The Trump Administration is acting recklessly
It's trying to withhold funds it approved in March
Mark Lieberman reported for EdWeek that the Trump Administration is “holding back” nearly $7 billion in federal funds.
Money that districts were counting on did not arrive, and the process the Trump Administration followed was highly unusual. The day before the money was to be sent out, “in an unsigned email message sent after 2 p.m. the Education Department informed states that the agency won’t be sending states any money” for programs dedicated to migrant education, teacher professional development, English-learner services, academic enrichment programs, and before- and after-school programs. Lieberman also reported that a separate email, sent at 4:27 p.m that day, alerted congressional staffers that the Department was also holding back $729 million in grants for adult basic and literacy education.
Carissa Moffat Miller, head of the Council of Chief State School Officers, had the clearest reaction to this move when she noted that, “These funds were approved by Congress and signed into law by President Trump in March.”
Let me repeat that point for emphasis: These funds were appropriated by Congress in March. They were signed into law by the current President, President Trump, less than four months ago.
The Administration is saying that they need to “review” the funds, but Alabama state Superintendent Eric Mackey told Politico that, “We don’t have any timeline for the review. We don’t have any parameters of what the review is about. This is not business as usual, and we don’t have any good direction as to what it means. Hopefully that will come in a few days.”
New America’s Zahava Stadler has an accounting of the 100 school districts at greatest risk for loss of these funds. Not surprisingly, the big districts are overrepresented in terms of total losses, but some of the districts with the largest per-pupil exposure may be more surprising. They tend to be areas with more exposure to migrants and serve a higher proportion of English Learners, and they pop up in states like Montana, Texas, and West Virginia. In fact, Stadler finds that, “the 100 school districts that would see the worst losses per pupil are heavily concentrated in Republican-represented Congressional districts (91, compared with nine in Democrat-represented Congressional districts).”
Now, I’m no lawyer, but this strikes me as an unlawful act of “impoundment” of federal funds. The Constitution grants the “power of the purse” to Congress, and the President doesn’t just get to pick and choose which funds they want to spend. So hopefully the Administration will fix this quickly, or the courts will force them to, before too many jobs or programs are lost.