at military academies, explicitly left intact by the Supreme Court affirmative action ruling, were banned by the Defense Department. The agency also said it would ban the use of its resources and its employees’ time to host celebrations or events related to cultural awareness months, such as Black History Month or National Disability Employment Awareness Month, and identity-based clubs.

Rules governing how cases of sexual assault and harassment are handled at K-12 schools and colleges will revert to a version created in the first Trump administration, the Education Department said. Unlike rules set by the Biden administration, the 2020 rules set by then-Education Secretary Betsy DeVos did not extend Title IX protection to gender identity.

Data from across government websites was removed to comply with Trump’s executive order recognizing only two sexes, male and female. The Office of Personnel Management ordered agencies to remove websites and social media accounts that “inculcate or promote gender ideology.” Among the information removed was data from the Youth Risk Behavior Survey, maintained by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The wide-ranging survey includes questions about youth sexual orientation and gender identity.

Week One (Jan. 20)

Trump issued a sweeping executive order banning DEI efforts in all federal agencies, covering personnel policies, federal contracting and grant-making processes, among other things. He also instructed federal institutions to investigate DEI “compliance” at colleges with endowments of more than $1 billion, giving them 120 days to complete their investigations.

Trump issued an executive order reversing Title IX protections for transgender people and declaring that the government recognizes only two sexes, male and female, assigned at birth.

A Trump executive order rescinded a number of Biden-era executive orders, including one relating to tribal colleges. The executive order signed by President Joe Biden, which was similar to those signed by previous presidents, indicated tribal colleges and universities need support from across the federal government.

The Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights declared an end to investigations of book bans, dismissing 11 complaints from schools alleging that removing “age-inappropriate, sexually explicit, or obscene materials from their school libraries created a hostile environment for students.”

Schools and colleges are no longer off-limits to ICE and other immigration enforcement agents, according to a directive from DHS.

Have thoughts about this list and ways that Trump’s actions are affecting students and education institutions? Write to us: editor@hechingerreport.org.

This story about tracking Trump was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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