Department of Education Gives Public Schools 10 Days To Eliminate DEI Programs Or Lose Federal Funding

The first 100 days of the Trump administration’s second term have been a flurry of activity as priorities shift from the aims of the Biden presidency. Already, the Education Department (ED) has undergone a number of shifts to comport with a “final mission” of eliminating the department all together, a move that would require Congressional approval. On Thursday, ED issued a memo taking aim at another of the administration’s ideological targets: diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). State leaders have been given 10 days to verify the elimination of any DEI programs in public schools. If they do not, they will not receive federal funding for Title I schools, which serve low-income districts.

“Federal financial assistance is a privilege, not a right,” said Craig Trainor, acting assistant secretary for civil rights, in a statement. “When state education commissioners accept federal funds, they agree to abide by federal anti-discrimination 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 based on identity characteristics.”

The memo cites SFFA v. Harvard, a Supreme Court case pertaining to universities’ affirmative action admissions policies and not K-12 education as the basis for this move. It also threatens “substantial liabilities, including the potential initiation of litigation for breach of contract by the Department of Justice” for those found to “use DEI practices,” but never clearly articulates what constitutes such an initiative.

This move comes after a halving of ED’s Office of Civil Rights (OCR) staff, which is responsible for ensuring the enforcement of civil rights laws and protections in schools and anywhere that receives Department funding. OCR accepts complaints and conducts investigations to ensure students are not discriminated against on the basis of disability, race, color, national origin, sex, or age.

Even prior to the effective gutting of this department, the backlog of complaints, ranging from racial discrimination, disability discrimination, and sexual assault, had a backlog tens of thousands deep.

Title I schools, those most affected by this memo, are determined based on U.S. Census Bureau poverty estimates — if a district’s population meets a certain threshold of children living in poverty, it receives funds from the federal government so that children can have better access to a fair and equitable quality education. The number of Title I schools varies by state — 61% of Mississippi students and just 3% of those in New Hampshire go to schools that receive Title I funding.

The amount of federal funding as part of schools’ total budgets is also variable. Across the board, most school funding is generated at the local level through property taxes, with just 8% coming from the federal government on average, per ED stats. But state by state and school by school can look very different.

According to the Pew Research Center, Mississippi, South Dakota, Montana, Alaska, Arkansas, North Carolina, Kentucky, Arizona, Oklahoma, and Tennessee are most reliant on federal funds for education — ranging from 19% to more than 23% of their budgets. More granularly, individual districts may rely quite heavily on such funding. In Detroit schools, for example, federal aid constitutes nearly 49%.

Though Title I can only be undone by Congress, ED has leeway in how it distributes funds. Project 2025, which has proven to be somewhat of a blueprint for the Trump administration, recommends phasing out the program within the next decade, replacing Title 1 funding with grants given to states by the Department of Health and Human Services.