More than a month after the U.S. Department of Education abruptly told states and districts they had to unexpectedly stop spending several billion dollars of remaining federal pandemic relief funds, chaos and confusion continue to reign supreme.
Sixteen states that sued the department over what they called an illegal effort to withhold money now have until May 24 to cancel investments and terminate contracts, or seek a federal reprieve from that updated deadline, a department official announced Sunday in a letter to those states. A judge ruled last week that the department’s initial changes were illegal but left open the possibility that it could impose similar changes with slightly more notice.
Meanwhile, the unspent COVID relief funds for schools in states that weren’t involved in the lawsuit remain frozen.
The department has given states the opportunity to once again request more time to spend funds on individual projects. But so far the department has rejected many of the requests it’s reviewed, arguing that projects ranging from professional development in Arizona and mental health services in Missouri to school construction in Guam and instructional support for math and literacy in Kansas don’t sufficiently relate to responding to the pandemic and improving academic achievement.
The cuts, and the administrative chaos swirling around them, threaten to disrupt efforts to support the highest-need students, said Mariana Barragan Torres, a researcher for the Workforce and Education Research Collaborative at the University of Illinois.
“We’re not talking about districts that still have the funds and they didn’t know what they were going to do with them,” said Barragan Torres. “These are districts that already had committed those funds. They already had a strategy and a plan on what to do with these resources.”
In response to state requests for project-by-project extensions, Education Department spokesperson Madi Biedermann said the agency had sent notification letters that “explain in detail the Department’s view that states and school districts have been spending American tax dollars intended for COVID relief on a variety of projects that constitute misuse of such funds.”
Education Department officials have rejected dozens of state requests for relief
States and districts have been scrambling to rejigger budgets, reevaluate contracts, cancel programming, and even lay off workers since they received an unexpected letter from Education Secretary Linda McMahon on March 28 after business hours.
McMahon announced that her agency had—a year early and effective immediately—ended the extended timeline for spending a lingering fraction of the roughly $200 million in pandemic-relief funds Congress doled out for K-12 schools during the first year of the pandemic.
Schools and states had in some cases years earlier committed those funds to particular expenses, including many to contracts with third-party vendors. The federal government—under both the Biden and Trump administrations—had already approved states’ requests for extra time to allow the remaining spending to play out until March 2026.
But McMahon’s letter swiftly reversed those efforts for grant programs including Elementary and Secondary Schools Emergency Relief (ESSER), Education for Homeless Children and Youth (EHCY), and Emergency Aid to Non-Public Schools (EANS). “Extending deadlines for COVID-related grants, which are in fact taxpayer funds, years after the COVID pandemic ended is not consistent with the Department’s priorities and thus not a worthwhile exercise of its discretion,” she wrote to states March 28.
She followed up a few days later laying out a process for states to appeal for individual projects to be exempt from the sweeping rule changes, by sending “a brief description of how a particular project’s extension is necessary to mitigate the effects of COVID on American students’ education.”
More than 30 states and territories had collectively submitted upwards of 250 appeal requests to the department as of May 9, according to a department webpage. The department said it had reviewed 129 projects and sent replies to 18 states and two territories.
The department hasn’t publicly shared its responses to states. Education Week obtained responses the department sent to five states covering 32 individual projects. Of those, the department approved nine totaling $2.8 million and rejected 23 totaling $31.3 million.
The Education Department on May 2 told Arizona that three districts once again have the federal go-ahead to keep paying for tutoring, summer school, and after-school programs with their remaining ESSER dollars.
But the department denied late liquidation requests for projects in two other Arizona districts that had been using their lingering pandemic relief funds to cover professional development for teachers, “rather than directly supporting students academically.”
It also said roughly $4.5 million the state had been spending on efforts at Arizona State University to recruit math teachers would remain frozen because “it does not provide services directly to students.” Another $4.9 million for a statewide contract with HealthCorps, a nonprofit founded by Trump administration official Mehmet Oz, will remain frozen because, the department said, “While this project provides services to students related to mitigating the effects of the pandemic, it is focused on health rather than academics.”
The department declined to approve late liquidation for four ongoing state-level projects in Kansas with a combined $8 million that remains unspent, including training on “science of reading” instruction for thousands of Kansas educators. The department acknowledges the training efforts are “an important function for schools, but this project provides support to teachers rather than directly to students.”
The department also declined to extend the spending timeline for more than $14 million in Missouri that was set to go toward a school construction project, an upgraded statewide data system; more than 80 math and literacy consultants supporting schools across the state; mental health training opportunities and grants to school districts; and a research report on homelessness in the state. These projects either weren’t addressing issues that specifically arose from the pandemic, or weren’t providing direct academic or emotional support to students, the department said.
A wide body of research says the opposite, though—improving students’ mental health and providing more resources to recruit and retain instructors leads to better academic outcomes for students.
“The first word that came to mind to describe those [rejection] letters was myopic,” Barragan Torres said. “Arguing that the projects that they’re requesting don’t have a direct impact on students, I just don’t see that.”
States now have to finish spending by next week, or keep trying to appeal
Communications from the department have been difficult for even the closest observers to follow and interpret.
Officials approved a new late liquidation request for tutoring programs in several Arizona districts, but rejected North Dakota’s request to spending less than $10,000 in remaining ESSER dollars on training tutors to deliver intensive services. The department said funding to help train tutors, rather than funding that fuels the actual tutoring efforts, isn’t an appropriate use of the funds. (North Dakota’s state superintendent, Kirsten Baesler, is President Donald Trump’s nominee to run the office that has been approving and denying these extension requests; her nomination, made in early February, is still pending in the Senate.)
Some states have received responses from the department for some projects but not others, while others haven’t received a response at all, and don’t know when to expect one.
Then on Sunday, Mother’s Day, the department announced that the states involved in the lawsuit must wrap up their remaining pandemic aid expenses by May 24.
Hayley Sanon, the principal deputy assistant secretary and acting assistant secretary in the department’s office of elementary and secondary education, wrote that states’ use of pandemic relief funds for priorities like “social-emotional learning hubs,” “construction of a turf field,” “IT support for an anti-oppression, anti-racism portal,” and “a window-replacement project” represented a departure from the program’s original priorities.
“Congress did not intend scarce taxpayer dollars earmarked for COVID relief to fund these kinds of projects,” Sanon wrote. “Moreover, in the Department’s independent judgment, this money can be put to better uses than simply serving as a slush fund for state educational spending unrelated either to COVID mitigation or even direct academic services to students.”
Judge Edgardo Ramos, who reviewed the states’ legal challenge against the late liquidation changes, had said the department needed to give at least 14 days’ notice before ending the late liquidation period, but the department is giving only 13 with its May 11 letter and May 24 deadline.
States that now have less than two weeks to figure out plans for millions of dollars of upended expenses were reviewing their options as of Monday.
“This is yet another attempt by the administration to cut off money intended for students,” Jonathan Burman, a spokesperson for the New York State Education Department, wrote in an email Monday. “We are confident the court will see this for what it is.”
In the meantime, some planned education projects are in limbo. In Selma, Ala., a school construction project that got delayed when a massive tornado struck the area could fall even further behind schedule. And a Vermont district had been offering its summer programming to all students, but may now have to restrict eligibility only to students with disabilities.