Trump Administration Drops Appeal In DEI Lawsuit
In unexpected good news, the Trump administration has abruptly dropped an appeal against a court ruling that prevented it from withholding federal funds from schools with diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs.
According to the New York Times, the initial lawsuit was filed against the Trump administration over a threat to withhold billions in education funding if schools refused to sign a paper declaring they didn’t have DEI programs. Federal Judge Stephanie Gallagher ruled in favor of the plaintiffs who filed the lawsuit against the administration, finding that the Trump administration didn’t go through the proper process to withhold the funding. She also found that the policy would undermine teachers’ First Amendment rights.
The lawsuit was filed by the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), the American Sociological Association, and a school district in Eugene, Ore. AFT President Randi Weingarten told the Times that the suit was one of 22 filed by the union against the Trump administration. She added that the suits were filed to establish precedents that limit executive power in education funding and policy.
“You cannot, by executive fiat, rewrite 60 years of educational opportunity,” Weingarten said in an interview, referring to the Trump administration’s attempts to change how civil rights laws are enforced in education.
Throughout the second Trump administration, there’s been a concerted effort to frame any program that benefits Black and brown students as discriminatory to white people. The Department of Justice, in collaboration with the Department of Education, opened 45 investigations into schools’ DEI programs. The Trump administration has withheld funding from schools such as Harvard, Brown, and Northwestern over their DEI initiatives. As a result, several schools have reached deals with the Trump administration that have led them to shutter their DEI programs and pay significant fines to restore federal funding.
Beyond the attacks on federal funding, there has been a significant decline in investigations into sexual assaults and civil rights violations at colleges and universities due to widespread layoffs in the Education Department’s civil rights division. In one year, the Trump administration has managed to do immense damage to an entire generation of Black students whose only sin was wanting to obtain a quality education.
While the Trump administration has tried to argue that the Supreme Court’s ruling overturning affirmative action means all DEI programs are illegal, Gallagher’s ruling found that it “certainly does not proscribe any particular classroom speech, or relate at all to curricular choices.” The appeal was largely believed to ultimately go to the Supreme Court, where the conservative majority has repeatedly expressed skepticism over DEI initiatives and racially targeted education programs. The Department of Education did not give a reason for why it dropped the appeal.
While I’m far from mad at the administration for dropping the appeal, it is quite strange that they abandoned a case that seems central to one of its long-standing goals. The Trump administration rarely, if ever, does anything to the benefit of America’s Black and brown citizens. Either they really feel like they didn’t have a case here, or they’ve cooked up another way to make life hard for Black students.
Unfortunately, my gut is telling me it’s probably the latter.
SEE ALSO:
Black Academic Programs Under Direct Threat From DOE
A Year Into Trump’s Attacks On DEI, Where Do We Go From Here?
Trump Administration Drops Appeal In DEI Lawsuit was originally published on newsone.com
