Washington — The Trump administration on Wednesday asked the Supreme Court to intervene in an ongoing dispute over Department of Education grants that were canceled because they funded programs that promote diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.
In a filing with the high court, the Justice Department requested the justices put on hold a temporary order from a lower court requiring the Education Department to restore millions of dollars in grants for recipients in eight states that challenged the cancellations.
A federal appeals court declined to provide relief to the Justice Department and agreed with the district court that the terminations of the grants likely violated a federal law that governs the agency rulemaking process.
Echoing concerns raised in other emergency appeals filed with the Supreme Court, acting Solicitor General Sarah Harris took aim at the scope of the lower court’s order. The Trump administration has in recent days focused its attacks on nationwide injunctions. More than a dozen have been issued by district courts considering legal challenges to President Trump’s policies.
“This court should put a swift end to federal district courts’ unconstitutional reign as self-appointed managers of Executive Branch funding and grant-disbursement decisions,” she wrote.
The Justice Department has also asked the Supreme Court to step into court fights over Mr. Trump’s executive order seeking to end birthright citizenship and efforts to fire thousands of federal probationary employees. The high court has yet to act on their bids for emergency relief.
The grant programs at issue in the case, the Teacher Quality Partnership program and the Supporting Effective Educator Development program, or TQP and SEED, relate to efforts to improve the development and quality of teachers. In early February, the acting education secretary ordered a review of all grant awards to ensure that they did not fund so-called DEI practices, which the Trump administration have said are discriminatory. The review found that 104 grants should be terminated because they conflicted with the department’s policy objectives.
Roughly one month after the grants were canceled, the eight states filed a lawsuit and sought a temporary restraining order from a federal district judge in Massachusetts. Public and private universities, as well as nonprofit groups, in their states received the TQP and SEED grants from the federal government.
The states — California, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Colorado, Illinois, Maryland, New York and Wisconsin — argued that the grant cancellations violate the Administrative Procedure Act, which governs the agency rulemaking process, in part because the Department of Education failed to “provide a transparent and reasonable explanation for the termination of the grants.”
The district court in Massachusetts issued a temporary restraining order, initially set to remain in place for 14 days, that ordered the Trump administration to reinstate the grants for all recipients in the states. It also temporarily blocked the Education Department from canceling any further grants for beneficiaries in the challenger states.
While the administration began working to reinstate access to the funds, it asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit to pause the lower court’s order and allow it to continue with the grant cancellations.
But the 1st Circuit rejected the Department of Education’s request. The district court later extended its temporary order to remain in place up to April 7 while it considered a bid for longer-term relief.
The case from Massachusetts is not the only challenge to the Education Department’s decision to scrap DEI-related grants. In a second dispute filed in Maryland, a federal district court separately ordered the administration to reinstate canceled TQP and SEED grants for members of teacher-education groups.
In its bid for emergency relief from the Supreme Court, the Trump administration warned that the two orders from courts in Maryland and Massachusetts potentially overlap. The government reiterated its opposition to the broad injunctions that have been issued by district courts in the slew of cases.
“Unless and until this court addresses that question, federal district courts will continue exceeding their jurisdiction by ordering the Executive Branch to restore lawfully terminated grants across the government, keep paying for programs that the Executive Branch views as inconsistent with the interests of the United States, and send out the door taxpayer money that may never be clawed back,” Harris wrote.
She argued that the temporary restraining order gives relief to all grant recipients in the states, instead of limiting it to the states or their instrumentalities. The district court, Harris wrote, directed a federal agency and its leaders to immediately make available millions of dollars to fund programs that they determined do not align with the administration’s objectives.
“That is a remarkable intrusion on the operations of the Executive Branch, and the kind of judicial action that this court has routinely decided to review,” she said.
On the merits of the case, the acting solicitor general, who represents the government before the Supreme Court, said the Massachusetts court did not have jurisdiction to consider the states’ claims, since the case is effectively a contract dispute that should be heard by the U.S. Court of Federal Claims.
