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BySRSam Reyes·CMCal Morrow·EQEliza Quinn·DPDana Park
BREAKINGApril 30, 2026

Why We Are Suing the Department of Education

Multiple organizations, state attorneys general, and advocacy groups have filed lawsuits against the U.S. Department of Education in 2025–2026, challenging a wide range of Trump administration actions including dismantling the department, withholding grants, restricting loan forgiveness, imposing new data collection mandates, and threatening billions in federal funding over policy disagreements. The plaintiffs range from New York City's government to the NAACP, NEA, AFSCME, and coalitions of over 20 state attorneys general. Courts have already begun ruling in some cases, with at least one preliminary injunction granted against the department.

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⚡Both sides have significant internal splits on this story. Arguments below represent the dominant positions — see The Divide below for the full picture.

What happens when a lawsuit challenges the Education Department's power to set policy instead of just enforcing law—and wins? This case could reshape who actually controls what gets taught in American schools.

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TRIO cuts violated procedural law
Conservative
A federal court found the TRIO terminations procedurally flawed — and we said so. But notice what that injunction actually held: not that cutting TRIO was wrong, but that the Department skipped required steps. That distinction matters enormously. The remedy is 'do it lawfully,' not 'never touch it.' Forty-five years of continuous appropriation doesn't transform a program into a constitutional right.
Liberal
You're describing a procedural defect as though it's a technicality the administration tripped over accidentally. But when you're cutting off tutoring services to first-generation students in the middle of an academic year, 'we skipped the paperwork' is not a minor process quibble — those students lost real services in real time. The court didn't say 'try again.' It said stop.
Conservative
The injunction says stop until procedure is followed — that's precisely the system working. If your argument is that the harm was too urgent to survive any legal delay, you've just made the case that TRIO is too important to run through a bureaucracy that took 45 years to produce 26th-place math scores.
Liberal
Urgency of harm is exactly the standard courts use to grant preliminary injunctions — and this one was granted. The system working means the administration lost round one because it broke the law, not because judges are bureaucracy fans.
Executive power to dismantle statutory agencies
Conservative
Congress created the Department of Education in 1979, which means Congress can restructure or eliminate it — and the executive can reorganize within constitutional limits. What these lawsuits demand is that every statutory agency, once created, becomes permanently immune to democratic revision because it has accumulated a constituency willing to litigate. That is not separation of powers; that is administrative entrenchment.
Liberal
The word 'reorganize' is doing a lot of work there. Reorganizing an agency within its statutory mandate is legal. Refusing to spend money Congress appropriated — which is what withholding $47 million from New York City over transgender bathroom policy actually is — runs straight into the Impoundment Control Act, a law Congress passed specifically because Nixon tried this exact move. You're not describing reorganization; you're describing impoundment.
Conservative
Conditioning federal grants on compliance with federal law isn't impoundment — Nixon impounded funds with no legal hook. If New York City is violating federal civil rights statutes, the Department has genuine enforcement authority. The question of whether it is gets decided in court, which is exactly where it is.
Liberal
Then let the court decide — but the administration threatened $47 million before any court found a violation. Enforcement comes after a finding, not before. Funding conditions as leverage ahead of adjudication is the constitutional problem, not a feature.
PSLF reliance interests are legally real
Conservative
The reliance argument for PSLF cuts both ways. Borrowers who structured their careers around a statutory promise deserve weight — genuine weight. But the taxpayers who never voted to permanently backstop nonprofit employment in sectors the federal government now funds through other channels also made decisions on the assumption that administrative interpretations don't quietly become permanent entitlements. Both sets of reliance interests exist.
Liberal
There's an asymmetry you're glossing over. The borrowers you're describing already performed — they took lower-paying jobs for a decade, made irreversible career decisions, and held up their end. The taxpayers you're invoking haven't performed anything yet; they're objecting to a future cost. In contract law, you don't get to change the terms after the other party has already delivered.
Conservative
Contract law governs contracts. PSLF is a statutory benefit subject to the interpretive authority of whichever administration is in power — that's settled administrative law, and borrowers' attorneys knew it when they advised their clients. The real argument is about fairness, not legal obligation.
Liberal
If 'we can reinterpret the statute after you've already served your decade' is the administration's position, then every future public servant is on notice that no statutory promise survives a change in administration — which is precisely the harm the 22-state coalition is trying to establish.
DOE spending record justifies structural reform
Conservative
The Department of Education has operated for 45 years, absorbed trillions of dollars, and left American students ranking 26th in math among OECD nations. If any private institution produced that return, its board would have acted. The lawsuits being filed to preserve this architecture are not protecting children — they are protecting the institution that has been failing children for a generation.
Liberal
You're treating correlation as causation and then reversing it. Federal education spending doesn't control local curriculum, teacher hiring, or classroom instruction — states and districts do. If the Department disappeared tomorrow, Mississippi's reading scores would still be Mississippi's problem. The 26th-place ranking is an indictment of the whole system, not an argument for removing the one source of targeted funding for the lowest-income students in it.
Conservative
That's actually a concession in disguise: if the Department doesn't control outcomes, what are we preserving it for? You can't simultaneously argue it's too important to touch and too removed from results to blame.
Liberal
The answer is that it funds things — Title I, TRIO, special education — that states demonstrably underfund on their own. 'It doesn't control everything' is not the same as 'it does nothing.' Cutting the funding doesn't fix Mississippi; it just removes the federal floor beneath the students states have already failed.
Funding threats as coercion versus enforcement
Conservative
When California's FERPA compliance is genuinely disputed, threatening to pull $4.9 billion in total state education funding is not enforcement — it is leverage of a scale so disproportionate that it reveals the actual goal. Enforcement is calibrated to the violation. This is not.
Liberal
Disproportionality is real, but the underlying enforcement authority is also real. The federal government has always conditioned education grants on compliance with federal law — that's been settled since the 1965 Higher Education Act. You're drawing a line at scale, which is a legitimate legal argument, but it's a different argument than 'this is coercion with zero legal basis.'
Conservative
Granted — and we said the FERPA dispute is genuinely unresolved. But calibration is part of constitutionality under the Spending Clause. The Court said so in NFIB v. Sebelius: conditions cannot be so coercive they leave states no real choice. $4.9 billion for a disputed compliance question isn't enforcement; it's a gun to the head.
Liberal
Then cite NFIB — that's the right argument, and courts will apply it. But it requires winning on the merits of proportionality, not the premise that all funding conditions are illegitimate. The students in California's schools shouldn't lose their funding while that litigation proceeds.
Conservative's hardest question
The TRIO grant preliminary injunction is genuinely hard to dismiss: a federal court found the administration broke its own procedural law, harming tens of thousands of low-income, first-generation students — the exact constituency conservatives claim to champion. If the administration wanted to reform failing programs, it had lawful paths; choosing speed over legality on this specific program hands opponents their strongest argument that this is about ideology, not students.
Liberal's hardest question
The FERPA dispute with California is genuinely unresolved — if courts ultimately find California was non-compliant with federal student privacy law, it weakens the argument that every administration funding threat is purely pretextual coercion rather than legitimate enforcement. The $4.9 billion response would still be disproportionate, but the clean narrative of 'zero legal basis' gets murkier.
The Divide
*Republicans split on how fast to dismantle the Education Department; Democrats divide between civil rights emergency and rule-of-law breach.*
MAGA/POPULIST
Fully supports dismantling the DOE and using funding cuts to enforce administration values on schools.
“We're going to close the Department of Education and send the money back to the states where it belongs.” — Donald Trump
ESTABLISHMENT/FEDERALIST
Supports DOE reform but opposes abruptly cutting congressionally appropriated programs like TRIO that serve rural and working-class students.
PROGRESSIVE/ADVOCACY
Frames resistance as a civil rights and racial justice emergency, prioritizing protection of vulnerable communities and LGBTQ students.
INSTITUTIONAL DEMOCRATS/AGs
Emphasizes procedural and statutory violations—lack of congressional authority, violations of FERPA and PSLF rules—as the core legal argument.
“The Trump administration is weaponizing the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, punishing workers for simply doing their jobs in service to the public.” — Letitia James
The Verdict
Both sides agree
Both sides acknowledge that the Department of Education's structural and procedural decisions must ultimately operate within legal and statutory constraints — the conservative argument for 'lawful reform' and the liberal argument for 'following the law' both accept that executive action cannot simply ignore statutory procedures, as the TRIO injunction demonstrated.
The real conflict
Whether congressional appropriations law categorically forbids the executive from withholding or redirecting funds as a condition on policy compliance: liberals argue this violates the Impoundment Control Act and constitutional separation of powers; conservatives argue the executive has interpretive authority over how to implement congressionally created programs and can enforce statutory conditions on grant recipients.
What nobody has answered
If a federal court can enjoin a major federal program termination based on procedural violations, but cannot ultimately prevent the executive from achieving the same outcome through correct procedure, has the court actually constrained executive power or merely delayed and inconvenienced it — and what does that mean for whether courts can meaningfully enforce the Impoundment Control Act?
Sources

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