Does DOGE care how government works?
It illegally canceled important federal investments in teachers
Update as of 3/11/25: This is a fast moving case, and a federal judge has already ruled against the U.S. Department of Education in the grant cancellations I discuss below. In granting a stay, the judge concluded, “Based on the evidence before me now, I find that Plaintiff States are likely to succeed on the merits of their claims.” The Administration now has 24 hours to respond.
Earlier this month I wrote about the “process fouls” in the way the U.S. Department of Education canceled a number of grants and contracts. Some of those may even stand up to legal scrutiny, even if the savings are a lot less than what the “Department” of Government Efficiency claimed.
The “savings” from those cancelations may also be a lot less once USED realizes it has no other way to comply with a long list of assorted congressional requirements.
I’m also willing to predict that many of the grant cancelations will NOT stand up to legal scrutiny. I’m not a lawyer, so you should take all my legal judgments with a grain of salt. But it’s hard to read the lawsuits and not conclude that USED acted unlawfully.
For example, here’s one filed on behalf of grantees under the Teacher Quality Partnership Program (“TQP”), the Supporting Effective Educator Development Program (“SEED”), and the Teacher and School Leader Incentive Program (“TSL”). In notes that that USED informed the grantees that their grants were, “inconsistent with, and no longer effectuate[], Department priorities.”
But this isn’t how things are done. The President can’t just come in and declare, “X, Y, and Z are my new priorities!” There’s a process for legally setting and embedding those priorities into grant competitions. As another lawsuit notes, “The Secretary of Education (the “Secretary”) is required to publish agency Priorities in the Federal Register, which must be used to select the Priorities for a competition and must have gone through public comment.”
That’s what the Biden Administration did in outlining their official priorities (and the first Trump Administration did before that). In 2021, the Biden Administration officially codified six supplemental priorities:
(1) “Addressing the Impact of COVID-19 on Students, Educators, and Faculty”,
(2) “Promoting Equity in Student Access to Educational Resources and Opportunities”,
(3) “Supporting a Diverse Educator Workforce and Professional Growth To Strengthen Student Learning”,
(4) “Meeting Student Social, Emotional, and Academic Needs”,
(5) “Increasing Postsecondary Education Access, Affordability, Completion, and Post-Enrollment Success”, and
(6) “Strengthening Cross-Agency Coordination and Community Engagement To Advance Systemic Change.”
After it codified these supplemental priorities, the Administration could then apply them to various grant competitions, where relevant. Applications were then scored based on how well their plan met the requirements of the program, as well as how they were going to meet the supplemental priorities in the context of the given competition. This is all legal and routine, and the grant competitions in question all followed this same process.
What’s unprecedented here is that the current Trump Administration is trying to say that it doesn’t have to go through the normal processes. That it can just unilaterally declare that the old priorities are null and void. Like I said, I’d be surprised if that holds up in court. (And, in fact, until the Trump Administration officially adopts its new priorities, the old ones remain in place!)
Wait, there’s more… I said in my last post that some of the programs being swept up in this process were not my favorite programs. I think it’s important to stand up for the rule of law even in cases where I disagree. The ends don’t justify the means.
But one of the programs cut by the Trump Administration was a program I do care about and support, the Teacher and School Leader Incentive Program. This program has evolved over the years, but it started out as a pure merit pay program under George W. Bush. When I worked in the Obama Administration, I played a small role in re-crafting it into a more comprehensive program that invested in district evaluation systems and extra compensation for great teachers to take on extra leadership roles. It is the federal government’s biggest investment in re-envisioning the teacher role, it’s helped a number of districts transition away from the one-classroom, one-teacher staffing model.
This particular program also had an independent evaluation funded by the Institute of Education Sciences and conducted by Mathematica that found that the investments helped boost student performance in reading and math. A recent Wall Street Journal column by none other than Vivek Ramaswamy cited the same study, noting that, “A 2017 study commissioned by the Education Department found that three years after schools implemented merit pay, school morale and teacher cooperation were better than in schools without merit pay.”
But now, with the abrupt cancelation of their grants (not to mention many similar evaluation contracts), school districts are struggling to find a way to pay teacher bonuses. I think the grantees may eventually win their lawsuits, but that may be too late to salvage their progress.